Boss Monster game review

Sometimes I impulsively buy games purely on the packaging. Boss Monster is one of those games. I saw what looked like an old school 8 bit video game box and I couldn’t resist. It just went *bloop bloop bloop* into my buying pile. Let me tell you I am 8 bits of happy to have this game.

In Boss Monster you play as the Boss Monster of a dungeon from the old school side-scrolling games. You build up your dungeon in order to attract heroes to defeat. This would be easy if you weren’t competing with other players to achieve your goal.

The game seems a little complicated right out of the box. There are three card deck slots for the 5 decks. (Rooms, Spells, Heroes, Epic Heroes, Bosses) so setting up the game might be confusing if you have a friend who just grabs a stack of cards and starts shuffling.

To start each player is given a Boss Monster. This card will be who you are for the round. Your Boss Monster will have an XP rating; the highest XP rating has priority in play. The card will also have a level up ability. Once during the game when you have a five room dungeon the level up ability activates. Typically the lower the XP for the monster the more powerful the level up ability: bringing balance to these characters. Your Boss Monster will also have a treasure type.

Now the goal is to build the best dungeon to attract and defeat heroes. For that you need rooms. There are 2 types of rooms, Monster and Trap. These are built out from your Boss Monster to a maximum of 5 rooms. Each of these rooms has a damage value (for defeating heroes) as well as special abilities and treasure types. Advanced rooms can only be placed on top of existing rooms of the same type and treasure.

Spells will help you out during the game. Some, marked with a hammer, can be played during the room building phase and others (marked with an axe) can be played during the hero combat phase.

Finally there are the heroes. Heroes are attracted by one of the four specific treasure types. Whoever has the most of that treasure type attracts the heroes. If the health of the hero is lower than the damage you deal you defeat the hero and collect a soul but if the hero survives your dungeon you take a wound. You are eliminated if you take 5 wounds and you win if you collect 10 souls. Epic heroes have more health. They deal two wounds or award two souls. If players are tied for most treasure the hero stays in town until the tie is broken.

I like this game because it plays differently from most games. Most of the activities are performed as a group. Players reveal their next room together, they calculate their treasure totals together and attract heroes based on that. The game is great for strategy. Planning on which heroes to attract and when is very important. Sometimes ensuring ties prevents wounds. Sometimes breaking ties can cause a number of defeatable heroes to come to your dungeon.

The game becomes rather quick once you know how to play: roughly 20 minutes or less per game. I like this because it allows a player to play multiple Boss Monsters and try many room combinations in a single night.

The cards are a lot of fun to read. Each card is a tribute to old school gaming or pop culture references and are full of humour. Whether it’s the boss Cerebellus the brain or the Monster’s Ballroom you will have a laugh. I also recommend reading the hero cards, they are brilliantly titled and the quotes are great for a giggle (Bodon the Pantless.)

The downsides to the game mostly come from the rule book. It could have used more work and there are quite a few rules that need more clarification. It turns out our group was playing wrong in that we combined advanced rooms with the basic rooms when calculating damage and effects. (When rooms stack only the top room counts.) I also found that there isn’t much in the way of mechanics for gaining spell cards. This limits the number of spells you get to try out.

To sum up Boss Monster is an extremely fun game that is full of nostalgic gamer humour. While the rule book needs the dust blown out of its cartridge the game is still well designed and a blast to play. I would recommend this game if you ever enjoyed 8-bit gaming or if you just really want to be the big bad Boss Monster for once. This game is great for up to four players on the nerdy/game side. It won’t be as fun for grandma but for any child of the 80s or 90s it will be great way to level up game night.

Life update

I figured I should talk to you readers about my current issues with posting regularly. Being an adult really sucks for me lately. Responsibility has really been piling up.

For those of you who don’t know I made the decision to go back to school. I had expressed some dissatisfaction with my job to my manager in the fall. Being 35 and having the same job title as Beaker from the Muppets was getting me down. She was extremely supportive and directed me to a course I could take to advance in the lab. She even helped me secure funding to be reimbursed for the course if I complete it.

I’m less than a month from completing the course and I’m more than a little stressed. The work is getting steadily more difficult and intense. At least it’s also getting more fascinating. By the end of the course I will be a certified tissue specialist. Meaning I will be recovering and processing human tissue for transplant: a considerable step up from lab assistant.

