The long dark night of the dice rolls #1: a little light relief

I mentioned last Tuesday that I've played hundreds of games during the months of my depression, nearly 600 in fact. Still getting back into the swing of things here at RD/KA! as I am, I thought I'd run through some of the highlights of that epic series of games, and cast a quick eye over some other games which I've bought recently.

Ivanhoe, Ivanhoe and yet more bloody Ivanhoe!

The impressive statistic of nearly 600 games played since last September is put in its proper context by the fact that more than half of those were games of Ivanhoe. My neighbour Liam (last seen swigging wine at Sioux's gallery launch in May last year) came round on xmas eve keen to play a game to which he'd taken an instant liking way back in October 2009. We played a 24-game session. And so began a marathon run of 325 games, all but 9 of which were played in the 6 months up to May. That's averaging 14 games/week, in a couple of sessions each week. Whew!

I've written before about how much I like Ivanhoe. I still like it, but I never would've imagined that there could come a point when I'd be scunnered at the suggestion of playing again. That point came sometime in May I seem to recall, when we played 12 sessions. Luckily something came along to break Liam from his obsession with Ivanhoe before I broke down completely!

A pleasant sufficiency of Alhambra

Alhambra is a game I first played a couple of times at a DiceCon in Glasgow way back in the days before RD/KA!. I enjoyed it quite a lot, and remember it as being something of a brain-burner in which my every move was foiled before I could make it. Seeing some slightly battered boxes going cheap in Static Games a couple of years ago, buying a copy was a bit of a no-brainer. As so often happens, the game then gathered dust on the shelf until I finally got it to the table one Sunday last November.

Bits, dear boy, bits

I won't give a detailed review. In short: Alhambra is a tile-laying game in which players have to collect money cards to buy their tiles (for more info, see the video on the game's page, via the link above). The rules are very straightforward, although they contain one or two of the little 'fiddles' which some gamers take as characteristic of Euros and which they dislike with varying degrees of intensity.

A major feature of Alhambra is that there is no direct player interaction, so that the game is something of a multiplayer solitaire puzzle. Even though I'm an avid wargamer I don't mind this a bit: random tile and money draws; the uncertainties of market conditions as you wait your turn; coupled with often fraught decision-making in poor markets; these all add up to a game I'll be happy to play a lot more.

Not nearly enough Cosmic Encounter
"We come in peace for the benefit of all humanity"

Cosmic Encounter is one of the classic multiplayer boardgames of our time. It was first published in 1977 by Eon Games and has since seen 16 editions. 'Uncle' Martin (last seen around xmas 2009 introducing me to the delights of Pandemic) owned the original- and all its expansions IIRC, back in the early 80s. We played the game endlessly, and viciously, for hours and hours at a time. It was in my first ever flat- which I happened to share with Martin, and I have one of those peculiarly vivid memories of us all sat playing around the kitchen table; peculiar because I can see the scene from outside, as if out of body.

"Eat plutonium death, you disgusting alien weirdoes!"

The original Eon edition

Looking for something new to bring to the table for birthday gaming, I treated myself to FFG's 2008 Cosmic Encounter revamp back in March. For the uninitiated, Cosmic Encounter works like this:

• Each player is an alien species with a system of 5 home planets and 20 spaceships.
• The game is played by playing cards in encounters to establish colonies on your opponents' home planets.
• The winner is the first player to have 5 such colonies.
• Encounters work like this:

The hyperspace gate

1. The target system is chosen at random.
2. You place up to 4 of your ships in the hyperspace gate and point it at the planet of your choice in the target system.
3. You invite any other players to ally with your attack.
4. The defender also asks for allies.
5. The other players decide in turn if they'll ally, committing their spaceships as they see fit.
6. You and the defender each secretly choose an encounter card from your hands; these can be Attack cards or Negotiate cards (there's one other kind of encounter card, but I'll leave that out for simplicity).
7. Cards are revealed, with the following effects:

Sample Encounter cards:
sneaky, mighty, median
& mediocre

• Attack v. Attack: the highest total of card plus ships wins; all losing ships go to the warp (the deadpile).
• Negotiate v. Negotiate: allies are sent home; the main players have 1 minute to make a deal involving swapping cards and/or bases; if no deal is struck, each player loses 3 ships to the warp.
• Attack v. Negotiate: the Attack card wins automatically; the player who played the Negotiate receives 'compensation'.

