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One play: Dead of Winter

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Dead of Winter in playIt’s fair to say I believed the hype about Plaid Hat Games’ Dead of Winter. I was a long-time fan of the company’s podcast and had enjoyed the descriptions and design talks about the game leading up to its launch; so much so that I was happy to pre-order it.

I’d been looking for a replacement for old classic Arkham Horror for a while, and this looked like it would fit the bill: a story driven co-op with a horror theme but the bonuses of being shorter, less fiddly and with a tension-building traitor mechanic – as well as the much lauded ‘crossroads’ mechanism (more on that later). It duly arrived, we duly played it, and it has since been duly traded away. So what went wrong?

Theme and components: Check

Out of the box, Dead of Winter is a triumph. While the churlish could point to thin location and player boards – or even complain about old-school standees (in this day and age!) being included rather than minis – overall the production quality is excellent. The artwork is evocative and high quality, the rulebook solid and the tokens, dice etc up to snuff. I don’t care a jot about minis and the like, so I was more than satisfied.

On the downside it’s a bit of a bear to set up, with a multitude of card decks needing to be shuffled and placed, alongside a plethora of tokens – and that’s before you get to choosing a scenario, setting it up, and then dealing each player their choice of starting characters. This is definitely a game you should play at the owner’s house, giving them time to get it ready before you arrive – but once it’s ready to go, I think it looks pretty cool on the table.

It’s also worth pointing out that players that enjoy this kind of game are prepared for a lengthy setup process. Arkham Horror takes just as long to get ready, while players of games such as Descent or Star Wars: Imperial Assault will see nothing to put them off here. With highly thematic games, it seems to go with the territory.

Can you keep a secret?

So far, so what – it’s just another thematic zombie game with nice bits: but the first semi-USP comes with the secret roll cards. Before the game starts, two secret objective cards per player are shuffled in with a betrayal card and one is dealt to each player.

While Dead of Winter is a two-to-five player game you don’t have a betrayer with two, leaving a 45-ish per cent chance of someone being the betrayer with three-to-five players. There is a betrayer variant that swings this wildly in the other direction, giving you an 80-ish per cent chance. But either way, the lot of any betrayer may not really be in their hands – and sadly the same goes for everyone else.

Because here lies Dead of Winter’s first real flaw: unbalanced objectives. Some of them are just plain easy, while others take a real effort and may not be possible despite your best efforts. The aim of this seems to be to create tension: to force people into situations where others may think they’re showing betrayer tendencies. But unless you are dedicated role-players, it is a very real possibility this tension will fail to emerge – especially as after one play you know those super tough objectives are out there.

Attack of the randoms

While not fatal on their own, you are trying to complete your unbalanced secret objectives while competing with the oldest and lamest of all board game mechanism – the ‘one in x chance’ of something terrible happening. And you thought we’d moved on right?

Some caveats here. First, I love me some random – and second I know Ameritrash games are the beating heart of random. I get that. But there are ways to do random right, or cleverly, or with a bit of imagination. Instead here we seem to have incredibly naivety.

Every time you move to a location, or fight a zombie (unless you have particular equipment cards or special powers), you need to roll a 12-sided dice – on one side of which is a tooth. If you roll this, that character is dead. This in itself isn’t a big deal – you’ve probably got more characters (you start with two each and often pick more up) and if not you just grab a new one out of the box. The bigger problem is ‘morale’.

Morale is the game’s timer – the ticking clock of doom which, if it reaches zero, will mean the players lose. In anything but the easiest scenario this should be causing the tension, which is ramped up by the fact every character death causes a one-point loss in morale. Which brings us to the ‘one play’ which put the nail in Dead of Winter’s coffin for me.

Epic fail

This was my fourth game of Dead of Winter and we had a group with some new and some experienced players (five in all). After the epic set up/rules explanation we embarked on a short scenario to give everyone a taste of what this game had to offer.

