Labels: Board Games

- posted by Tobold @ 10:34 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments

In April of this year I reported about a Kickstarter board game called Bardsung, where I first was enthusiastic of receiving it ahead of schedule (which is very unusual for Kickstarter projects), but then found out I didn't like the game, and ended up trading it in. Now Bardsung, like many other games, is a game of two parts: A core activity, which is a dungeon crawl in this case, and a campaign linking a series of these repeating core activities together into a greater whole. Just that in this case the core activity was kind of okay, and the campaign totally sucked, offering very little narrative, and very little change from one dungeon crawl to the next.

Since then I had a few more experiences with board games which made me think about campaigns in board games. Tonight I am having friends over for an evening of Return to Dark Tower, and that game simply doesn't have a campaign mode. We will randomly choose a main quest and a main adversary, and then we play for around 3 hours; at the end we will either have won or lost, but nothing of what we do tonight will in any way influence our next game night with this game. On the other extreme, with the same game group we played through a whole campaign of 11 game nights of Clank! Legacy - Acquisitions Incorporated. And while the individual plays were fun, the main fun was the legacy campaign, where new elements were added to the game, and we put stickers all over the game board.

Earlier this year my wife and me played all the way through a campaign of Roll Player Adventures. Gameplay was on the simple side, but we loved how over the campaign not only the story evolved, but visibly decisions we did in one game session were remembered by the game and led to different outcomes in later game sessions. Like Clank! Legacy, Roll Player Adventures also had 11 adventures to the campaign. Much more is problematic: Bardsung trying to stretch their campaign over dozens of sessions is probably what made me feel that there was too little story and too little change from one session to the next. And even Gloomhaven, which has a decent amount of story, and lots of variety in its 95 scenarios, failed to keep me and my wife interested for more than about 20 sessions, at which point we just gave up. I am one of the few people in the board game space that didn't back Frosthaven, which should be out late this year or early next year; but I looked at it and just thought "why would I need *more* Gloomhaven, I already have more than enough".

In Hoplomachus: Victorum, which I recently reviewed, a campaign consists of 4 acts, with each act being 12 weeks, and each week being one event, which often is one arena combat. But each arena combat can be short enough to not really fill a complete play session, and depending on how fast you play and how long your sessions are, you could play a whole act in one 3-hour or so session. Here is justification for having a campaign is not story, but the mini-bosses at the end of each act, and the main boss at the end of each campaign. If you played the arena fights without a campaign, you wouldn't have the character progression and wouldn't have the sensation of getting stronger to beat the bosses.

As I recently reported, I backed Tainted Grail: Kings of Ruin including the 2.0 update pack to the original Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon. And that was clearly a case where in the 1.0 version many players and reviewers said that they liked the core gameplay, but found the campaign progression too grindy and repetitive. It is easier to fix a flawed campaign than it is to fix flawed core gameplay, so I think it is a very good idea for the developers to have gone back to streamline the campaign. Tainted Grail is a game where the core gameplay is relatively short, so some sort of campaign or adventure structure to string several encounters together is certainly necessary even to fill one play session.

One other game I own is Hexplore It Volume I: The Valley of the Dead King. Which used to be a game without a campaign. But the Kickstarter of Volume IV of Hexplore It added Klik's Madness, and 500-page campaign rules and story book to Valley of the Dead King. I haven't had the time yet, but I am interested in how well adding a campaign to a board game a few years later works.

I don't have many games which could be described as "Euro" games, the kind of game which very often is about collecting the most victory points at the end of a session. But I recently bought Wingspan, after having tried the app version. And Wingspan is a game that doesn't have or need a campaign. But somewhere a game like Wingspan has something similar: If you buy a game like Wingspan, it would probably be best to play it repeatedly with the same group of people, who shouldn't already know the game or play it with somebody else. The problem with these Euro games is that there is a strong correlation between your victory points and how well you know the game. If you learn the game with a group of people, and play with them, and they only get better at the game while playing within that fixed group, the challenge for everybody is balanced. But if you play Wingspan the first time against people who already played it repeatedly, the experience would be rather frustrating.

At the same time I bought Wingspan, I also bought Charterstone. Which at its core is also a Euro game with worker placement and counting victory points at the end. But in Charterstone there is a legacy campaign. Which means that the game can start simple, and add more complexity over the campaign. And the campaign structure keeps everybody playing equally often. I don't think there is all that much story in Charterstone, but I can see the interest of having a legacy campaign to structure the repeated session experience of a game group for a Euro game.

Labels: Board Games

- posted by Tobold @ 2:40 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments

Essentials:

Hoplomachus: Victorum is a solo campaign game of gladiatorial combat. Your hero travels through a mythological version of classical antiquity with a small squad of combat units. The campaign is divided into 4 acts of 12 weeks each, and in most weeks you will use your hero and squad to fight tactical arena combats. The rewards will increase the power of your hero and give you better units, so that at the end of acts one to three you can face a mini-boss, and the final boss at the end of act four. There is a small amount of flavor text and story, but at its core this is a game with a series of small tactical combat encounters.

