Ticket to Ride: The Sade Express

One of my favorite destination tickets in Ticket to Ride is Los Angeles to Chicago, also known as the Sade Express. Ever since I first heard the Sade classic song “Smooth Operator” the lyric “coast to coast/LA to Chicago” has stuck out to me for the simple fact that it makes no sense. LA to Chicago is not going coast to coast. I suppose that Chicago is a coastal city but invoking LA and traveling to the other coast really conjures up an east to west continental journey. While the lyric may be silly, the route is certainly a winner. A favorite of mine, that Sade Express.

What makes it a good ticket? Well, it’s worth sixteen points which makes it one of the more valuable tickets in the game. There are certainly tickets worth more than that, but I think that the Sade Express might be better than all of them because of the fact that you don’t have to enter into the labyrinth of small, time wasting connections that begin once you head east of the Windy City. The only tricky thing about the route can be getting out of Los Angeles, which can frequently get clogged up early in the game. Aside from exiting LA there are a myriad of ways to get from one way to another, and it is also possible to pass very close to many of the other major cities in the game and have a multitude of tickets contained within the Chicago to Los Angeles route. I’d like to think that Sade knew all of this when she penned Smooth Operator.

DM Theory: Planning Too Much?

Running a successful, long term gaming campaign is a lot of work, and there is no guarantee that it is going to be worth it in the end. I’ve seen many games that lasted less time than a goblin in padded armor. So, what can you do to make your game fun and lasting? Well, there are a near infinite amount of ways to approach gaming but I can’t talk about all of them here. One that I would like to comment on is the amount of preparation that goes into a single session and into the ongoing campaign. Contrary to popular opinion it is possible to plan too much for a game, sometimes to the detriment of all involved.

If you are (un)fortunate enough to be the GM, DM, Keeper or whatever for your group there is no need to burden yourself with additional planning and long term masterminding that may never come to pass, or even worse, be forced upon the group of players. In my experience one of the worst things that a game master can do is to plan too far in advance, have the whole arc of the campaign scripted out before the first dice are rolled. It’s important to realize that the Game Master is just one half of the equation, with the players comprising the more volatile, explosive part of the game and the GM providing the framework that it can all exist inside of. It has to be a collaborative effort or it’s going to fall short. A couple of years back I was running a D&D campaign and when I was putting together my initial thoughts on the story I had in mind a plot involving the poisoning of the land by a clan of evil blighter type druids. Ultimately I assumed that the players would battle the druids and find their way to a mystical isle of legend where they could find the cure for the blighting that would be tearing through the land. I had some plot hooks that would interest all of the PC’s, but the PC druid was going to sort of be the driving force as to why they were getting involved in all of this. Well, guess what? The druid totally sucked as a character (she was fun and everyone liked her, but grossly ineffective) and wound up getting killed halfway through the campaign. But even before that I was able to adjust where the game was going by letting the players steer the course and in the end we had what may have been the best long term game that the group had experienced. It was a ton of fun. However, if I had spent a month writing up NPC’s, drawing maps and creating monsters I think that I would have been much more hesitant to scrap it. And this allowed me to adjust to what they did want to do, rather than just going along with what I had planned.

Another thing that is worth mentioning is that sourcebooks are there to help you. Honestly I’ve never been a big fan of the D&D books for specific locales (Greyhawk being the major exception) but the Shadowrun ones are great, as are a lot of other games. Use them, make it easy on yourself. Especially if you are new to running a game, piggyback on what others have done before you and play around and see what you and your group are most into. No need to reinvent the wheel.

It’s also very useful to have some key plot points or NPC’s that can be used in any location, that is to say that they are not tied to a certain inn or an event that will only happen if the party decides on a certain course. For example, the party is looking for a piece of information while investigating the disappearance of a college professor. You know that the info that they need is inside the head of a colleague of the professor’s. Now maybe that guy is usually hanging out at a certain watering hole, but he doesn’t have to be. Guess where he is going to pop up? That’s right, wherever the PC’s wind up. That seems simple, but look at it from the player’s standpoint. You have not railroaded them anywhere, they have been free to check out a whole bunch of places and ask around for this guy, which is good. Players don’t want to be told where to go. But in the end they find what they have been looking for and also get explore the location a bit. And you’ve really just created one NPC (of course, you are going to need to be able to adlib your way through some social encounters. If you can’t do this, you may be in the wrong line of work.)