As it was a short scenario we started with just six morale. The base was surrounded by zombies so as a first act my tough guy – who had the ability to kill two zombies with one blow – ploughed into the fray. And promptly rolled the dreaded ‘tooth’.

So he’s dead – no biggy. One morale down. But it gets worse: the next player in the compound has a decision to make. They can just die and stop the infection spreading – or roll and take a big risk of survival vs getting bit, and passing it on again. With so little morale to play with they fell on their sword – so we were down to four morale.

Much like the game Battlestar Galactica (which it borrows quite heavily from), Dead of Winter has an objective players can meet each round – or face the consequences. In our case, if we failed to meet it – which needed quite a lot of fuel – we would lose two morale. So with two already gone, it was all hands to the pump (ho ho).

With our safe bet having tried and failed to get fuel from the petrol station (random card picks FTW), someone less likely tried their luck. En route they too rolled the tooth – and took both themselves and the person already at the petrol station with them. We failed to get our petrol, lost two more morale, and it was over. Worst. Walking Dead episode. Ever.

You traitor!

The highlight (and this is clutching at straws) was that we did actually have a traitor – but they didn’t even have enough time to complete their simple objective because two random dice rolls finished us all off before we got going. Otherwise, he’d have won.

And that’s the second big problem with the morale system: the betrayer rarely needs to show their hand before the final turn, because either the players are going to hell in a hand basket anyway – or morale has gotten them close enough that one really destructive final turn is enough for the betrayer to blow the game, without needing to draw any suspicion before it is too late to do anything about it (they can be exiled, in theory).

While this was a laughably short game, in some ways it was the best of the four I played. Two were tedious processions to victory playing the starter scenario with new players where we didn’t have a traitor, while the other was another defeat – again with no traitor – which threatened to ignite into a really fun experience but never truly shone (despite providing some laughs). It’s possibly the most fragile game system I’ve ever experienced.

Still, you might love it 🙂

Does Dead of Winter have the capacity to give players a fantastic thematic game experience packed with intrigue, tough decisions and a tense endgame? Absolutely. But does it equally have the capacity to provide a shallow and worthless one? As you can see, the answer is yes to that too.

I’m not reviewing Dead of Winter in my usual style because I realise a lot of people LOVE this game and I didn’t want to give it my standard treatment, as that format wouldn’t allow me to get things across the way I wanted. I can see I may not be the right audience and if you search t’interwebs you will find many an honest, glowing review of this very popular title. All I wanted to do was share my experience which was, sadly, a lot less positive.

At the time of writing Dead of Winter is in the top 20 games on Board Game Geek and games rarely get up that high by accident. But equally, just because they’re flying high doesn’t mean they’re for everyone.

The promise of better to come: Crossroads cards

I’ve saved the real jewel in Dead of Winter’s crown until last and that’s its one genuine board game innovation – crossroads cards (and I’m not belittling this – many, many games have on innovation at all and one bit per game is above average!).

At the start of each player’s turn, the player next to them draws the top crossroads card from the deck and reads the intro to themselves: this intro tells them in what situation they need to pause the game and read the card out. This could be very open – perhaps if a player leaves the colony to go to an outside location – or very specific – if a particular character is in play and this player controls them.

This restriction is interesting because it means not all cards are read out, so they do add a unique feeling to the game that’s akin to RPGs – that, “Oh god, will opening this door spring a trap” feeling. Each card has an ethical dilemma of some kind on it, either for the group to vote on or for the player to decide themselves. These can be great for adding theme, a laugh or even give you some character insight.

But sadly in Dead of Winter they don’t quite seem to work. You can have games where very few trigger, while many of those that do are no-brainer decisions. But on the plus side Plaid Hat is already working on another ‘crossroads’ game, this time set in space with an Alien style them – which could be awesome. But this time I’ll keep my powder dry and wait for the reviews before pulling the trigger.

* If you’re a fan of this game, good on you. But please don’t pick holes in my story if I have made small rule errors in the retelling. The facts may be a little off as this was a while ago, but believe me this happened: we played the rules right, we lost in a turn and it was crap. 