Components:
Well, this is Chip Theory Games, and thus the quality of the components is top-notch. All boards are neoprene, units are poker chips, and the cards are plasticized. If you spill your drink over the game, you can rinse it off, dry it, and keep playing. Just two minor niggles with Victorum: On the world map, printed on neoprene, some paths in the lighter colored regions of the world are not easy to make out; and the stadium seating holds only 12 dice out of the 20 that come with the game. Kudos for including the red die, which has 6 identical faces and thus isn’t strictly necessary, but it is fun when you like throwing a lot of dice at once.

The rulebook is quite well written and clear. It doesn’t have an index, but the list of Key Terms at the back answered most of the questions I had during the game. The back of the rulebook also serves as a quick reference during play. The only misleading information is the “90 minutes per act” playing time printed on the box. In reality that is more likely to be twice that, even more on your first playthrough. It is probably better to think of this as a 12+-hour campaign game, but you can save the game easily enough between shorter sessions. This is not a light, casual game, but you probably already noticed that from the price tag and weight of the box.

Gameplay - The Good:
Every combat event in Hoplomachus: Victorum is different. That is mostly due to the event cards imposing different conditions, but also to there being 8 different arenas with different local rules, and the random composition of the enemy squad. Even your own squad evolves over the length of the campaign. And a new campaign brings a new hero, new mini-bosses, and a new final boss to beat. So the game has a lot of replayability. And most of the time combat is an interesting enough puzzle, with a mix of foreseeable enemy unit actions and random dice rolls.

Within the limitation that Hoplomachus: Victorum is only playable solo, for me it is a better solo game than Too Many Bones. The rules are a bit less complicated, and the variety between fights is better. The hex grid of the 8 different arenas allows for a bit more tactical gameplay than the 4x4 squares of Too Many Bones. On the downside, there are less options to upgrade your hero. Your mileage may vary.

One important consideration with tactical games like this is the role that luck plays. Combat dice have between 2 and 6 “hit” faces, and the rest are “miss” faces. With every single die having at least a one in three chance to hit, and you usually rolling several dice at once, the overall outcome doesn’t feel too random. For example if you throw three blue dice with 3 hit faces each, the chance to have 1 or 2 hits is 75%, while the chances to get 0 or 3 hits are only 12.5% each. Yes, extreme results can happen, but the statistics of rolling several dice at once favor average results. The hero can also upgrade his dice, and thus achieve more reliable results for his own attacks. So, yes, dice mean some amount of luck, but I still felt that my tactical decisions were more important to the outcome of a battle than the luck factor.

Gameplay - The Bad:
Enemy units in Hoplomachus: Victorum follow a very simple AI script, following a list of priorities, which can be different from one arena to another. There are no random AI cards or similar more advanced systems. The enemy moves are predictable, and when there are two equivalent options, the player can choose the one that is better for him. So, there is a certain aspect of playing the enemies deliberately badly against yourself, and the occasional opportunity to cheese.

Over the length of the campaign, the biggest problem is game balance: The combination of random event cards, arena special rules, and random enemy units can sometimes be very easy, and sometimes very hard. For example my very first fight was with an event card that made all attacks work only at range 1, and by chance the first two enemy units were ranged units, who were significantly hampered by that. But the game rewards you with more power if you win, and punishes you with disadvantages when you surrender. The challenge goes up from act to act, so if you have a series of bad luck encounters in the first act, you’ll never make it to the end of the campaign. There are no “failing forward” or “catching up” mechanics anywhere. You can find yourself in a death spiral and have to start the campaign over, or you could have a lucky easy run.

Theme:
Hoplomachus: Victorum is not a heavily thematic game with a lot of story or story choices. There is half a page of introductory story, and at the end of the campaign the epilogues booklet has one paragraph for every possible hero/scion combination. There is a small section of flavor text on every event card, and that is it. However, the gameplay is very consistent with the theme, and does feel like gladiatorial combat.

Overall:
I am playing the retail version of Hoplomachus: Victorum, as sold in Essen at the Spiel 2022, and I am writing this after playing through one campaign. While it is hard to predict how many campaigns the fun will last, I am certainly not yet bored with the game, and am looking forward to trying a different hero against different bosses.

Whether this game is for you depends mostly on whether you can see yourself playing a medium-to-heavy complexity tactical game against yourself for 12+ hours. For me, I rate it at 8 out of 10, “very good - enjoy playing and would suggest it”.

Labels: Board Games

- posted by Tobold @ 12:10 PM Permanent Link  (5) comments