To the victor the spoils

The warp: home of
the rash, the luckless
& the unwary

The spoils of victory are:

• Attacker and allies: all gain a colony on the defeated planet.
• Defender: survive to fight another day.
• Defending allies: rewarded with 1 new Cosmic card and/or ship freed from the warp for each ship committed to the defence.

'Compensation' means that the player whose Negotiate card lost to an Attack card takes 1 random card from the winner's hand for each ship lost to the warp.

"Take us to your leader"

"My card? No, your card."
"I hit you with my planet."

Readers unfamiliar with Cosmic Encounter might by now be wondering why the game is such an enduring favourite if its core system is a simple as I've outlined above (and it is). There is a bit more to it, naturally enough- namely alien powers: each player has a random alien power which allows them to break the normal rules in all sorts of weird and wonderful ways. Some are apparently quite weak and therefore subtle in their applications: who'd want to be the Philanthropist, with the "power of giving"?. Others are so mighty to behold that you wonder how you'll ever stop such behemoths in their galaxy-conquering rampages: who could hope to resist the Leviathan, with their "power of Worldships" which allows them to take entire planets through the hyperspace gate, for +20 attack.

More cards, more sneaky tricks

Some useful cards
filling out the deck

The aliens and the encounters define the core of Cosmic Encounter gameplay. The basic game is filled out with some more cards in the Cosmic deck:

• Morph: a unique card which dupiclates your opponent's encounter card.
• Reinforcement: any player(s) involved in an encounter can play reinforcement cards after the main cards are revealed, to change the outcome; any number of these cards may be played in an encounter.
• Artifacts: these are 'event' cards which have various useful effects, some of which can tip the balance in an encounter.

Flares & tech:
more power;
more chaos

In the familiar tradition of FFG box-stuffing, there are 2 further decks of cards in the basic set: flares and tech cards. Flares are intended as part of the core game and are cards you can play for effects which will vary according to whether you have the power matching the flare- 'super', or not- 'wild'. The flares were an expansion for the original Eon edition. Tech cards are new to the FFG edition as far as I know, and are optional.

The rules for tech in Cosmic Encounter are simple enough: each player starts the game choosing 1 of 2 random cards. Tech cards have to be researched before you can use them. Researching a tech card involves placing ships on the face-down card- 1/turn, until the player chooses to reveal the card. If the number of spaceships on the card is greater than or equal to the card's research number (that number in the bottom right of the cards), the card is complete. Whether the tech card is complete or not, the ships on the card are returned to the player's colonies.

Surprise, surprise: an expansion!

I also picked up the Cosmic Incursion expansion set for the sake of a potential 6th player. Cosmic Incursion adds 20 new aliens to bring the total number up to 70, and a new rule: 'Cosmic Quakes'. A 'Cosmic Quake' happens when a player has to draw a new card and both the Cosmic deck and the discard pile are empty. All players must discard their cards, then new hands are dealt to each player. This will be rare, but no doubt entertaining and frustrating in equal measure when it does happen. There is also another deck of cards: the optional Reward deck. Players can choose to draw their cards from the Reward deck instead of the regular Cosmic deck when they receive rewards for participating in a successful defensive alliance.

Rewards: a gold
standard loyalty
scheme

There are lots of neat cards in the Reward deck, but this could prove to be a double-edged sword for 2 reasons: the back of the reward deck cards is different from that of the regular encounter cards- so your opponents could always choose to pick a reward card if they were allowed to draw a card from your hand; and there are a couple of real turkeys in the deck, including the 'Attack -7', the lowest valued attack card in the game. Still, there are only 2 bad cards in the 32-card Reward deck, and some of the good ones are very good indeed:

• Kickers: these multiply your attack card value, compensation and/or opponent's ships lost due to failure to make a deal (just watch out for the 'Kicker x0').
• Rifts: free ships returned from the warp- always good; with a sting in the tail if your opponent steals the card from you- better still.

