Over the July 4th weekend, I had a chance to play a couple of games, both of which have been around for a while, so I won’t pretend to write reviews. I was meeting family for the weekend, and both my older brother and my son had not really played D&D [although I've played a couple of simple tabletop RPGs with my son]. My 18-year-old nephew has played and GM’ed many D&D 4e games, and he joined us.

D&D Board Game

First, we played Castle Ravenloft, the board game. I had heard good things about the game, and my nephew had played the sequel, Wrath of Ashardalon. There are several reviews that explain how to play these games in detail, but the gist is that it’s a dungeon crawler with 13 scenarios [with different conditions for victory] and a dynamic game board. The game has an element of the 4e rules in terms of healing surges and the different types of powers. But I thought this would be a good sort of intro game for my brother and a little variation for my kids. I loved this game, more than I expected, because it is one of those very well balanced yet somewhat unpredictable games.

What makes the game a challenge is that for each player’s turn, we had to add a new tile with a new monster, or draw an encounter card, which might reveal a trap, loss of points, or some other bad bit of news. And with some tiles, you get both a monster and an encounter card. Fairly early on, we had some awful bad luck with the dice, as we ditched the d20s that we had and searched for a ‘luckier’ one.  At one point, we had 5 monsters, and we were all low on health, having used up all our healing surges. More than once, my son’s wizard died [three times, in fact] and my cleric managed to revive him. We were all down to 1-2 hit points when things took a turn for the better.

Quite unexpectedly, when we revealed the chapel and four new monsters, my son discovered a multiple attack that he had been saving for this last card, and he killed 3 of the 4 monsters, enabling to kill the fourth and grab the icon item to win the game. The game has a great mechanic for building tension, even despair, but includes space for strategy as well as chance to allow players to recover from disaster. It’s the sort of design and balance that reminds me of the Advanced Civilization board game. I also enjoyed the coop nature of the game–if you lose one member, you lose the game. I enjoyed it much more than Pandemic, which is a good game.

Castles and Crusades

A while back, while looking at various RPG systems, I stumbled across Castles and Crusades, a supposedly rules-light game that feels like a hybrid of early D&D and 3.5e. Again, this is another game with lots of reviews, with its share of detractors and fans. I liked the idea of no feats or skills and the reliance on 6 attributes for all checks and saves. I grabbed the Quick Start rules and a character sheet and thought it could be something we could play in a short time.

Character creation is indeed pretty quick, though we took some time to explain things to my brother and my son, as well as to go over the classes and races. Still, I can see where creating a character could take 15 minutes, as Troll Lords claims. I used the very simple adventure in the quick start, thinking even a group of newbies would knock it out in an hour or so.

I think this was indeed a great choice for players new to tabletop RPG. Even though my son has played some simple RPGs, like Mouse Guard, this was more complex and closer to D&D, which he has been really wanting to play. For him, this gave me the opportunity to work some on gaming etiquette. He’s a very imaginative sort [a 'hambone' as my mother calls him], so he can get carried away, especially in this session where we had a great mix of humor and adventure. C&C didn’t overwhelm my son and brother with too many options and rules that D&D can bring. It allowed them to focus on their characters and getting into the game.

My brother played his Skullcrusher fighter well, focused on getting money and, where possible, killing. My son struggled with his character but seeing the others, he got the idea to develop a character, not just stats and abilities. And my nephew played his cleric well, bringing his character’s religion into the game on several occasions.

The session took a good two and a half hours, though it had only two fights. [I skipped the treant encounter partly by accident but also because I had them play level 2 characters, who had few hit points. Plus, I wanted to finish the adventure.] In both cases, the creatures pushed the players, who were somewhat acting in isolation. Unlike Castle Ravenloft, the players in this adventure had no reason to play fully coop. In fact, my nephew’s cleric repeatedly withheld information which angered my brother’s fighter, who hated all spellcasters to begin with. We all had a lot of fun with these 15-minute characters, who begin to flesh out during the game.

We ended with player victory and a lot of fun. Everyone was definitely game for continuing to play. In fact, I’m working now on using Maptools for us to try playing online with Skype. My brother admitted that he had doubts about how well the online play would capture the great part of our adventure, which was the interaction among the players. But, as he said, it’s better than not playing.

