I’m not the biggest fan of most campaign games. They have a few things going on that don’t gel well with me, personally. Firstly, I find it hard to have the same group of people meeting regularly. I find the overhead of character customisation and tracking annoying. I don’t like the repetition of doing the same combat steps again, and again, and again. Mostly I don’t like how they are prohibitive to drop-in, drop-out play. I still enjoy campaign games, but those things are like grit in my shoe. Nothing that’s going to hurt, just an annoyance.

Midhalla makes some welcome changes to those things which go a long way towards alleviating my annoyances.

Keep your trap shut

My favourite thing that Midhalla adds is the element of tower defence. If you’re unfamiliar with it, it’s a game style where enemies keep rolling in towards you, and you build defences to keep them at bay. One of my favourite games ever – Cloudspire (review here) – uses it. In one of the three phases of the game in Midhalla (more on those phases shortly) you get some preparation time between waves of bad guys. During this time you can buy and upgrade traps, positioning them in the dungeon to try to slow their encroachment towards your gate, which you’ve got to protect above all else.

Traps aren’t just single-use either, they’ll continue to work against the enemies until they destroy them, which is great, and really leans into the tower defence theme. As a group, you can decide during these preparation phases how you want to set up for the next assault, and it acts as a little breather. Breather is an apt term here too because Midhalla moves fast. Combat rounds are often over in 10 minutes and are really easy to run. I will give a quick overview of how the enemy turns play out because cumbersome enemy control drives me crazy in games.

First, you activate all of the enemies in the dungeon. There’s a specific order that is really easy to follow, but it’s a case of “Can the enemy attack the thing it targets (typically heroes or traps)? Yes? Okay, attack it. No? Okay, how about the gate, can it attack that? If it can, great, if not, just move onwards”. I can’t tell you how happy it makes me to have the basic enemy turns work like this. No complex way-finding. No charts of priorities. No list of exceptions. Just look at their card and do the thing.

Power up

My favourite thing in campaign games, whether they’re tabletop or digital, is when you unlock new powers and become more skilled in the art of ass-kickery. Midhalla doesn’t just tickle that little dopamine hit for me, it pulls the ripcord on a 2-stroke receptor stimulator. Each time you start a new part of the campaign, your characters are pretty basic. It’s not like Aeon’s End Legacy (review here) or Gloomhaven where you whip out your heavily modified character to take on the next chapter of the story. Your character sheets only have some pretty basic actions on them, which might sound rubbish, but they don’t stay that way for long.

The basic gameplay loop has three main phases: Exploration, Preparation, and Combat. During exploration, you’ll draw new tiles to add to the dungeon, each time reading the appropriate section of the campaign book to explain what you found. It’s a pretty cool system that gives you ideas about how you might want to explore and fortify. You might read a section that talks about noises from the west, so maybe you choose to keep exploring in that direction to find out what kind of a something makes those noises.

I touched on the preparation and combat phases earlier and won’t go into it more for now, because the fun stuff happens after those three phases when you come to the rewards step. The reward phase is when you get to prepare one of the ultimate abilities you might have used, do the same with items, remove status effects, and most importantly – for the control freaks like me – level your character up. Levelling up is as simple as drawing a couple of cards from the next skill tier up, choosing one, and putting it in a space on your character board. Instant power!

I love this way of doing things. It means you get more powerful as each chapter progresses, not like Gloomhaven where you’re thinning your deck out constantly, barely surviving an encounter with a sole ability left. Midhalla makes me feel powerful, and that’s a great feeling to get from a game like this. You’re going to need that power, too, because once you’ve levelled up you do it all again, and then again a third time. Exploring, placing traps and monsters, fortifying, fighting. The dungeon starts to sprawl, waves and waves of monsters begin to bear down on you, and the event cards you draw add a little bit of spice to the proceedings.

Interestingly, and brilliantly, the events are just about the only random things that happen during the game.

Determination

If you read and watch a lot of Midhalla previews I’m willing to bet five whole Pounds that you’ll hear a two-word phrase used a lot: ‘deterministic combat’. Sounds like a smartypants, big-brain thing to say, right? “I really like Midhalla because of the deterministic combat” – dinner party conversation gold right there.

What does it actually mean though?

