How can Death be an “easy” problem?

After the sad news of the death of Terry Pratchett this week, it seemed only right and proper to play a game based on his work. Miss B has read one of his novels, The Wee Free Men (one I haven’t yet read), and so has been introduced to the character of Tiffany Aching and the environs of Lancre, so was interested in playing The Witches, a game which features Tiffany and other trainee witches trying to deal with enough problems to keep their homes from descending into chaos.

Tiffany appears to have found something a bit scary in Lancre Caves, so decides that discretion is the better part of valour.

There are a number of interesting things about The Witches. One, which probably won’t surprise Discworld afficionados, is that all of the player controlled characters are female. It’s sad that this is worth remarking on, but this game is unique within my collection in this respect. Another is that, while there are bad guys to defeat, most of the challenges are mundane things like dealing with a farmer’s sick pig, or helping with a pregnancy. Also that you have to be really careful in using magical powers for fear of the cackles that lead you into darkness and becoming like Black Aliss, but take comfort that having a cup of tea with your fellow witches can help you keep the darkness at bay.

This is basically an adventure game where you wander about and deal with challenges around the board (which increase in number each turn if you aren’t quick in dealing with them), but designer Martin Wallace has done a lovely job in making the game feel like its source material. The detail is all neatly abstracted away, so to deal with a problem you just roll a couple of dice, then choose to either run away or play cards to help yourself, then roll a couple more dice to finish off. It’s really simple once you’ve done it once or twice (though I found it took a little while to explain everything before we started), and when you get going the game flows really well.

Miss B got the hang of the game right away and was soon off solving problems. This is one of those games where we naturally start building a narrative around our characters as the game develops. Miss B’s version of Tiffany Aching turned out to be a natural at comforting folk grieving for their deceased relatives, while my Petulia Gristle, in addition to being a dab hand at curing sick pigs, also had a real knack for fixing broken arms. And when you manage to get help from the older witches, particularly when you manage to get three of them at once (the unstoppable Power of Three) the results are really satisfying. B was frustrated for a while by the perception that I was getting more luck than her, but in the end, while I dealt with more problems overall, she managed to solve trickier ones and we ended up in a tie for points, broken by the fact that I had fewer cackle tokens and won by the slimmest of margins.

The general opinion in the gaming world seems to be that this is a bit disappointing as a game, being not very challenging. I’d say that it is no less challenging (in terms of strategy and skill) than most other adventure games I have tried, and out-charms just about anything. I like The Witches a great deal and hope to play it a lot more. It seems to me like a nice way to go about remembering the late Sir Terry.

The verdict from Miss B (aged nearly 8¼): “It was really good but I found it frustrating at times. It’s good fun. I think it was coincidence, but I was Tiffany Aching, who started with an invisibility tile and I was the only one who drew invisibility cards! I give it a 9 out of 10.”

The game: The Witches (Mayfair Games), 1 to 4 players aged 13+.

A ferrox! I can just defeat that!

Close on the heels of Rune Age, we have finally had a play of a game set in the same world, which I’ve been wanting to play for some time now: Runebound. This is a fantasy adventure game, where heroes wander the land fighting bad guys and trying to be the first to defeat the Big Bad. It is often spoken of in similar terms to Talisman, though it is clearly less on rails and attempts to introduce a narrative which develops through play.

Armed with a great bow and a dwarven fire mug, Red Scorpion fears nothing!

There is a good selection of characters to choose from and Miss B chose the all-rounder Red Scorpion, who seems to go into battle wearing a +1 bikini of somehow-not-freezing-to-death. The rules are pretty straightforward, using a novel dice system for movement around the map and dice-plus-modifiers versus a target number for combat and other skill checks. Miss B mostly got her head around this, but needed constant reminders of what was going on in combat. She was, however, getting really into the decisions of what type of attack to launch each combat round and clearly enjoyed all the dice rolling.

The real juice of the game happens when you move onto a space with an adventure token. You then draw a card of the appropriate colour (the adventures are colour coded according to difficulty so you can choose how much risk you want to take), which might be an interesting encounter, a world-affecting event, or a combat challenge which needs to be defeated (actually, you keep drawing and resolving cards until you reach a combat challenge). I rather like the event system as the cards do steadily develop a plot, making it feel that things are happening in a world that is heading towards a terrible cataclysm.

