Some new things from the past few weeks.
Arboretum
I'm not sure where to begin with explaining this one. The rules aren't exactly tricky but it also keeps a constant tension of what cards you're keeping and what you're playing.
On your turn you take 2 cards, which can be drawn blindly from the main deck or from any player's discard pile; each has their own separate one and you must take the top (you can take two from the same). You then add 1 card to your own arboretum and discard 1 from your hand (these don't have to be the ones you've just drawn). The aim is to build various chains/sets of coloured trees in ascending order (there are cards 1-8 in ten different colours). The trick is that a chain can go in any orthogonal direction and starts and ends with the same colour. There are bonuses for starting with a 1 or ending with an 8 or whatever, and possibly a double bonus for all in the same colour (I forget).
The twist is that you'll only score for the chains if, at the end of the game, your unused hand contains the highest value of remaining cards of that colour. The other twist is that if anyone is holding a 1 it makes an 8 that someone else is holding worth 0 or 1 (also forgotten that). It means that all throughout the game you're trying to deduce which chains people might feel confident in or maybe you can trick them by discarding stuff they want or maybe DID HE JUST DISCARD A MOTHERFUCKING PURPLE 5 I WANT THAT
Our first game probably went as expected with us fumbling our way through. Long story, short, I held onto some 8s and 1s in a couple of colours just to fuck over the guy who bought it and the guy who was enjoying it, and then lost by a few points to the third player. So. Worth. It.
Oath of the Brotherhood
My regular gaming group fucking LOVES worker placement games. Which is fair enough, but I've always craved something with more of a twist on the basic mechanics (Argent, Dogs of War). Something a bit mroe involved, with a bit more interaction.
Oath of the Brotherhood actually brings some of that but it feels a little lacklustre in other areas.
You take on the role of pirates vying for a place in the prestigious brotherhood which is mainly done via completing quests, which involves placing your dudes down on spaces and collecting things to later turn in. The interesting twist is that you have these player boards on which you store this stuff that confer certain benefits. Get an equipment token (hook hand) and you could put it on the Pistol space which means that if anyone tries to place a dude next to yours in a space, you can rob them instead of it costing them toughness (needed for entering the same space as an opponent)... unless they put an equipment token on the sword and use their main captain pawn. There's all sorts of wrinkles with being able to get some "double-actions" with your captain pawn or shadowing another dude, or gaining a quick boost in toughness.
My particular favourite, however, was the gunpowder which allows you to clear out a space on the board (you know, for when some fuckers take the spaces you wanted). The trick is that many of these powerful little abilities requires discarding the token, which obviously sets you back if you needed them for quests. You have a bit of management of long-term goals and short-term gains. I think if people became familiar with the game there might be more jostling and use of even the passive abilities.
There are issues in that some of the way things work feels a little odd. Available missions reset each round so you can't really plan around anything unless you snatch up a bunch early on; the tavern where you can recruit followers never refills between rounds and some feel very circumstantial anyway; exploring and adding new spaces doesn't really benefit the player who performs this action beyond taking the first player token (unlike, say, building things in Lords of Waterdeep) and, if anything, makes it much easier for people to avoid conflict over other spaces altogether. For example, in Lords of Waterdeep it might still be tense trying to get 4 of one thing across 2 rounds in order to squeak out one final quest, but here I had about 4 spaces to get what I wanted and could even plan for 1 extra so I had a back-up plan of bombing the fuck out of any dudes who took my space.
It's still enjoyable enough though.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shadows of the Past
I'd been waiting for this game for so long (originally supposed to be a retail release in Jan '16, actually launched as a Kickstarter in Feb '16 and finally delivered to the UK in Jan '17) but it was definitely worth it.
TMNT usually disappoints when it comes to licensed games. The publisher wants to cash in on the new cartoon or the latest film or whatever so you end up with a rushed product (the last two video games showed a lot of promise but the lack of polish showed).
Anyway, this is a different story. Since the TMNT property got sold to Nickelodeon, IDW had been licensing it to create a really cool new comic series (I highly recommend it). A veteran game designer who had worked with their games division and was obviously a fan, approached them and said something along the lines of, "Get me the licence to make a TMNT board game and I'll give you a masterpiece".
This designer was Kevin Wilson, who worked at Fantasy Flight Games for a long time in its heyday and created the DOOM board game as well as the first edition of Descent (along with many other things any board gamer would be familiar with). So, if you've played either of those dungeon-crawl type games you might have an idea of what to expect... except you're not quite there.