When a game is deterministic it means that there are no random factors to the play. No dice rolling. No blind drawing of cards. No spinning a wheel of fortune and hoping for the best. In Midhalla this means that you know everything that’s going to happen in each cycle of play before it even happens. You know which enemies are in which locations. You know what they’ll attack, from how far, if they’ll move or not, and how much damage they’ll do. You know which traps will survive, where you can move, what you can do, and how much damage you can do.

Now, when it’s written like that, it doesn’t sound like much fun. It sounds like a giant spreadsheet that you can sit down and puzzle out with a pen and a piece of paper. And in fairness, you actually could. If you’re just that much fun that your idea of a good time is to run through every permutation possible to see what works, then you go for it. For the rest of us though, the reality is that you’re only really planning a few turns ahead at most. You know some baddies are miles away, so you don’t think about them until they’re getting close enough to cause you a headache.

It’s a really fresh take for a dungeon crawler. I realise there might be other examples out there, but to me, it’s something new and interesting. It makes me wonder why more of them aren’t done this way.

Final thoughts

Midhalla wasn’t a game I knew anything about when I first spoke to Eike, one of the designers. Coming into a game fresh like that is the way I always choose to do things when I can because I go into it having no expectations. If I had had any expectations, however, it’s fair to say that Midhalla would have blown them out of the water. Even playing with a prototype with thin card standees was an atmospheric, exciting experience.

I love that it has answers for so many of the things I don’t enjoy about campaigns. The rinse-and-repeat combat is broken up with preparation phases and setting up traps, and acquiring new skills mid-game. The feeling of getting more and more powerful in a short period of time is great, and the speed it plays out is so snappy, it keeps me invested more easily. Exploration is quick and adds flavour and atmosphere through the campaign book. Preparation is a proper team event, deciding on how best to defend your gate. Combat rattles through quickly and painlessly, and it’s all tied together with a player aid which honestly tells you everything you need to play the game, including all the status effects. Chip Theory Games would do well to see how to handle status effects without making it all but incomprehensible at times.

The combination of enthusiastic, colourful world-building and a story that looks like it’s going to deliver on the narrative front, and a smart, clean, efficient game design is an absolute winner. Maybe the Viking theme does nothing for you, but that’s personal taste. As far as whether you should take a punt on Midhalla – yes. The game is fun, it’s easy to learn. Your friends can drop in and out and take a character from a weakling to a hulking man-bear made of fists and axes without tainting someone else’s precious hero. The tower defence aspect is nicely done, and I love, love, love playing one of these games where luck doesn’t play a factor. Fyrnwest games have created something special, and for the money they’re asking for it, it seems like a bargain.

The Kickstarter campaign for Midhalla is running now and runs until September 13th 2023. Click here to jump across and take a look at it.

Prototype copy kindly provided by Fyrnwest Games. Thoughts and opinions are my own.

Midhalla (2023)

Design: Eike J. Meyer, Michael Meyer
Publisher: Fyrnwest Games
Art: Phan Tuan Dat, Nicholas Koo, Nikoloz Baloo Kuparadze
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 90-180 mins

The post Midhalla Preview appeared first on Punchboard.

There’s a part of me that wants to draw comparisons to Mass Effect all the way through this preview, but that would be both disingenuous and doing an injustice to Rogue Angels. The concept for the game is great. A sweeping intergalactic story plonks you – the heroes – smack bang in the middle of it. I’m not going to delve too far into the story because the whole point of the game is to discover that for yourself. On top of that, what happened to me in my plays might end up being completely different to yours.

You see, one of the big draws of the game, and one of the things which draw more comparisons with the aforementioned video game, is the way the story changes based on the decisions you make. You get the same thing right from the first scenario in Rogue Angels. It’s great to have a game where there isn’t a single win condition every time you play. You might get the option of escaping or killing all the bad guys, and the choice you make shapes the story. Choices shape the story directly and indirectly, which is the kind of thing which raises your investment in a game, and Rogue Angels does it really well.

Building a legacy

I really like the legacy folders that come in the game. These little folios not only give you somewhere to keep your character’s board and cards, but also track things like your relationships with other characters. Some decisions will move towards making you closer, and some will drive an irreconcilable wedge between them, and these things again play into the story, options, and choices later in the campaign.