I knew Runebound was likely to take a long time to play, so we had ensured that we had the whole afternoon available, had taken a “shorter game” option which meant that our characters would gain experience more quickly (though next time we’ll go even further with this — and I think starting with more gold should help make for a quicker start), and we’d decided that we’d finish when someone gained one dragon rune, instead of the rulebook-mandated three (or the defeat of the boss). In the event it still took well over three hours and we only just managed to get things rounded off by dinner time.  Towards the end, Miss B got a bit of an injection of chutzpah and dove into the red (most difficult) adventure deck, which nearly ended up very badly.  But thanks to judicious use of her Rule 17b counters (if you don’t know about that, Google is your friend) she managed to get through and defeat a dragon to gain the first of the dragon runes, which we ruled to be a victory for her.

Given the length of the game, we scheduled a tea-and-snack break to allow us some time to recharge, but I was slightly surprised that this was the only break we needed (other than a few short toilet trips).  The game held Miss B’s attention throughout and, although there were a few moments of frustration due to bad die rolls, etc., some Rule 17b counters dealt with that and all went well overall.  I don’t think we’ll be playing this very often in the near future, purely because of the length of the game, but we definitely will when the time is available.

And in comparison with Talisman?  I’d definitely prefer Runebound.  I think Miss B is torn, though likes the characters in Runebound more.

The verdict from Miss B (aged 6¼): “It was quite scary when I just did one purple card and then went straight on to the red. Green is the easiest level, yellow is next, next is purple, and the winning cards are the reds. You need to collect three runes which are in the red cards but we only did one this time because we were running out of time. I really liked this game because you have different skills and everyone’s different and when I played it I was Red Scorpion. She’s called this because she’s red and she’s got a scorpion on her arm. And Red Scorpion can change a wound into an exhaustion once a turn.”

The game: Runebound (Fantasy Flight Games), 1 to 6 players aged 14+.

Diddley dum, diddley dum, diddley dum, diddley diddley…

A few weeks ago we had a visit from the cousins-in-law, or whatever they might be best described as, and they brought along a copy of Doctor Who: the Card Game as Miss B is starting to become something of a Who fan and the cousin-in-law (in-law?) actually runs the company that publishes the game. So, in the interests of propriety, I should now declare a possible conflict of interest: we got a free copy and the publisher is family. Make of that what you will.

I know that look: it’s someone who has a jammy dodger, or some similar card of excellence.

Actually, I must admit I was a little nervous of this game as it has received very mixed reviews. But we set up a four player game (though in this case, Miss B and I acted together as a single player) and off we went.

The mechanics of the game are very simple, but a bit weird as you play cards from your hand until you have three left, then pass these last three to your right. All a bit odd, but it means sometimes you end up trying to make sure that you don’t pass anything too good to the player sitting next to you. Each player controls both bad guys (enemies) and goodies (defenders) and the idea is to have control, by whichever means, of location cards which give you victory points at game end. I think this arrangement might disconnect some people from the theme, but we actually had a lot of fun with it. Miss B loved spouting trivia about various monsters that she had read about in her Doctor Who annual.

We have now played a second time, this time with three players and Miss B taking part in her own right. There are quite a lot of cards to play through, so we set the game length to be a little shorter by putting the end of game card higher in the deck than usual. The game played really smoothly and had some nice ebb and flow of play until, in the closing phase of play Miss B suddenly started attacking all over the place and ended up with a nice victory.

Unfortunately this game requires three players, which means it’s likely to not get as much play as we’d like. That said, I have an idea for how to play with two, so I think we’ll give that a go some time soon. Plus S quite likes the game, so three player games may happen from time to time.

The verdict from Miss B (aged 6): “It was cool how you could play two monsters on the same thing because if there’s one defender there, there’s a good chance the enemies could defeat them. I liked it and I really want to play it again so it’ll be one of the top ones on the game chart. This was my first time on my own but I won because in the last round I got the Weeping Angels and the Beast and I played both the Angels and the Beast on Daddy and he got no points for the ones I attacked because the defenders were too weak for the monsters. I thought that was really cool.”

The game: Doctor Who The Card Game (Cubicle 7), 3 to 4 players aged 13+.