One play: Time of Soccer

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Time of Soccer end gameHaving had a passion for football since my youth, and lost more days to PC football manager sims than I care to admit, I was excited to hear friends extolling the virtues of Time of Soccer – a football management board game.

I have no idea how they came up with the name – its terrible. I can only presume it was some sort of Google translate faux pas from the Spanish designers. But what’s in a name? I have games called Hamburgum, Banjooli Xeet and CV after all. More importantly it looks great – I had absolutely no complaints about the components. however I can’t comment on the rulebook as the game was taught to me (thanks Rocky!), but I didn’t hear great things. Also, apologies if I get any naming terminology wrong.

Putting the ‘euro’ into European football

In the early part of play, it becomes clear that Time of Soccer is very much built on a strategy game engine. Half of the main board is dedicated to a grid system onto which are placed tiles that represent players, agents, sponsorship deals and coaches.

The themeing here is a little odd, as the board is made to look like a city grid that you drive around trying to sign the deals you want before other players can get to them. This works in essence, representing the fight of agents to sign players etc before their rivals, but the roads/city just doesn’t work thematically. However, if you can get past this the routing, budgeting and risk taking mechanism itself works very well.

Players start with initial basic agents and deal makers who can be upgraded. Your agent represents the speed you can move around the board, while your deal maker allows you to try and sign a deal you can’t quite reach with your agent’s moves – but its dependent on a dice roll and even then a success will see you paying over the odds. This adds a nice tension, while giving some genuine options as you build your club.

Building the perfect team

Time of Soccer player boardEach team starts with a very poor journeyman team, so as managers you are all scrambling to sign some stars before the season begins. Players have a varying set of stats alongside possible connections with their team mates which give bonuses if you can connect them up with each other.

For example, in the image above you’ll notice the two central defenders have a blue triangle on their right and left sides respectively, facing towards each other. This represents a bond between them and will give them a bonus, while if you add a coach that works well with players with this symbol you’ll get further bonuses. This is a great way of introducing a very euro-style puzzle element to team building, while keeping on-theme.

In addition you’re trying to sign these players while also balancing the books, which can prove very difficult. It felt as if there was constant financial pressure, adding another classic euro trait to Time of Soccer’s mechanism arsenal (sorry, couldn’t help it).

A long hard season

Another thing Time of Soccer gets right is the season structure. It boils things down to a six-team league (so 10 games, home and away) and an eight-team cup, with the winner of the game overall needing to score points for both of these plus the quality of the team they’ve put together.

During each week you will have a league game and occasionally a cup game: each other week day is dedicated to going around town to either buy something or position yourself for the next round of tiles (better players, coaches, deals etc come out as the game goes on). You can also have friendlies, although these are abstracted out to a small cash gain.

I felt this was just about the right amount of games to make it feel like a ‘proper’ competition but also to make it feel as if the decisions you were making in the team had enough time to have an effect. But wow, this game was long. It says two to three hours but with four (three beginners) we went well over that.

A game of two halves

I was in for the long haul, and that in itself wouldn’t have put me off buying Time of Soccer – but there was a much bigger problem. Unfortunately the hard work achieved in the earlier euro mechanisms was – for me – undone by the matches themselves.

In theory it’s a good system. Your team building gives you both an offensive and a defensive stat, which is used to decide how many chances you will both create and defend against in each match. So if you create five chances but your opponent only defends three, you score two goals. The team at ‘home’ in the game attacks second, giving them a slight advantage as they know how many they need to score to win.

The problem lies in the way chances are determined. It is of course with dice – and it wouldn’t feel right without them – but for me they have injected too much randomness. Teams always roll the same amount of standard six-sided dice, with fives and sixes adding to the amount of chances you have either created or thwarted. For example, if my team is at level two and I roll four successes that would be five chances – but at level eight those four successes would be nine chances.