I was playing with a prototype copy of the game which has to go to several reviewers, so my changes happened on a colour photocopy I made, but even doing things this way felt personal and gave me that level of connection with my character. Apparently, the stickers which customise your cards with new abilities are re-applicable – how cool is that? It seems that publishers might finally be listening to players and not forcing them to go for after-market options like the removable sticker sets you can get for Gloomhaven.

The last time I felt this level of connection to my character was with Aeon’s End: Legacy (review here), which is my favourite campaign/legacy game yet. Speaking of cards, I want to give a mention to the card system in the game. There are four slots at the bottom of your board, and each card has a value on it. To play a card you have to be able to place it in the matching numbered slot, which requires a little forethought. In a nod to video games, each ability has a cooldown, and this is represented by the cards being moved a step to the left each turn, until they come off the end of your board and back to your hand. I really like this, it’s both tactical and a nice tie back to the inspiration it draws from.

Bang for your buck

Once I got stuck into everything that came in the box, I was blown away at just how much there is to the game. Not in terms of hundreds of minis you might only see once, but in the size of the campaign and map books. There’s a crazy amount of world-building, story-writing, and attention to detail. Page after page after page of new places for the action to take place, an unfurling narrative, and the writing is excellent.

I’ve been spoiled when it comes to narrative in games. I spent a lot of time playing through The Baker Street Irregulars (review here) which had phenomenal writing throughout, so games have a lot to live to. Rogue Angels does a great job. Sci-fi and fantasy can so easily become derivative and boring, but I was completely invested in what was going on. Part of that comes from the game refusing to sugar-coat anything. I won’t give too much away here, but after the second or third mission, I had a really horrible choice to make. From then on it coloured the way I felt about one of the senior figures on my ship.

Choices like this get stuck in your head, and it becomes the difference between a good campaign and a mediocre one. When you play a game which revolves around the same type of action scenes, sometimes hundreds of times, the story is what keeps you coming back. You’ll know how to move, what your attacks can do, and how your characters best work together, but a good narrative keeps it interesting and means you want to see how it plays out, and what happens in the end.

Final thoughts

Generally speaking, campaign games aren’t my thing. If you’ve been visiting here for a while, you’ll know that. I just had to reach out and try Rogue Angels though, and I’m really glad I did. Firstly, it’s a pleasant change to play one which isn’t based on fantasy. There’s nothing wrong with fantasy, it’s just been done to death, and it was great to delve into some campaign sci-fi for a while. My biggest problem with sci-fi and fantasy is buying into yet another universe, but I love the Rogue Angels setting. The writing is superb and very atmospheric.

I love how combat works. The card slot system is great, and it genuinely feels like the cooldown systems used in turn-based and action RPGs. I said at the top that I didn’t want to keep comparing it to Mass Effect, but it’s hard not to. The branching story, the character development, and the relationships between characters are handled so nicely. Saving your game is a breeze, and setup and teardown are both quick and easy too.

The biggest caveat I have is around the components and their quality. I’ve been playing with a proper homemade prototype. Card standees in repurposed stands, a map book made of bound printer paper, dice with stickers on – that kind of thing. Obviously, this doesn’t impact the quality of the game, which is sound, but I know how important those details can be to these games. The presentation can affect a person’s buy-in to a game and its universe. Keep an eye on the Kickstarter page and official game site to find out more about that as and when more is announced.

Overall, Rogue Angels is a fantastic sci-fi campaign that honestly lives up to its billing as Mass Effect in all but name. Brilliant stuff.

Preview copy provided by Sun Tzu Games. Thoughts and opinions are my own.

Rogue Angels: Legacy of the Burning Suns (2023)

Design: Emil Larsen
Publisher: Sun Tzu Games
Art: Dinulescu Alexandru, Linggar Bramanty, Przemek Kozlowski
Players: 1-4
Playing time: 60-120 mins

The post Rogue Angels Preview appeared first on Punchboard.

When you read the words ‘dungeon crawler’ in the previous sentence, did you conjure an image in your head? Did you see brooding warriors in armour alongside scantily-clad women only wearing enough armour to protect their most intimate areas, flanked by wizards in robes? Did you envisage skeleton warriors, orcs, goblins, and magic? Was it dark, gloomy, and grimy? If you did, this might not strike you as a problem, because it’s probably what you’re looking for in a dungeon crawler.