Overview

Individual planet counters
& the new spaceships

The FFG edition of Cosmic Encounter is excellent. In fact it's one of the best new editions of any game I've ever seen, up there with GW's 2nd and 3rd editions of Space Hulk and 3rd edition Blood Bowl, which have long held my prize for best new boardgame editions. FFG's familiar high production values are nicely brought to bear: their thick cardboard makes all the counters and other pieces nice and chunky; and the little plastic spaceships are just lovely, with the added bonus that they stack perfectly and are easy to handle for those players who are all fingers and thumbs.

New destinies
to explore

There are also some neat additions to the destiny deck (from which you draw to decide the target system for an encounter). These are: 'Wild'- any system of your choice; and 'Special'- particular systems according to certain specifications, eg. the player with the most ships in the warp. I don't know for sure if these were in previous editions; they're certainly new to this player of the original Eon edition.

If there was nothing more to FFG's new Cosmic Encounter than some new aliens, cards and high production values, then it would be good but not excellent. What makes the new edition excellent for yours truly are several small additions in particular, much more important in play than their unassuming appearance might suggest. These additions are:

• Text on the alien cards to remind players when they can use their powers and whether use of the powers is optional or mandatory.
• The timing strip which appears on all relevant cards.

Those pleasing
little details

These additions- and the rules for resolving timing conflicts, mean that players will always know when and how to use their alien powers; and that there should be no problems dealing with the complex interactions of the wide variety of card effects in the game. Clarity of this ilk is important enough in its own terms in any game. It's doubly important in Cosmic Encounter. Why? Because timely cardplay — to zap powers and to trump or cancel opponents' decisions or other game effects — is at the heart of the fiendish tricks which constitute so much of the tactics in a game as chaotic as Cosmic Encounter.

All-in-all then, this new edition of Cosmic Encounter should be sought out by all fans of highly interactive multiplayer games with serious screwage; sought out, cherished, and played- a lot! ;)

Related@RD/KA!
- The long dark night of the dice rolls #2: light at the end of the tunnel

Changes, changes

Old habits die hard: tabletop miniatures games

"Very pretty John, but
what does it mean?"
(Damned if I know BTW)

When you're depressed you often become withdrawn to the point of being reclusive. The resulting emotional disconnection from so much of your life means that a period of depression really isn't the best time to make decisions of any consequence about your life, not least because coming out of depression means that you face putting back together everything which has been disrupted when you were down. So you could easily dispose of things or give up on activites which are really important to you because you take your depressive emotional disconnection at face value, when you're really just expressing your dread of the effort it'll take to get everything sorted out when you're feeling better.

Memories, sigh

All of which is by way of preamble to an explanation of some changes in my gaming tastes and habits which have come upon me in recent months. First and foremost is that I'm giving up tabletop miniatures gaming. This is something of a painful break, and even as I type this I'm struck by a sense of unreality, not to mention wistful nostalgia. After all, my life as a hobby gamer started nearly 40 years ago when my brother and I made up our own rules for playing proper games with our Airfix 1/72^nd Napoleonic toy soldiers.

An all-too-familiar sight!

Tabletop miniatures gaming- or to be more precise, collecting miniatures with a view to tabletop gaming; this has been part of my hobby whenever I've been active as a gamer. And I've always enjoyed my tabletop games- eg. last year's games with Penumbra's Talons. The sad reality though is that games have been few and far between. More important than that: I just can't be arsed with the effort of army-building. It's too much like hard work for me, which turns the most important part of tabletop miniatures gaming- the visual appeal, into a dreaded chore.

Hexes, lovely lovely hexes!