In the end nothing is more important than understanding the group that you play with, and it takes time to breed that familiarity. But I know that I like to game every week and I don’t always have 10+ hours to set aside for preparation so I’ve learned to get by on less and less prep time. And some of the best sessions we’ve every had came as a result of having virtually nothing planned (don’t tell the players that) because it becomes a real group effort with everyone contributing to the action.

Castle Panic review

Building your castle right in the middle of the forest was probably not the smartest idea, so you shouldn’t be all that surprised that monsters are coming out of the woods to tear it down. Such is the dilemma of Castle Panic, from Fireside Games. Castle Panic is a cooperative game in which the players must defend their castle from hordes of goblins, orcs and trolls. The monstrous horde reigns victorious if they are able to destroy the castle, the players are triumphant if they defeat the entire gang of monsters laying in wait. Castle Panic is for one to six players and takes about 45 minutes. I think that it's a fun game and a great introduction to cooperative board games due to it's simplicity, but ultimately it lacks the depth and strategy that would allow it to be a great game. 

The castle consists of six towers in the middle of the board surrounded by six walls that help to defend it. Working from the inside out the castle is surrounded by several colored rings; swordsmen, knights, archers and the forest. Monsters in the forest are in wait and can’t be attacked until they emerge, monsters in the other rings can be attacked by the appropriate soldier. Example: a troll that has moved into the Knight ring in the green section can be attacked by a Green Knight card. Monsters are randomly placed in the forest when they come into the game and on each turn they move one step closer to the castle, ultimately destroying the walls and moving onto the towers. There are 49 monster tokens in the beginning of the game and the players have to defeat them all in order to achieve victory. The game sort of works as a puzzle as the players attempt to piece together the best offense by anticipating where monsters will wind up on a given player’s turn.

Each turn the players have a chance to trade cards with one another, and if the game has a key strategy it is trading cards between castle defenders. The strategy is simple to grasp and, unfortunately, does not get much more complex which does not bode well for repeated plays of Castle Panic. Most of the moves are self evident. If there is a goblin in the Red Archer zone and one of the other players has a Red Archer, you should trade for it. You can only trade once per turn so it is important to prioritize and make sure that the trade you make is the best one available. Aside from that you should just kill anything that you can reach.

The oddest thing about Castle Panic is the Master Slayer. When a player defeats a monster they claim it’s monster token and at the end of the game players total these up and the one with the most points is given the title of Master Slayer. So, everyone wins but one player wins more than the others? That seems real weird to me and does not mesh all that well with the team dynamic. I suspect that the designers probably added this to increase the competition in what is generally a pretty easy game. But I’m not so sure about it.

The game components are simple and do the job. There is not much to the game. Castle Panic consists of some towers, some walls, monster tokens and a deck of cards. The art is just okay. I would like to have seen some variation amongst the creatures that are attacking. The orcs all look the same as one another, they must have some real military discipline going in on those woods to get the traditionally chaotic creatures to all agree to the same uniform. I do like the Boss monsters that lead the others. The best components are the actual walls and towers. They are on little stands and lend some depth to the board. They fall into the unnecessary but enhances the game category. The board is sort of bland and the one I have is a little crinkled around the edges. I would like to have seen maybe some enemy encampments, siege engines, or really anything else put on the board just as a meaningless detail. As it is it is just a big field with circles on it.

I think that the biggest issue I have with Castle Panic is that it seems to be pretty easy. Actually, it seems to be real easy. I’ve played the game about a half dozen times now and only once did I actually feel panicked, which I sort of assumed to be the signature emotion of the game. A cooperative game needs to be hard. It is one of the reasons why Pandemic is such a success, most of the time you are probably not going to win. It’s creates tension and drama and a nice feeling of accomplishment when you finally succeed. Same thing with Shadows Over Camelot. There are suggestions in the instructions about making the game harder, the most difficult of which is the version in which the castle starts with no walls, just the towers to defend. It was close, but we were able to defeat that one as well and I’m just not sure where we take the game from here. I’m not sure how much our game group will continue to go back to this game since we will keep winning. I don’t need the ego boost that comes with continued winning, I’d prefer the challenge that makes a great game.

The Game of Real Life

I was given the Game of Real Life by a friend, who had it given to them by someone else. Other than Hot Potato a game should not be passed around this much, so I was a bit leery about this game from the start. The Game of Real Life is a more realistic approach to the Game of Life, the classic game of happy endings. Apparently real life is filled with nothing but drugs, prostitution, early death and pain. I suppose that’s not entirely false and actually makes a decent premise for a game. Honestly though the game is not much more than a “roll the dice, move your mice” with some colorful details and some options along the way. But, like real life, much of the decision making is really out of the player’s hand. The game is for two to six players and should not take more than a half hour, considerably less if a couple players meet unfortunate endings. Which they probably will.