Now I’m working full time, going to school, working on our new home, on top of the usual other family commitments. Some things are falling through the cracks. Right now school and work are my biggest priorities so I apologize if I don’t post as often in the next while.

The course ends on May 25^th so I should be gold after that. I took that week off of work so I can go all hermit at home with my studies and really hit the books for the big final exam.

You know what really sucks about this? I had to miss out on the Calgary Expo last weekend. My Facebook feed is full of friends posting about it. I keep seeing them with Bruce Campbell, The Doctor (Matt Smith) and Amy Pond, the cast of Aliens, Alfonso Riberio, Danny Glover, and the Highlander Adrian Paul. At least staying home means I didn’t spend my money... or the banks money. And I worked on Ocular transplant stuff so I kept it nerdy and interesting. The wife… she really wanted to go too. But she has some plague and is a total snot machine. So I guess it worked out for the best... sorta kinda...

Ah well, there’s always Edmonton Expo in the fall. I really hope Sigourney Weaver comes to that. She’s one of my big celebrity crushes; same with Karen Gillian (Amy Pond.) Matt Smith would be cool but Tom Baker is my Doctor.

Well, I'm working on a few board game reviews but nothing is quite done yet. Hopefully I will have one up soon.

Thanks for your patience and once again sorry for my lack of updates!

The new Game Room

The wife and I bought a new townhouse recently. Now that we are mostly settled we decided to set up a game room in the basement. I’m really in love with the space but we haven’t had anyone over for game night yet.

To start off we had two bookshelves in the old apartment to store our games. They are a little full so we are looking for some more. Mostly for my RPG books to go down into the game room but some of the game boxes are too large so we need somewhere to better store them.

We wanted a new table for down there and asked at John at Mission Fun and Games where to get one. He went into their storage room and brought out some table toppers. We liked the one but I was on the fence about it. He offered us a deal and when I mentioned we would need to get a table he ran back into storage to bring out a round pedestal table. Turns out some were left over from when the building was a restaurant so he threw that in for free. I couldn’t resist the deal. I think he was happier than us because it’s out of his way in the storage area.

My sister is big into Kajiji shopping and she let us know about some chairs being sold for cheap: $60 for ten. We called only to discover we had sat in those chairs at our wedding. The hotel was selling off the old chairs because they were getting new ones in their renovation. Chairs elsewhere were $60 each so now we have an old school looking room.

It all fits in because the room has an outlet and phone jack every couple of feet: 13 in total. We think it was used as a call center. There was a debate on whether we should run a 1-900 number out of there to earn back money but my wife was a little against that. I’m happy with a game room.

My mom is big into knick knacks and has bought me a few over the years. So of course I put them up in the game room. The bear and buffalo heads are from her, as are the monkey clock and the African mask. I snagged the green man from my grandparent’s cabin when they sold it. The Kit Rae dagger was a collectible I bought. The light sabres my wife’s sister and husband bought us as a wedding present will be going in there somehow.

We added in our old microwave on a stand in the basement. We will be filling the stand with snack food to make game night easier. We have a small chest freezer and a wine fridge in the basement too so that makes for a lazier snack run. I’m wanting another beer fridge for right in the room but the budget is way to tight to get that any time soon.

Finally there is a washroom in the basement. It’s a toilet and sink in the ugliest colour scheme ever. Someday we will update it. I think my wife has that renovation higher on the “to budget for” list than the beer fridge. The old owner left room deodorizing spray cans in every room of the house. I moved them all down to the basement bathroom after my brother designated it his pooping bathroom. I also threw in some bathroom reading: Dilbert and the Big Book of Being Rude.

What I really want to get is a video game cabinet for down there. I know of one local supplier called Retroactive Arcade that I keep looking at. Again the budget it not really open to that yet. Maybe if my lottery investment ever pays off.

Hopefully we can kick off a routine game night session sometime in the near future.  We actually haven't used the room yet. School and work are holding us back right now but my schedule will clear up before summer. I can work on my nerd tan down there.

Battleship board game review.