Rather than taking that framework and just statting out ninja turtles so Raphael is the fighter, Michelangelo is the rogue, etc. he has created a much more dynamic system that is highly accessible and incredibly engaging.
Each turtle has their own stats, special moves and unique action dice that give them certain specialities -- Donatello has strong defence, Michelangelo is quick, etc.-- and they each roll their 3 action dice at the start of the round (Raphael actually has 6, but I'll get to that). The icons on these dice govern their actions for the round. Katana are used for melee strikes, shuriken for ranged ones, skateboards for movement and shells for boosted defence; there's also a Chi icon for regaining Focus and health then selecting any other side you want. The really cool twist is that the turtles then line up these action dice so that they are sharing the leftmost and rightmost dice with the turtles on their left and right, so effectively each will actually have 5 dice available on their turn.
Why does Raphael have 6 though? Well, that is what demonstrates an appreciation of the property and some cool thematic game design. Anyone who's seen the old TMNT film (or most other incarnation) knows that Raphael is the surly loner. In the IDW comics version he was actually separated from the others for a year, surviving on his own. So he has 6 action dice and doesn't share others' because he learned to rely solely on himself, while they can share his since they can count on him. There's another neat twist in that the only way Raphael can benefit from other turtles' dice is by Leonardo using his Leader ability to swap the placement of any two dice for the round, i.e. Leo reins in his hothead brother.
What this dice-sharing system means is that the heroes are always coordinating what they do and trying to make sure people get the icons they need. You can also split up/combine your icons however you wish. So you might have three katana icons which actually gives you multiple options of how to attack. The way melee/ranged work is that you spend these icons and then add your attack stat, which is usually 1 but Raph actually has 2 (which is actually major), so you roll that many battle dice. So with three icons you could combine it all into a 4-dice attack (3 icons + 1 attack), make three 2-dice attacks or a 3-dice attack and a 2-dice attack. You might vary how you spend them because you could have a bunch of weak minions all around or you could have one big tough guy. This system also makes things so much more varied and kinetic than the usual dungeon-crawl affair. Normally, it's the old staple of "two actions" and then you move/attack, move/move or attack/attack. Here you can fucking throw a shuriken at a dude from across a rooftop, jump off a building into a dumpster and run into a group of guys before taking a couple out with a multi-attack special move.
... which reminds me. My influence got one of the special move cards renamed. Basically, when the Kickstarter first began I facetiously posted in the designer's thread on the BoardGameGeek forums, "If Leonardo doesn't have a move called Slice & Dice then I'm cancelling my pledge!" Little did I know, this perfect pun had actually slipped right past the designer; I saw the photos of the moves posted by playtesters and there was no one named as such there. Cut to many months later when US backers started to get their copies and I noticed something. So I went on the Facebook group where the designer and IDW participate and jokingly mentioned it...
Woop!
Anyway, back to the game itself. It's fucking awesome. As a turtles fan is everything I'd want it to be. There are so many great thematic elements and the action begins on turn one as the fight puts masses of thugs and ninja against the turtles (there are 21 standard Foot Ninja miniatures in the game). Everything about the rules is designed for elegance without sacrificing depth. The setup for the scenarios is usually very simple as it's more skirmish than true dungeon-crawl but the adaptability comes from the terrain (grinding along rails, flinging manhole covers, avoiding security cameras). And you have scenario books where things branch and conditions change based on whether the heroes or villain win. There's a cool-sounding one, called "Cat & Mouse", set in the sewer. Here, the villain is trying to KO the heroes while they have to KO minions out of the line-of-sight of other minions (like sneaky ninja!) or knock them into a whirlpool, in order to remove them from the villain's pool of respawning enemies.
Even the villain role (which I am probably stuck with) is a load of fun as they don't use action dice but a deck of cards that activate certain figures, giving them the same sorts of icons and temporary defence boosts. So you get leaders like Shredder as well as tons of minions. And I haven't even mentioned how much better the KO/awakening system is compared to the old methods (it puts an emphasis on getting your allies nearby or to clear out enemies, while sharing shell icons).
The only real downsides are on the production side. The artwork and graphic design is generally superb but the actual map tiles look a little too "realistic" for want of a better word and there are all sorts of copy-paste errors in the scenario books. The miniatures are generally quite good (speaking as someone who's not a fussy miniature gamer) but there are some definite scale issues with some of the models. It doesn't bother me too much, but I can understand some people's gripes when looking at the price tag for the game. Although, I believe the standard retail edition comes in at a lower price point than similar products (the aforementioned Descent, or Star Wars: Imperial Assault) and still has a bunch of content.
All in all, I'm really pleased with it and can't wait to play more.