The best part of the game is the diary. All the players are given a diary sheet to keep track of their life events. It’s nothing all that special, but I like that the game creators wanted to put some sort of element into it that gives it some life. It’s nice to be more than just the sum result of some dice rolling and a score at the end. The problem is that you think that the diary will be a nice, flowing narrative of your character’s life when it is actually just a bunch of short sentences summarizing what happened to you. The game turn is very quick (just roll and read) so it does not leave you with much time to create flowery prose.

The object of the game is to be the player who has the most happy faces at the end of the game. Living for a long time helps because it allows you more time to collect happiness, but it is possible to win even if you die early if those are some real happiness filled years of youth. Happy faces are gained by all sorts of activities; marriage and kids, vacations, and many other things such as your own pizza, catching leaves on a fall day and seeing a unicorn in the forest. Strangely, the single biggest happiness provider in the game is found on the heroin chart. Granted, some of the other heroin uses create disastrous situations, so it’s not always a happy ending. It’s really not a happy ending in most situations. Cris, Mike and I played the other night. Mike was a drug addict witness to an infant having their throat slit, Cris was a prostitute that died in World War III and I perished in a nightmare of a nursing home. At least I made it to old age, not bad for someone who was disowned by their family, shot in a drive by and had some bad experiences with LSD.

The board itself is a blur of lines, small type, colors and some drawings. It is very confusing and the fact that the print is so tiny and facing off in all directions makes it very hard for the player to read what is going on. What space am I on? Can you read that for me? And the game pieces are rocks. Actual rocks. I suppose they are little bit glossy actually. I don’t mind the low-tech approach to the game, but the design of the board could have been a lot better. It’s not just that it does not add a ton to the game, but I would say that it actually detracts since it slows things down as you try to figure out the space that your rock just landed on. And the spaces are very little. Also, maybe we had too much wine when we were getting started but it took us several minutes just to locate the starting point on the board. Not a great sign.

The Game of Real Life is fine if someone wants to give it to you, but I’m not sure that I would recommend buying it. If you are used to Life and Monopoly than it will probably be exciting and funny and perhaps an impetus to look further into the world of board games, which is a great thing. I’m not saying that I will never play it again, but it is not at the top of the list.

Sage Advice: An Archive of Bizarre Questions and Answers

In my formative role playing years I was a big fan of Dragon magazine. What I liked best about it were the insights into the games of other players. I really enjoyed the letters column and Sage Advice, where gamers would write in and ask questions of the gurus at TSR. Most of the time they could easily be answered by anyone who actually owned any of the books for D&D, but other times they were totally off the wall and represented, what I felt was, the real way that people play the game. Fortunately for all of us someone has taken it upon themselves to post years worth of Sage Advice and put it out there for all to read. Thank god for the internet.

This glorious page can be found here:
http://jgrimbert.free.fr/add2/advice/?order=id&debut=0

I’ve spent some time reading through it and I am happy to say that it is as entertaining as I remember. Some of my favorites include the following questions: “We are having an argument over an issue that has us divided. My friends say that with a ring of telekinesis they can make an arrow spin at the speed of light and then release it, having it do between 100 and 600 points of damage to their target. I say this is impossible! What do you think?” The Sage answer sides with the questioner, in case you were wondering it is not possible to do such a thing. Apparently the arrow would disintegrate if it was to spin that fast. Hmm.

Another: “What is the difference between chain mail and plate mail armor?” What kind of a question is that? There are dozens of books that describe both of them in detail. No one at this gaming table was able to answer this question? They had to write to a magazine? I love it.

Some more: “Will a monster join a character party if invited?” There are a lot of these subjective questions going on as well. Some of the others include “Is my character dead”, “What is behind the secret door” and “Is the sword I found magical”. The Sage Advice guy was a lot kinder with these questions than I would have been.

This also got me thinking about some of the questions that my game of 13 year olds would have asked back in the early 90’s. One of them would definitely have been, “Is a wish spell capable of giving the character an army of water breathing minotaurs? And, if so, what needs to be done to insure their loyalty? Is the promise of pillaging enough?” That was big in our game. Very important. I’ve also always wondered about “How many ballistas can fit onto the deck of the boat that my party stole at the end of the Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh?” If you are a player of a certain age the answer to just about any question should be yes. It just makes sense to try to do everything. And, in a way, it’s easy for the DM because they all lead to murder and treasure.