My brother and I spent many an afternoon playing battleship in the basement. My parents even got us the electronic battleship. It’s still in their basement somewhere. The memory will no reset so it still has a game from the late 80s stored forever. I like to think that a piece of our childhood will live on forever and someday long after the machines have taken over they will pull up the memory. They will see my military genius and seek to clone the master of the electronic battleship.

Okay that will never happen. Battleship is a very light strategy game of guess where the ships are. Two players place their ships on a board the other player cannot see in the first part of the game. The second part of the game has the players alternately calling out coordinates as shots. If it hits a ship you call hit, if it misses you call miss. The whole point of the game is to sink the other player’s fleet.

The game actually plays very slowly and has little to do with actual naval warfare. The ships do not move, unless you are my brother then you cheat like crazy and we fight until dad gets home. The alternating blind guessing gets very tiresome after a while and then the game goes back into dust collection mode.

I do harbour a lot of nostalgia for battleship as I actually had fun playing it with my brother, especially the fighting over it. It’s a game I am willing to play only very occasionally. It just gets very dull very quickly.

I have no idea why there was a movie made after this game. I actually would prefer watching people play the game than watch that terrible movie.

To sum up Battleship is a mediocre game. I would only recommend this to those with nostalgia for the game or for parents who would like another source of conflict for their children. It will keep them busy up until they tire of the game and begin to argue over it.

Red Dragon Inn Allies game review

Yet another Red Dragon Inn post from me. This time it’s on all of the single character expansions called Allies. I find these expansions fun and interesting. They are great if you only need one or two more characters for your game group to play. Since the characters fit with the base game rules there’s no need to go over those again so I will jump right into the characters.

First off is my wife’s favourite: Pooky. For those familiar with Red Dragon Inn the resident wizard Zot has a familiar named Pooky. He’s a bunny with some insanity issues and now you can play him too. Pooky has an extra mechanic where his mood slowly descends into psychotic where he becomes very damaging to other players’ fortitude. He plays a lot like Kaylin from Red Dragon in 3 but Pooky’s mood fluctuates much more rapidly. Pooky is definitely a character for your table’s wild card player.

My favourite ally is Cormac the Mighty. A barbarian of great power and drunkenness and by Crom he reminds me of someone… He has a mechanic where certain cards have a rage icon. Once used these rage icon cards go into the rage pile instead of the discard pile. Cormac slowly builds his rage until the next rage marker turns. Each increase in rage increases the fortitude damage he deals. However it does increase the rate at which he gets drunk as well. His rage is a double edged sword, one he will use to crush his enemies, see them driven before him and hear the lamentation of their women!

Erin the Everchanging is an interesting ally. She is the resident shapeshifter. Depending on your stance in the game you can be an aggressively damaging bear, a gold loving raven, a sober tree or an elf. Knowing when to change and why is very important for her. Erin is a great character for the cunning strategist player.

The Witchdoctor Natyli is the last of the Allies out at this point. A witchdoctor with a bag of curses who just so happens to be Brewmaster Phrenk’s niece. A nice touch for those who really get into the role play Her cards are really funny for the subtle voodoo doll art. Her hexes are needles in the side: her mind hex ups the alcohol content of your next drink, her pain curse increases the damage of the next incoming attack and her most sinister mind hex decreases your next card value by one. The mind hex often completely nullifies some much needed cards. Natyli is great when you are working with her against another character. When she teams up against you she can be a real… witch… doctor.

Each of these characters does have a downside. Natyli is pretty underpowered, Cormac can get drunk under the table if he doesn’t build his rage fast enough, Pooky always seems to be a big target and Erin is a very basic wooden character (pun intended.) All of the characters require other players to constantly watch how they are played. Often players can forget to change a mood or form leaving themselves in a powerful position. Missing these required changes can really unbalance a game. New players will definitely be confused by these characters extra mechanics. The components of the boxes (namely the gold and player boards) are very different from the base game. Aesthetically this makes for an ugly mash-up but you can always use the components from RDI 1, 2, or 3 so it’s more of a nitpicky issue.

To sum up each of the characters has their pros and cons but for a collector of Red Dragon Inn or for a player who really likes the style of an ally these are great buys. Of course you do get more characters for your dollar with the other boxes of Red Dragon Inn. The Allies do not include drink decks so you will need to get the base game but being able to choose characters on player preference is a definite plus, I hope to see more allies in the future. As always I love Red Dragon Inn so I don’t think you can go wrong with this game or choosing your favourite Allies to play with.

