What I’ve Been Playing: Tabletop A Through F

Here are notes on games I’ve played in the past couple months, with game design comments where appropriate. Covering four games at a time means there’ll be a follow-up or two.

I didn't intend to begin with two of my own games but such are the gifts of alphabetical order.

13th Age

We’re getting close to the end of epic tier in the Teachers from the Court campaign that’s mentioned several times in 13th Age 2e. Jonathan started the campaign to test the living dungeon he’d written as the intro adventure at the back of the Gamemaster’s Guide. We liked our characters and wanted to keep playing so Paul Hughes took over as GM for the next nine levels! Early in adventure tier, we posed as instructors from the Court of Stars sent to educate the half-elf children of our primary contact. We needed a cover-story because we’d entered a contested zone where the forces of the evil Diabolist/Archmage visited the town for supplies. ‘The Teachers from the Court’ became our nom de guerre, even after we’d qualified for several other higher ranking titles in the Elf Queen’s service.

When we don’t have a full crew, I’ve been running my deviant Arduin game, 13th Arduin, aka Arduin, Blessed Arduin.

And I’ve run a couple one-shots lately for diverse groups, one of them using the two-hour freeform adventure you can find here.

Armello: The Board Game

This gloriously beautiful board game from King of the Castle games shipped to all its kickstarter backers a couple months ago. It’s based on a digital game I like to call ‘the national game of Australia.’ With the help of an excellent development/playtest team, I reshaped the original digital game’s mix of quest movement and funny-but-serious-animal combat into a deckbuilding quest and combat game. Each of the four heroes has its own starting deck and powerful experience cards. Your hero gets more powerful by buying action and combat cards from the marketplace and winning treasures by finishing quests that send you criss-crossing the board. Unlike some deckbuilding games, that pretty much let people play their own solitaire games side-by-side, Armello: the Board Game rewards players who mix it up with their opponents.

One of my biggest reasons for designing the analog version of the game as a deckbuilder is that I dislike the way Armello’s beautiful cards are used in the video game. Some cards get played for their full effect, but a whole lot of cards in the video game are discarded to use the symbol that’s on the card in combat. In other words, you read the card, you decide it’s not something you need to play, and you discard it to get a hit or a shield or a save. When a game has beautiful and evocative cards, I like to try to make those cards matter. In this case, deckbuilding mechanics that bring cards through your hand multiple times did the trick, and opened a huge amount of design space. You’ll see my attitude towards cards that should matter surfacing again, below, in comments on Finspan.

I’m answering rules questions on BoardgameGeek, helped by savvy players. I’m not sure when there will copies for sale on line or going through distribution.

Dead Man’s Hand

My Desperadoes faced off against Chris Pramas’ Lawmen a few weeks ago. It was an appropriately desperate tie and a very fun skirmish miniatures game. I love minis games but neither paint minis nor invest in terrain, so it was good that Chris came prepared. We also used a couple buildings from a paper Belgian village that I used as terrain all through my childhood. Chris has now invested in a proper Dead Man’s Hand box, and we’ll definitely play again, probably with different factions.

Finspan

I quite love Wingspan. So does my wife Lisa. So do our ornithologist friends!

Lisa also loves Finspan so I’m going to need to relax my critical spirit and just-enjoy the good parts.

My disagreement with this iteration of the system is that you pay for most fish by discarding other fish from your hand. Yes, it’s that problem again, the same type of objection I have with the digital Armello cards. I’m looking through all my beautiful cards and constantly grading them, only a couple deserve to be played, the others will be discarded . . . and possibly returned to my hand if I get that type of engine working.

Discard-to-buy annoys me. Maybe it doesn’t annoy other people. I'll give it another try and whine less.