What if you’re looking for something else? What if dull greys, greens, and browns aren’t your thing? What then? Up until now, your options have been very limited. As soon as you step outside of the generic, gritty fantasy theme you’re either looking at generic, gritty sci-fi or ‘family/kids’ games. Artisans of Splendent Vale redresses the balance by giving us a watercolour world full of diverse, non-stereotyped, pastel protagonists, breathing fresh life into tired tropes.

By the book?

Artisans of Splendent Vale takes a leaf out of the books (pun very much intended) of games like Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion which use a book of maps to play on. I’ll touch on overworld exploration later, but once you visit a place where some kind of skirmish takes place, you’ll be instructed to turn to a particular page in the Action Scene Book and told where to put the different characters before getting down to some fisticuffs.

Skirmishes – Action Scenes in the game’s parlance – in Artisans are great fun. There’s an initiative track to keep track of who gets to act in what order, which is more intuitive for newcomers than something like Gloomhaven’s per-turn initiative setting. I had an initial worry that the action scenes might feel a little hollow, with so much attention being lavished on the narrative and world-building. I needn’t have worried, the action scenes are solid. What I really like is the way they’re not always just a straight-up fight. I’m not going to spoil things for you here, but let’s just say that at times you’ll be testing how fast you can get out of trouble, instead of getting elbow-deep in it.

The design choices for the skirmishes have been carefully thought out too. Gone are plastic minis, and in their place instead we’ve got screen-printed meeples with round edges. The screen-printing is friendly too, just giving the impression of clothes and characteristics. Why am I telling you this? Because the sort of person who might want to try a game like Artisans of Splendent Vale might also be the same sort of person who’s looking for a friendlier experience. The sort of person who wants to feel like they’re being led by the hand into something welcoming and fun, without having something sharp and pointy stuck between their ribs and left for dead.

Representation matters

During its Kickstarter campaign, a lot was made of the diversity represented in Artisans of Splendent Vale. It’s true, there’s a ton of diversity in the game, and it’s a good thing. It doesn’t take very long before you realise how embedded it is in the game. To begin the game each player chooses one of the four characters in the game and takes the corresponding (200+ page!) book, and what you’ll notice right away is that each book lists the character’s pronouns. If you choose Farah, you’re going to be referred to as ze/zir for the rest of the game. What’s the last game you played where that happened? This doesn’t just happen for pronouns. All four characters are QTPOC, which is another first for me in a board game.

Does all of this matter? Yes, absolutely, it matters. It’s not just about ticking boxes. It’s not just a case of saying “Look at us, we’re being so diverse, right?!”. I play games as a part of that huge demographic group of heterosexual, cis, white males. I don’t have to worry about what I see in games. I know I’m going to find something familiar in whatever I play. What about the huge number of people who don’t fall into that intersection of those Venn diagrams? What about people from marginalised communities? What’s going to make them feel comfortable and at home when they take their first steps into this hobby? Artisans of Splendent Vale might not cover everything, but it does a damn fine job of doing better than most.

The sad truth is that there are people out there who will actively avoid the game because of the diversity and representation. I’ve seen it in online groups. I’ve seen people who believe it’s some kind of agenda, and it’s ridiculous. If you’re really worried that a game with a good representation of diverse characters is in any way negative, I’d ask you to stop reading now and close your browser. We should celebrate the fact that games like this exist. In Artisans’ case, this celebration should be amplified, because it’s not just a token gesture of a game, it’s an excellent game in its own right.

Career path

Artisans of Splendent Vale is a campaign game. Your choices dictate where you go in the world, what you do when you get there, and how your character changes after the action scenes. I love that each of the characters has a different mechanism for tracking their advances. Harinya’s method for brewing potions is completely different from Javi’s artificing, where he fills in nodes around tracks. It reinforces how different each character is from one another.

