As promised in the this year’s Gift Guide here are my thoughts about the Fantasy Flight Games Arkham Horror the Card Game.
Spoiler alert: I think it is one of the best games I have played.
Just to fill up this space next to the ArkhamLCG box cover before the “more”-line I’m adding the fact that this product is not a new game and it is not similar to the older Call of Cthulhu LCG by FFG. I condemned this game to be just a newer edition of that and I was so wrong in this.
What is a good gift? Depends on who you are giving the gift to.
For example, if you, for some reason, were buying a gift to me, that’s a hard hurdle to cross, because in general I have enough money to buy what I want, so in order to buy me a gift, you need to come up with something I was not aware of. In general, this is difficult, but some people are able to do it.
My general advice on buying gifts: Keep your eyes open. When you come across something interesting you know someone would like, get it for the next occasion. Or, like me, don’t worry about special occaions and give gifts when you feel like it. With that in mind, here’s some places to start.
(No sponsorhips involved despite some direct links.)
I could have sworn we have done this numerous times before but all I could find was the Guide from 2014… Oh well! Here come the recommendations for this year’s holiday season!
(By the way – those recommendations by Aki? They are still relevant. As are the Top 5 Boardgames I listed in February.)
This year I have been working in my local gaming store Puolenkuun Pelit (Tampere) and have quite a bit better grasp of thing I would like to recommend for holiday gifts. I have a few absolute favorites so let’s get them out of the way first. Continue reading
Old School Renaissance is a wonderful trend. I don’t know it too well myself, but every time I take a peek or venture a little deeper into the jungle, I find endless adventures, ideas, hacks, additions, and other stuff that all seems very cool. That, of course, means that it can be really difficult to spot the stuff that’s the best for you.
I’ve looked into a lot of games. Many of them promise room for imagination and a return to a rules-light approach, but to me, they don’t live up to the promise. Still, I have kept looking. To find a treasure. A real treasure: a game that would encapsulate OSR ideas and energy but whose design felt modern enough.
With David Black‘s The Black Hack, I may have found what I was looking for.
As Lauri said in his review, I have never played or read any edition of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay or WFRP. My own experiences in RPGs are mostly horror and then American indie games during the last 10 years. My tastes have been drifting as of late, though, which is why I was eager to set my eyes upon a relaunch of a British classic.
Disclaimer: Cubicle 7 was kind enough to send us a pdf for review.
A clear and concise title.
A draft costs you 1500 gems. You gain more gems by winning enough matches.
winsgems
| 0-1 | 0 |
| 2 | 800 |
| 3 | 1500 |
| 4 | 1800 |
| 5 | 2100 |
You can keep playing until you’ve either won 5 matches or lost two. To win your gems back (and some packs, but you can’t use packs to draft, so that’s not part of going infinite), you need to win 3, so it would seem that you need a win percentage of 60% to go infinite, but it’s not that simple.
Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 4th edition was published by Cubicle 7 quite recently. They were kind enough to send us a pdf to review and we will be reviewing this game in two parts. This first part is written by Lauri who has been there since (almost) the beginning. And the second part is the newcomers view written by Ville who has not played any edition of WFRP (published later).
Grognard’s Grumbles
Disclaimer: We haven’t actually played this fourth edition yet so all of my opinions are based on my earlier knowledge and reading the book so they must be taken with a hint of salt.
As said in the intro I have played WFRP a very long time. I started in the 90’s with the Enemy Within campaign (as player) and have GM’ed every edition since. My most active era of Warhammer was in 2002-2010 when I ran several campaign, wrote for Liber Fanatica and created the Daily Empire as a base for all fan material. So my approach for this game couldn’t be farther from Ville’s view which should create an interesting contrast to our views.
“What?”, you might be asking right now. Obviously, right now, I don’t really know what will be good when the set comes out, but what I can do is speculate. I mean, we do know the rest of the shocks are coming up, so that’s a start. It’ll give us the crucial Godless Shrine. Actually, the shocks are going to enable a lot of decks. There are already GR-decks without Stomping Grounds.
You’re using platforms of different kinds. I mean, you are reading this and this block is a platform of sorts. So, what are they?
There’s a great video on Cracked about Idiocracy with almost a million views (so, there’s a chance you’ve seen it before). Go ahead and watch it, but the main message, as I see it, is that actually those people in the future are in a pretty good situation, because they acknowledge that they are stupid and they are ready to listen to someone who is more intelligent then themselves. In that world it doesn’t even take much to better everyone’s lives, but they still need to come together and listen to that one rational voice, and that’s something we’re clearly unable to do.