More than all of that, I must confess a longstanding sneaking preference for boardgames. Why? Several reasons. First: it's in the nature of boardgames that the location of every piece in the game is well-defined. It's in the nature of tabletop games that it's not. This is the old measurement problem, and every tabletop gamer will have their stories about 'creative' measurement. I like the fact that boardgames circumvent this completely.

Elegant functionality:
a beauty all its own

In addition, boardgames are typically deeper and more challenging games than tabletop games. I must qualify that statement with the recognition that this isn't necessarily true of tactical games, all the more so because simplicity seems to be increasingly the trend in some corners of both genres. By and large though the statement holds true, especially when you consider the vast range of operational and strategic level board wargames which, by definition, are beyond the scope of tabletop gaming as such.

Just a small selection...

Talking about "vast" ranges of board wargames brings me to another salient point: variety (check out this list of board wargames @Wiki to get an idea of what "vast" means in this context). Ringing the changes with your boardgaming experience is a relatively simple matter: you get your new game; prepare the counters and study the rules; get your willing opponent in front of you, and you're good to go. Tabletop games bring with them the added complications of all that painting, as well as finding opponents who've collected their own armies should you be interested in a game which is out of the mainstream.

Under a large shadow: roleplaying games

"The Shadow knows!"

It's been 2 years since I last played an RPG: during Keith Baker's 2009 visit as part of his ongoing Have Dice Will Travel world tour (also to be found on The Escapist Magazine: Live Bookmarks feed here). I wrote way back in May 2009 of my hopes that I'd get over my burnout following on from my Ashes of Middenheim campaign and get some more roleplaying going. Sadly, that one game with Keith aside, this just hasn't happened.

I'm soft & cuddly,
really!

Reasons for this are various, general lack of player interest in the Sunday group being primary. Also important though for yours truly is this "large shadow". Less the various problems associated with the aforementioned burnout, this is really a matter of the burden of the past. Let me explain. Regular readers might remember how I wrote last year about my friends' and my own intense engagement with our games and our PCs in our free and easy student days back in 80s. The outstanding result of this was a degree of emotional involvement with our PCs which enabled the GMs cruelly to manipulate us by pushing the psychological buttons we had so conveniently laid out before them. Oh how we loved it!

Gotta get inside your head

For me then, these peak gaming experiences mean that roleplaying is strongly associated with the particular psychological payoff you get when your identification with your character is so great that you are literally choking with emotion as you make an empassioned speech, or do something just plain stupid because it really is what your character would do when they'd been pushed to the extremes the GM has put them in (not to be confused with doing something stupid in, say, D&D because you're a party-fucking dipshit).

I may be the
Master of the Universe,
but I'm only human

Of course I was typically PCing back then. I was the GM during the Ashes of Middenheim, but I rarely felt that my players were giving me anything significant to work with in the terms I've described above. Honesty compels me to note that this could've had as much to do with my limitations as GM as anything else (and there were plenty of those on show). Only my players could really adjudicate on that and we never really got to discussing issues like these, neither during nor after the campaign.

So I'm left with this hankering for that special something which only roleplaying can offer: not just the form of playing a single character; but the content unique to that form, content which even the most satisfying boardgame victory can't deliver. Writing this I find myself wondering if our youth might've been the decisive factor in our willingness as players to step up the way I've described. I can't say for sure, but I hope not because this is an itch I really want to scratch.

And so?

Aging grognard
on the prowl

Giving up miniatures games has had no effect on my time because I've actually done so little associated with that hobby in recent years. I just no longer spend time poring over various Space Marine codexes dreaming about army lists. It's possible that I will return to miniature painting as a relaxing aside to other activities. I don't really know, but I certainly haven't given up the notion. Meanwhile, I'll be continuing recent efforts to play more of my collection of wargames (if you look at my boardgame collection over at BGG you'll see that there are many wargames there which have few or no plays). In any event dear readers, don't expect any more Penumbra's Talons battle reports or articles drooling over the latest Space Marine goodies from that old money-sucker GW.

Dig those
threads man!