These differences are apparent in each character’s book too. Most of the books’ contents are the same, but there are subtle differences in some parts. Again, I don’t want to spoil anything, but there might be occasions when your group is exploring a room, and each of you is looking at a picture of it in your books. One character with a certain ability might be able to see something in their picture that the others cannot. If you see a number in something like that, you’re free to look up that location in the book and see what you find there. This is one of those bittersweet features of a game like this because it means that your experience could be very difficult from somebody else. Your chosen characters (if you’re playing with less than four characters) might not see things that other people did. That’s just something you have to live with in any campaign or legacy game – you won’t see and do everything in one playthrough.

Something about the game makes your character feel uniquely yours. I’m not sure whether it’s using pencils to add things to your to-do lists, or using the overworld map to decide between you what happens next, but I can tell you that the moment you apply your first scar sticker to your character, you’re going to feel a real investment in their fate.

Final thoughts

In an ideal world, I’d be able to write a review of Artisans of Splendent Vale and tell you why it’s so good. It’s a great campaign game with tons of dungeon-crawling skirmish action, character development, and fantastic writing throughout. Seriously, the story of Artisans is great, and it’s abundantly clear how much time and effort has been put into the world-building. The graphic design and illustrations throughout are beautiful. Truly beautiful. This isn’t an ideal world, however, so I have to pay attention to what this game does for inclusivity and diversity and applaud it for that. To have these things not just paid lip service to, but woven into the very fabric of such a story-rich game is special.

In the interest of transparency and full disclosure, I’ve got to tell you that I haven’t finished the game yet. I’m playing a two-player campaign and getting the time together with my player two to get through it all is tricky. What I can tell you, however, is that I desperately want to know what happens in the end. The story is so good, which is a good thing because there’s an awful lot of reading between fights. If you’re not a fan of the written word and look for your games to be action, action, action, this probably isn’t the one for you. If and when you do complete it, if you want to explore all of the ‘what might have been’ options you can buy a reset pack to play it all through again.

Artisans comes in a big box so make sure you have space on your shelves for it. Along with the rulebook and action scene book, you’ve got four full paperbacks along with the various meeples, pencils, and the gorgeous card box. The card box works like an old card index, and even the design and artwork on it evoke the sort of feeling the game is going for. If you’re looking for a big-box campaign but are tired of the same old themes being re-hashed, and if you have the money for it (it’s north of £100 at the time of writing), Artisans of Splendent Vale is going to give you and your friends an adventure you won’t soon forget.

Review copy kindly provided by Renegade Games Studios. Thoughts and opinions are my own.

Artisans of Splendent Vale (2022)

Design: Nikki Valens
Publisher: Renegade Games Studios
Art: MK Castaneda, Lil Chan, Cleonique Hilsaca, Lisa Pearce, Christina Pittre
Players: 2-4
Playing time: 45-90 mins per session

The post Artisans Of Splendent Vale Review appeared first on Punchboard.

If I’m gonna die, I’m gonna die historic on the Fury Road!

The basic premise of the game pits you as one of the four drivers available, piloting one of four vehicles. Your vehicle is a mat in the middle of the play area, which has nine card slots on it, arranged in a 3×3 grid. These are the places you can attach various items to either help keep you in one piece or add attacking prowess to your rolling deathwagon. You’ll need them, as the bulk of the game has marauders swarming around you on all four sides, aiming to destroy your car and claim what they can from the wreckage.

The swarming – oh the swarming – how I love the swarming cars. For each round during each chapter of the campaign, enemy cars come off the draw deck and surround your car’s mat. When a marauder attacks you, they deal damage if you can’t block it, and then circles around clockwise to the next side of your mat. If a little piece of your brain is now whispering “Sounds like something we can manipulate”, then it’s correct.

You see, which enemies activate and attack you is up to you. Most of the game is at the whim of dice rolls, and you’ll find yourself assigning dice for just about everything. Whether that’s your attacks, what you repair or add to your car, or which enemies activate and attack. If you choose a red 2-pip die, the enemies with a 2-pip die on them activate. So you can choose which cars move, and predict where they’re going to go.

So what?

I am your redeemer. It is by my hand you will rise from the ashes of this world.

Let’s say you’ve attached some really nasty guns to the front of your car. You’d like to fire them, but you want them to do the most damage possible to as many enemies as possible. Well, let’s activate those enemies behind us to being them up our left side, where another car already thunders along next to us – the driver leaning out of the window, giving us the bird. Every edge of every piece of metal down the side of the car is trimmed with barbed wire, like terrible lace.