This sounds OK, until you note that zero successes is always zero chances no matter what your team’s level. While this gives very poor sides a chance to win any game, it feels like a massive misstep – you can’t expect euro gamers (and trust me, this is 80% euro) to be happy to lose a game after four hours of play simply because they rolled no fives or sixes. This isn’t a war game after all – and I think it could quite easily be fixed.

A hollow victory

For full disclosure, my team of all-conquering heroes did the league and cup double and I walked away from Time of Soccer as the victor by a pretty comfortable margin. However, the victory felt hollow. At no point during play did I feel as if I was the superior player, nor that I had the superior team. I simply had more luck on the dice.

And to make things worse, despite each of us taking different routes with how we created our teams, in the end we all had almost the same stats – in fact Rocky, who came second, just had the better team on paper. While we’d taken different routes, in the end we had all ended up in the same place – making the whole dice fest feel even more empty.

what the game lacked here was a meaning to the stats and some personality to the players; it didn’t feel as if one player had a long ball team, another a slick passing unit, another a lot of tough tacklers. It became an ameritrash dice game but lacked the personality to pull it off, while letting down its euro heart at the same time. Our teams were, frankly, boring. I wanted red cards, crap refs, diving – something less mechanical.

But despite all this, I had fun. This was helped by good beer, being by the seaside and playing in good company and if we sit down again soon I’d play again – once at least, and as long as a better football management board game hasn’t come along before then. What promised to be a title contended at the start of the evening slowly lost touch and slipped into mid-table, if entertaining, mediocrity – the Swansea of board gaming, I guess.

Navegador: A four-sided game review

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Navegador_Schachtel-Deckel3.inddNavegador is a medium complexity board game for two to five players from designer Mac Gerdts that plays out in around two hours. You should be able to find it for around £30.

Typical of Gerdts’ games, players use a shared rondel mechanism (more on this below) to sail their ships from Lisbon to Nagasaki, buying and selling goods and expanding their business empires in the 15th/16th Century Portuguese colonies.

The game is awash with all the typical ‘euro’ stereotypes: a dour looking man on the cover, a washed-out brown board and a trading in the Age of Discovery theme. But as Navegador is most definitely a euro game, why shouldn’t it wear its credentials on its sleeve?

In fact I think the board itself is evocative of the theme and lovely to look at, while the rest of the game’s components (around 100 small wooden pieces, a few bag-fulls of cardboard money/chits and five sturdy player boards) are above average if not remarkable. And as always with Gerdts’ games, the eight-page rulebook is complimented by both a handy setup/action description reference sheet and a great little booklet full of historical facts about the famous Portuguese figures of the time that are represented in the game.

In terms of game play, Navegador is one part exploring, two parts empire building and three parts buying cheap and selling high. Exploring lets you set up colonies – and subsequently sell their goods. You can also buy shipyards, churches and factories to process these goods, with the player who can most successfully time and manage its investments the most likely to come out of Navegador on top.

Teaching

Navegador rondelNavegador is a pretty easy game to teach, but a tough one for some players to get a handle on – especially if they’re not used to games with a commodities market.

The rulebook is a mere six pages of A4 with more examples and pictures than rules, while the game has no hidden information – making it simple to help players that are struggling.

Gameplay revolves around the board’s ‘rondel’ – a circle split into eight sections, each of which contains one of the game’s seven possible actions (the ‘market’ action appears twice on opposite sides of the rondel).

Players decide which action to take at the start of the game by placing their player piece on the appropriate rondel space. On subsequent turns a player will move their piece up to three spaces clockwise around the rondel, limiting their options dramatically. You can push further round the rondel, but only at the cost of one of your ships – which don’t come cheap. But if another player beats you to that spot, will it hurt even more…?

Navegador rulesMost actions in and of themselves are straightforward: buying ships, privileges (for end game scoring), buildings, workers; sailing or founding colonies: but the market can be the tricky part to teach.