There is something inherently strange about asking questions about D&D, since there are specific rules for the game and the DM’s word is law for anything not covered under those rules. But at the same time I am so glad that people ask these questions.

Prime Runners: Shadowrun 2nd Edition

Lately I’ve been pretty obsessed with second edition Shadowrun. There are just so many things about the world and the game that I really like, as a result I’ve been buying up pretty much every second edition book that I can get my hands on. Some are replacements for ones that I had a teenager (that have all gone to some sort of abyss of old role playing material, my contribution to this netherworld is substantial) and others are new to me entirely. One of the best parts of this is that not many people seem to be playing second edition these days so the books usually cost more in shipping than to actually buy them. The point is that I have been reading a ton of these things lately and, while many of them are excellent, the one that most stands out to me is Prime Runners.

Prime Runners is a sourcebook, but it is not location specific. It is essentially a book of NPC’s of all types. When I purchased it I had assumed that it would just be page after page of elite runners, which seems pretty cool to me. I like reading about badass futuristic mercenaries. But it is actually way better than that and gives such an interesting view into what makes the Sixth World really tick. There are runners contained in it’s pages, but there are also talismongers, journalists, fixers, writers, athletes, and pretty much anything else that you can come up with. To see how a world really lives and breathes it would be not all that useful to just see the runners that operate in it’s seedy underbelly. But to see how many powerful people in the world interact with and use this seedy underbelly is something else altogether. How did that fixer with the suitcase nukes get to be that guy? Why has that journalist been able to survive and thrive in the most dangerous places in the world? It’s all in there chummer.

Like all the Shadowrun sourcebooks, Prime Runners is presented as the work of someone else. In this case two runners who decided to compile a directory of people that other runners would need to know. Good concept. And like other books it is filled with comments from others who have read and commented on the entries. I love that. Usually the comments present various opinions on the person in question and bring up rumors about them as well. Aside from that all the entries have the character’s motivations, history (or what is known of it) and hooks to get the players involved with them. It is well written, smart, interesting and funny. If you can’t get something out of this as a GM then you should probably retire your dice.

One other thing that I really liked about the book was that it showed what a really tough character looks like. Since Shadowrun does not have a level system for characters it is sometimes difficult to know exactly when someone is very powerful, so much of it depends on the particular situation that they are in. And the location sourcebooks rarely have the stats of actual characters in them, that just seems to be how they are. But this books peels back the curtain and shows you how a real wiz runner scans. Take for example Teachdaire, the elven assassin. This guy is no joke. Skills as high as 13, all custom delta-level cyberware and rating six hydraulic leg jacks. Okay, the leg jacks are weird but I would not tell him that. But that is what elite level looks like. Two things really stuck out at me as I read his entry. One, in a standup fight he is virtually invincible. Super fast, skilled and deadly. And two, that with a good plan he can be killed with one shot just like everyone else. And that’s what makes Shadowrun so cool. At least one of the things.

Another runner I would not cross is the combat mage Sukie Redflower. She is totally absurd, both in attitude and ability. But the book is filled with compelling characters. As I was reading through it I was thinking with each entry how I would fit that NPC into our campaign, and it wasn’t stretch for any of them. When I finished the book I had a year’s worth of adventures planned. Isn’t that what a good sourcebook should do?

Ranking the Pandemic Roles

Pandemic is a tough game. In addition to the horrendous surge of disease that is plaguing the world, there are also the questionable hiring practices of the CDC. Sure, some of the staff I understand, but others I really wonder about. How did they get a job with an organization that seems responsible for saving the world? And wouldn’t the CDC just send out the people best suited for the task? Maybe they were on vacation and no one could get a hold of them. However, the variable roles in the game are also one of the best aspects of the game so I’ve decided to rank all of the roles, including the ones that are introduced in the On The Brink expansion. Unlike the characters in Last Night on Earth none of the roles are wretched, they all have some use. Though the gap between the best and worst is still pretty large.

Dispatcher- In my eyes the unquestioned number one in the game. One of the most important tactics in Pandemic is to be able to trade cards between players and no one makes this easier to do than the Dispatcher. The ability to dispatch any player to another player makes so many things possible when it comes to trading cards. And on top of that they can also move other players around with their own actions, usually setting people up to be in a good position when they start their turn. Any group with a Dispatcher gets a big leg up when it comes to winning. Ideally the Dispatcher never even leaves the greater Atlanta region. The only downside is that the Dispatcher can be hard to use, often requiring the player to think a couple of turns ahead. Which I actually consider to be pretty fun.