On your turn – BAM! – you ram sideways into the marauders, dealing damage. More importantly, however, when you ram into enemies, you also move them to an adjacent section of your choosing. In this example, maybe we line them up in front, like bowling pins, ready to send tumbling into the dirt. It’s really satisfying to shepherd the enemies around, making them dance to your tune. It’s not only fun, but it’s also an essential skill to master as the game goes on, especially once you factor in the boss cards.

Each chapter has a big baddie to take on at the end, and they’re tough. Like, proper tough. When the first boss came out to play at the end of the first chapter, I had to check the rules twice because I thought I’d misread them. Not only did I need to deal a crazy amount of damage, but I also couldn’t damage them if any other cars were in the same section. What the Hell?! You’ll finish chapters with most of your car on fire, somehow balancing on one wheel, with nothing but the windscreen wipers working, and it’ll feel like a victory.

I’m scared, Fif. You know why? It’s that rat circus out there. I’m beginning to enjoy it.

It would be easy to think Wreckland Run is a racing game, based on its name and artwork. The idea of high-speed pursuit and car-nage is compelling, but that’s not what it’s about. You could pick up the game, shake off its theme and re-theme it with some kind of base defence game against zombies or aliens, and it would still be a great game. It’s a game of enemy manipulation and forward planning, with a good splash of dice-rolling thrown in for fun.

That’s not to say that the story is just gloss, because it isn’t. Wreckland Run has a full seven chapter campaign to work through, with a good story that builds up as you play. I’m not going to spoil any of it, but it’s full of tongue-in-cheek humour, punny car names, and surprising new things happening. It’s cool that the new enemies introduced in each chapter stay in the draw deck. It feels like you never truly outrun the people you smash in the earlier chapters. They’ll still track you down and take a swing at you from time to time.

I was honestly surprised at how much I got into the story because I find it really hard to buy into new worlds. The flavour text is well-written, and not halfway up its own backside, which really helps. There’s something about light-hearted fiction that takes itself too seriously which is a major turn-off for me. If you suffer with the same lack of buy-in that I do, I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised. Wreckland run keeps you invested in what’s going on, and absolutely dying to know what’s waiting for you in the next envelope.

Final thoughts

A lot of people only know Scott from his Tiny Epic series of games, which is a shame, because he has designed a lot of other great games, including Heroes of Land, Sea, and Air, Warp’s Edge, and last year’s hit, Beer & Bread. My hope is that Wreckland Run joins that list of hits because it really is good. I don’t know how much playtesting and balancing the game went through, but it must have been a lot. I’ve not managed to steamroller any of the chapters yet, and it’s pretty common for me to have my flaming hunk of steel just crawl back to my garage for repair.

If you’d asked me before playing Wreckland Run, I wouldn’t have guessed that it would end up being my favourite post-apocalyptic car war game. The racing part isn’t there, but then, Mad Max was never about racing, it’s about survival, which is something I hadn’t really thought about before. Apocalypse Road from GMT Games does the racing and wrecking thing about as well as it could be done (read my review of Apocalypse Road here), so I’d probably swerve toward that if you yearn for tearing up tarmac and rivals.

Wreckland Run is a solo game, and while you could have someone else help you make decisions, it’s the kind of game to enjoy by yourself. It fits on a small table, plays out in about 45 minutes, and takes only a couple of minutes to setup and pack away. It’s a great ‘fill a dead hour’ game. I love how much variety Scott has managed to pack into the game. The cards coming out of each new envelope add new things to think about, and if you really rinse the game, the Fallout expansion is awesome. There are a couple of new vehicles for you, some new drivers to choose from, three more chapters, and some cool new mechanisms – including missiles. Missiles!

A fully-resettable campaign game for one player which is quick to play, fun, and doesn’t take up an acre of table space? Yes indeed, what a great game.

Review copy kindly provided by Renegade Games Studios. Thoughts and opinions are my own.

Wreckland Run (2022)

Designer: Scott Almes
Publisher: Renegade Games Studios
Art: Brett Parson, The Warden
Players: 1
Playing time: 30-45 mins.

The post Wreckland Run Review appeared first on Punchboard.