Castles and Crusades has some issues, even though I plan to continue using it. For example, I thought the money was far too plentiful. The characters had much higher AC as a result. To make it worse, even though I cut back on the gold that the prefab adventure included, they still walked away with about 4000 gold among the three of them. I think 1/20 of that would have been much better. I also did not care for the character sheets, which really didn’t allow space for abilities and which seemed very repetitive and poorly laid out, but that’s something I can rectify myself easily enough. I also think that once I have the actual core books rather than just the quick start, I’ll have a better feel for the game. As it was, I went to the 3.5e spells for details, which didn’t quite fit.

I’m hoping that our online sessions with Maptools goes well so that we can keep playing and maybe move to a better virtual tabletop, specifically Fantasy Grounds.

A while back, I mentioned that my had created a board game for his third-grame math project, which he called Attack on Ilum. This is the game manual that he had to write with a sketch of the board design. He created the board from foam board and drew the grid, drawing and coloring the objects. We didn’t get time to really playtest the game, but I think on the whole, he has a pretty good idea. I thought the game squares should have smaller and more, but he wanted the larger squares [4 inches x 4 inches] so that the game didn’t last too long. The two boards are then glued back-to-back to make one game board.

He had some trouble coming up with pieces but ended up using foam board again.

I had to guide him along, to keep the game’s focus simple, and used the exacto knife to cut the foam board. But the majority is his work.

If you’re interested, feel free to download, create your own board and pieces, and play with kids. According to my son, the game is designed for ages 8 and older, and I think the math aspect is educational, a good way to practice fast calculations and memorization.

Projects like this are good because they work in different kinds of thinking. He spent time researching what planets to use and coming up with a plot of his own, as a kind of backstory. I’m thinking of suggesting we do a similar project over the summer, but focused on a different subject, like history or science. It’s a good way to practice planning long projects as smaller tasks. But it’s a game, which makes it fun.

photo by apesara

For something different, some board games talk.

First, my son has to make a math board game for class, and we talked through it on Friday. I tried to guide as little as possible, but I had to keep pushing about the simplicity of design and goals. He’s not quite done, but I think he came up with an excellent game that has some variety and strategy to it. He’s halfway through drafting the rules, and he just laid out the basic board design. I’m very anxious to see what he comes up with for the final product, and I’ll definitely post the results here. I think he has something that we’ll be playing on family game night.

What was fun, too, was talking to him about basic board games and gameplay–race, random and luck, territory building, combat, etc. I didn’t inundate him, but I took the kinds of games he’d played and generalized from the specifics, to find out what he liked best and to encourage him to have both the subject and the type that he enjoyed. It’s definitely a fun exercise to do with kids, of encouraging them to create anything really.

Second, a couple of weeks ago, my son and I got back into miniatures gaming. I’m not sure what started it exactly–but I ended up getting more Star Wars miniatures and more maps, which helped greatly with the variety.  When we tried to play last year, my son liked the idea of the game but not so much the game itself. But, as I’ve been explaining the new figures and their abilities, he has been more and more interested. Perhaps my mistake before was that I tried to simplify the game and stuck to only using the base attributes, ignoring the special abilities.

So, on Saturday, we sat down to a full game. In the recent purchases, we picked up the current uber piece–General Obi Wan Kenobi, whose abilities make him nearly very difficult to defeat. But, from one of the ‘blind’ booster expansions, we also got a very rare Captain Rex, who, in some ways, is even more devastating than Kenobi. But my explaining these characters just didn’t register with my son, but when he saw the two of them tear through my droid army, he nearly forgot about his other 8 characters and focused on three characters, finding their strengths and advantages and then using them to defeat my squad quickly.

The problem was that, when my Dooku piece managed to take Kenobi down to half health, my son had that panic and wanted to stop playing, like when some lose the queen in chess. It was very, very late [about 11 pm], so we stopped. But he understood that he was still in an excellent position and wanted to play again. We had a family day on Sunday for Mother’s Day and never started a new game. [We actually stayed up talking in the bed about the game and about Star Wars, how the troopers could work together. We decided to play through a scenario the next time so that we could have more of a story to act out.]

I could see that both his enjoyment and feel for the game had improved over time, just because of his maturation as a 9-year-old. Will we go to a tournament or a game night? Probably not for a while because I’m not sure how many kids his age play this game. [In fact, I've noticed that few of his friends and classmates play even battle card games, like Pokemon or the newer, popular Bakugan.]

I also think that simplifying can also take out the interest and even the creativity of some games. My intention might have been good, but I didn’t realize how much the complexity added to the interest in the game, thinking it would be too much for him. Part of that comes from the assumption that games are learned, first, in the abstract and in explanations. But just jumping in and dealing with the complexity can sometimes be the best way to learn.