Each colony founded and factory purchased will trade one of the game’s three goods (sugar, gold and spices). When landing on a market action on the rondel a player may deal in each of these goods, but only in one direction – so if they choose to sell sugar from a colony they could not use any sugar factories they own.

Unfortunately the market on the board isn’t as clear as it could be for new players, with factories given a solitary column which has never failed to confuse at least one player if I’m teaching the game. But overall this is a very small barrier to entry and as mentioned earlier, it is easy to help new players with this action as all of their factories and colonies will be in full view of everyone.

The four sides

Navegador player boardThese are me, plus three fictitious amalgams drawn from observing my friends, and their respective quirks and play styles.

  • The writer: Gerdts’ games are renowned for their short, snappy yet agonising decisions and Navegador is no different. Despite having just one action per go, especially at higher player counts your best laid plans can be scuppered between turns, forcing you in a completely different direction. And the game is beautifully paced, arcing from an initial land-grab through consolidation to the final race to either end the game or get ahead before someone else does.
  • The thinker: While this isn’t my favourite Gerdts game (I’d go for Imperial 2030) there is a lot to like. To play well you need to be thinking about the long game from your very first move, with the limited end-game scoring tiles up for grabs at very specific moments. But then there are tactics required too, as the play of others can certainly force you to change tack anywhere up to the start of the game’s third and final movement. I’d prefer a little more depth and crunchiness, but enjoy my plays.
  • The trasher: Much like Gerdts’ Concordia, Navegador is a game I’d play at a (big) push but wouldn’t seek another play of. There is some competition for scoring tiles, colonies and cheap factories but its more of a race than having proper interaction and for me it all felt very dry and, well, brown – I’m the kind of player that can see a spreadsheet when others can see a game and I’m not here to work, I’m here to roll dice, get dirty and mess with your head!
  • The dabbler: I found this surprisingly enjoyable and the turns zip along super fast, meaning there is practically no down time. The theme isn’t great but the board is gorgeous, the rules simple and there are lots of ways to get points. You really have to keep an eye on what other people are doing, and we tend to find someone is always moaning about this or that or demanding we stop the perceived leader from getting a cheap colony or building. Just avoiding playing with AP people!

Key observations

Navegador marketCriticisms – and there are plenty – should be taken in context of Navegador being in the top 100 games on Board Game Geek (as of April 2015). The game certainly doesn’t have universal appeal, but as a fan of euro games I could predict these from a mile off.

The majority of detractors say the game is ‘boring’ or ‘dry’; that it’s like filling out a spreadsheet or solving a puzzle – especially as there is no direct interaction. As always there are merits to these arguments and if you have tried and hated Gerdts games such as Concordia and Hamburgum, or generally don’t like euro games with little interaction, it is highly unlikely you will be a fan of Navegador.

A bigger concern is the accusation that the winner will be the player who simply follows the road less travelled; the old adage of ‘do what the other players aren’t doing’. Again there is truth in this, as this is a game with several paths to victory points and if the players let one of their number exploit one of these alone it is likely they will prosper. However, it really is the responsibility of the other players to spot and stop this and personally I don’t see it as a flaw in the design – but some will.

Conclusion

Navegador mapHaving discovered and fallen in love with the rondel games of Mac Gerds through his earlier title Hamburgum, I’ve found Navegador to be a refreshing and fulfilling small step up in complexity and enjoyment.

The rondel works in a similar way in both games, but I find both the end game scoring and (admittedly abstracted) player interaction more enjoyable, while overall the game simply looks a hell of a lot better on the table.

If you enjoy euro games from designers such as Stefan Feld or Ted Alspach, or are looking for a step up in complexity from lighter weight games such as Ticket to Ride, Carcassonne and Catan, I’d highly recommend Navegador – with the caveats mentioned above around player interaction. for those seeking a more interactive experience, but are intrigued by the rondel idea, check out other Gerds classics Antike and Imperial 2013 which feature combat/area control and stocks/area control respectively.