Medic- The medic will not help you win the game in the curing sense, but no role is as productive when it comes to keeping the world safe. Being able to clear off all the infection markers with a single action is really strong, assuming that you can get them to the trouble spot. Once a cure is found they can also wipe out all the cubes without spending an action, making them the perfect partner for the Dispatcher to run them through an infected region and clean the whole mess up.

Researcher- Who doesn’t like the Researcher, the most giving of all CDC employees? Seriously, the Santa Claus of Pandemic is a welcome addition to any crew. For one action per card this lady (I think it’s a lady) can give city cards to other players as long as they are in the same place. One of the best tactics is to give away their initial cards on the first turn when everyone is in Atlanta, it’s a good way to get some direction early and maybe snuff out a color in the first two rounds if the cards cooperate a little bit.

Scientist- The object of the game is curing diseases and the Scientist does it better than anyone else. Needing only four cards (instead of five) makes them the ideal candidate to get the job down. However, they still need to get those cards and possess no ability to help with that. The Researcher, Dispatcher and Scientist make an awesome combo should you be so lucky to get them all together.

Field Operative- My favorite of the expansion Roles, the Field Operative has a cool mechanic that makes them very useful in finding cures. Once a turn when they remove cubes from a city they can put one of the cubes on their card. When they have collected three cubes of the same color they can then cure that color for only three cards. Awesome. I like this for a couple of reasons. Obviously it’s pretty powerful, it just takes a bit to develop. But I also like that it makes sense. This guy is out there collecting samples and then can use that evidence to find a cure. Though I am a bit concerned about their haircut, it looks like blonde noodles springing forth from their head.

Troubleshooter- The best preventative role in the game, whatever that means. The Troubleshooter works best in a game with four or five players when they can play the role of freelance operative, flying around and preventing outbreaks. The ability to peek at the upcoming infections is really handy, but if that is all they are doing they are nothing more than middle of the pack. The secondary ability of not discarding city cards to fly there is also useful, especially when it comes to trading since they can fly to a city that they have a card of. Makes it easier to trade.

Containment Specialist- Ultra specialized character that can be very helpful, though at times it’s power will go unused for long stretches. Perhaps the best character at preventing those horrid chain outbreaks, you just need to make sure that he is in the right location to take advantage of his unique skill set. Another character that works well with the Dispatcher, though really everyone does.

Generalist- That’s not a real job. How did they get hired? I wonder if the position was posted as Generalist on a government job site. “We are looking for someone who doesn’t do anything all that well but it useful to have around.” Each turn they get an extra action. It is what it is. Some turns it is very useful, other times it won’t make that much of a difference. About as average a character that you can be. And what it she holding in her hand? Is it for injections?

Epidemiologist- The ability to trade cards easier is very good, but the Epidemiologist gets the short end of the stick as far as this ability is concerned. The issue is that it is capped at being usable once per turn, which is okay but definitely inferior to the Researcher. Also, being able to give cards seems to help more than being able to take cards from players (which is what the Epidemiologist does). This is one of the roles that I’ve just never seen be all that useful during the actual course of the game. Additionally the fact that the woman’s face appears to be melting makes me nervous.

Operations Expert- It’s not so much that the Operations Expert is bad, being able to easily build stations is actually really nice, but the problem is that he becomes quickly obsolete. Once they build a couple of stations they can’t really do all that much. If you happen to have the New Assignment special event it works great here; build some stations and then bring in someone who can still do their thing. The added ability to discard any card at a station to fly somewhere is nothing all that great, but at least it let’s you put a station anywhere that you want. Oh yeah, it’s the On the Brink version that we are discussing here. The original killed himself in shame.

Archivist- Weak. A hand limit of eight cards instead of seven is okay, but it really doesn’t stack up to just about any other power in the game. The more useful ability is the one that allows the Archivist to bring a city card back from the dead, but it’s really an ability that takes a lot to make it work. Chances are it is something that you will want to use during the end of the game when you need a certain color. In order to yield some results the Archivist has to get to the correct city, get the card and then get it to the appropriate player (assuming it is not the Archivist) and give it to them (or more likely have the player come to them and take it). That’s a lot of work in a very time sensitive game.