As for roleplaying? Hopes of a return to the Warhammer Old World are still alive. More significantly perhaps, I'm considering investigating the Indie games scene. Regular readers might remember that I first met British indie publishers at Conpulsion 2010, and I met them again at UK Games Expo 2010. I've not yet had a chance to play any of the 3 games I bought at those events. Interestingly enough, one night some months ago I sparked Gav's (last seen leaving a hapless princess to her fate in a game of Descent) interest in Dogs in the Vineyard (a game which had conspicuously failed to interest anyone else). The rules rapidly captured his imagination in no uncertain terms and he spent the rest of the night reading them with mounting enthusiasm. Unfortunately this didn't translate into a playing opportunity.

"Do you feel happy punk?
Well, do you?"

Chances to play some indie games and find out if they're to my liking currenlty hinge on Glasgow Indie Gamers, a group I discovered on Facebook last year. I went to one of its early pub meetings last year, before the downswing kicked in bigtime. There was a healthy turnout of an interesting variety of people. The group is also frequented by the indie designers who live in Scotland. I guess it's time for me to shift my ass and turn up to another monthly meeting. The next one is Monday coming. Fingers crossed I guess. ;)

"Another fine mess..."

Woah, a tale of woe
Well, it was kind of a close run thing this time but here I am, back at the keyboard. There are several reasons why I almost succumbed to the urge just to disappear from the pages of RD/KA!. I'm just going to let them lie. I will however briefly explain why this particular bloglag was so long (at 9 months it's been the longest ever).

Sometimes people just won't own up...

It'll come as no surprise to my regular readers that a serious depression was to blame. Why so serious? Long story short: a home support worker who'd been visiting me for some 4 years took the huff with me one day and indulged in some unprofessional behaviour. The next time we met he manipulated me into withdrawing from the support service against my will. With hindsight I realised that saving his job was surely his primary motivation for being such a shit. We'd talked often of the difficult funding situation in his workplace and of how staff were worried about their jobs. So I think he feared a black mark if I was to ask for him to be replaced, which would've led to questions being asked about why I no longer wished to work with him (which I didn't, naturally enough).

At the time (just after RD/KA!'s 5th anniversary), I decided just to put the incident behind me. After all I reasoned, all the guy did was visit me for a couple of hours twice a week, when we'd mostly just talk, so what could happen? I was wrong. My mood was already wavering and within a couple of weeks it had taken a severe nosedive. Eventually I twigged that I'd been more psychologically dependent on the home support than I'd imagined, a supposition borne out by the subsequent length of the downswing.

And that's about that. I wish I hadn't let the guy off the hook, but it would've been an unpleasant experience to make a complaint which'd've been a matter of my word against his. And y'know, I believe that, deep down, he knows he was wrong. It won't get me back the last 9 months, but it's something I guess.

On a lighter note

It's not been all gloom and doom thank goodness. Sure, I missed this year's Conpulsion and UK Games Expo, so neither my Conflict of Heroes demo nor the Combat Commander tournament were repeated this year. Ah well, fingers crossed, they'll be back.

"A little bit of politics..."

These lowlights aside, the Sunday sessions- which stopped in February, were another significant casualty of my downswing. They too will be back sometime. There was a shedload of gaming nonetheless: I got through hundreds of games in those months; a playing record of which I'm strangely proud (I'm a gaming geek, go figure). I'll talk more about all that another day.

BoardGameGeek was another source of succour during those unhappy days. BGG community culture is not without its irritants (but then, I imagine that's true of any online community which otherwise serves your interests), but I like it for its game-specific forums, which allow me to focus my attention on subjects which particularly interest me; ie. my favourite games. I've also become a denizen of the Wargames forum. In fact, my increasing activity in these forums in recent weeks helped me recover my writing mojo to the point where only a couple of weeks ago I knew that my return to RD/KA! was just a matter of time.

Unfinished business
And so to the embarrassing matter of all those goodies about which I made such a hoo-hah before disappearing from view for so long. I will be sorting this out ASAP. More on that in due course. ;)