Stratego game review

My brother and I loved strategy games growing up. The games fed into our sibling rivalry and our need to beat each other. Because of this we both developed a love/hate relationship with the game Stratego.

Stratego is a two player strategy game. Blue and red armies take to a field of battle. The genius mechanic is that you don’t know the strength of the enemy pieces. The armies are placed with all of the information facing their own player. The backs of the pieces are a uniform blank of their colour. This makes Stratego a capture the flag style game of deceit, bluffing, guesswork and memory.

Each moveable piece is given a value. Older games use 1 through 9 as well as S for spy. Newer versions use numbers 1 through 10. Units that cannot move are bombs and flags. The most powerful unit in the game is the Marshal which is a 1 in old games or a 10 in newer reprint versions. When units encounter each other the strongest unit wins and the weakest is removed from the board. If the units are of equal strength both are removed from the board. An exception to this is the bombs which kill anyone except the miner/sapper which defuses bombs. Another exception is the spy, which can kill the Marshal if the spy attacks first; he loses if the marshal attacks him.

The game is won when one player captures the other player’s flag.

Placement strategy is often what makes or breaks a game of Stratego. Often players place the flag in the back row surrounded by bombs for protection. Other strategies involve placing the flag in the bluff behind one of the lakes where the other player wouldn’t look for it. Most often inexperienced players will place their flag first then build a strategy around that giving away their flag position in setup.

Most of this game is played by mercilessly sacrificing weaker pieces in order to build an idea of the opponent’s placement, admittedly not the best lesson for children to learn. However what is great for children is learning to memorize piece placement from past encounters. The blind play is effective in levelling the play between novice and veteran players.

My brother and I developed a love/hate relationship with Stratego because the blind placement/fog of war feel makes the game interesting. This really increases the strategy of the game however the actual battle tactics of the game feel limited. After plating for a while the guess and go mechanic gets a little old. Analysis paralysis becomes a big issue when a player begins to second guess their position. Having said that I do enjoy an occasional game every once in a while.

To sum up Stratego can be a fun strategy game. While it does have some novel rules and mechanics the novelty can wear off after a while. I do like the game but there are much better strategy games out there. I recommend Stratego for players who want to be able to switch up their strategy game night on occasion. I also recommend Stratego for those willing to teach inexperienced strategy gamers as it is great for learning the value of unit placement.

I suck at chess.

I suck at chess. I freely admit it. As a board gamer I know it’s an interesting and complex game that I wish I could master but I don’t believe I ever will. There are just some problems with the game that are preventing me (and other people) from joining the ranks of the chess clubbers.

My first issue is the gap between levels of chess players. For me a game should allow for a novice player to have at least a slim chance of winning. In chess a novice player isn’t even a challenge to a veteran player. When I sit down to a game of chess with a good player I feel like I’m cheating that player out of a good time. After all there really is no challenge to playing against me. I always leave the table feeling like I shouldn’t have bothered showing up. After all I never know what moves to make.

This leads into the memorization of possible moves. Good chess players develop a repertoire of moves. Most importantly they develop opening moves and opening defenses. Pretty much every permutation or combination of moves has a name associated with it. Entire libraries of books exist on which moves are better and how to counter each move. It’s quite daunting to think about taking on a hobby with so much history and in depth study.

Of course finding a board is easy. Chess boards are sold everywhere, my favourite local game store has a large board out front for people to use. Boards range from cheap and simple to expensive and elaborate. You can get a board with pretty much any theme that you like. That is one of the things I like about chess. You can find a board to appeal to your whimsy.

Finding a player is another matter. I don’t know very many chess players, and those I meet are of a very different skill level than myself. If I found a chess player I had an even footing with I might actually try to play. This is probably the biggest reason I suck at chess, it’s hard to find an opponent willing to play.

Personally I love the concepts and design of the game, I wish I could be a decent chess player but it just isn’t happening for me. I don’t seem to have the time or the available opponents to become a good player. At least there are so many other board games and players out there.

Maybe someday I will be a chess grandmaster, or I will remain a humble board gamer. Either way I'm having fun at the table.