Board Game Review - Lord of the Rings

Played the Lord of the Rings board game earlier in the week. It's from 2000, so I don't know if there's a more recent one based on the movies. It even has Fatty, which they left out of the movies. I only read The Hobbit, so all I know about Lord of the Rings is what I've seen from the movies. Note: It turns out we didn't quite play with all of the rules, we completely forgot the part where you can put the ring on! So this review might be a bit off.

It's a co-op game for up to five players, with each player taking the role of one of the hobbits. The goal of the game is to transport the ring to Mt Doom and destroy it before you become corrupted and get destroyed by Sauron.

The game follows the story pretty well, you start off in Hobbiton, and get various items, then you move on to Rivendell, show friendship and get a heap more stuff. Once you get to Moira, that's where the game really seems to start and the Scenario board comes into play.

The mechanics of the game are pretty straightforward. You have cards that have different icons on them: hiding, fighting, friendship, walking. On your turn, you draw an event card that signifies a particular event, which can range from one of the different to icon cards, or Sauron moves closer / one person moves three squares closer to Sauron, or the group must advance the event token, which means the group has to do whatever that particular tile says or Bad Stuff Happens. Then you may choose to draw two cards, play up to two cards, or move your character one square back on the corruption line.

You need to progress through the scenario board, which you do by playing cards that match that particular scenario's icon. Each scenario board also has some side quests which you can do to pick up shield tokens, or life tokens (heart, sun or ring). Shield tokens can be saved up to summon Gandalf for one of six once-off events, and they also stop you from insta-dying if you end up on the same corruption square as Sauron - though it can be a bit hard, as you need the same number of shields as the number of the square you're both on.

Acquiring hearts, rings and suns is important, because if your group reaches the end of a scenario, each player moves forward one square on the corruption line for each one of the three life tokens that they're missing (except for Merry, who only needs two). The problem for five players is that there are at most three of each life token on the board for each scenario. Even if you manage to complete all the side-quests, someone will end up becoming more corrupt.

One player also plays the role of ring-bearer, which starts as Frodo, but can pass on to other players as the game progresses. There are certain events that result in the ring bearer becoming corrupt.

I really liked the corruption mechanic. The players start at one end, and Sauron starts at the other. I've mentioned a few things that cause players to move forward, and there are a few events  / cards that cause Sauron to move forward. There's also black squares scattered throughout the board, and passing through those results in a dice roll. The possible results are 1 / 2 / 3 (player moves X corruption spaces forward), player discards two cards, nothing, Sauron moves forward one space. If Sauron catches up to the ring-bearer, the party loses. If any player lands on the same square as Sauron, they also get eliminated (unless they have the required number of shields).

We had a pretty rough start, and it felt like Sauron was just charging down the board. We also got pretty unlucky with some of our forced discards, as we had to discard some pretty powerful double joker cards because that was the only joker card some players had. It was pretty telling that I was playing the game with lawyers / future-lawyers, because they all became corrupt faster than sausage rolls get eaten at a morning tea. I can't talk, by the end, I was pretty corrupt, too. You can see from the photo that Sauron was so close to us at the end. We had managed to take the ring to Mount Doom, but we all had to survive one dice roll without dying, and by the second last person, we were relying on him to get a blank (nothing) roll, which thankfully he did, so we won!

It was ridiculously close. What I really liked about the game was that even though it was a co-op game, it didn't feel like one of those games where the "good" players take over and tell everyone what to do, it actually felt co-operative. It also reminded me of Shadows of Camelot, which is another great game, but this one required a lot less explaining before we could actually start the game. I enjoyed it, and it feels like it would have decent replay value, but not something that you'd play again right after you've just finished a game.

Game Review - Agricola: All Creatures Great and Small

Edit: Oops, QCN pointed out that the game isn't Agricola, but Agricola: All Creatures Great and Small.

Agricola: All Creatures Great and Small is a 2-player game where each player manages their own farm. There's a central playing area that's shared between the players, and each player takes turn to put one of their three workers on a particular action square to perform that action. Actions involve either obtaining resources, obtaining farm animals or building / upgrading buildings. The aim of the game is to score the most points, with points being scored via having farm animals, having buildings, or if you manage to build the storehouse, having resources in your stockpile.

The game is only 8 rounds long, which makes it pretty quick to play, once you know how it works.

At the start of each round, resources get replenished on the board. The resources that get replenished can stack, e.g. if nobody took the 3 wood action last turn, this turn it will have 6 wood. The player who has the "first turn" token gets to choose an action first. When you choose an action, it happens immediately. Your farm animals must be fenced, so if you see a large stack of animals in the stockpile, but don't have room to house them, then the excess animals will run away. So it's not just a matter of grabbing as many animals as you can, but on the same note, you want to pick things up before your opponent does, so you can't afford to take your time building up your farm either.

There is some benefit to grabbing animals first, because if you have at least two of any animal, they will breed at the end of the round, granting you an extra one. But that also means you need to make sure you have the infrastructure in place to house these free animals.

I thought the game was interesting, and it'll be good to see how the strategy evolves once you've played a few games against each other. However, given that there's no random element in the game, I wonder if there's some optimal strategy that you tend to settle towards after a few games. One of the things I thought of doing was trying to hog all the expansion squares, but since there are only 8 rounds, and you must use an action each round to grab one of the expansions, I eventually decided that it wasn't worth it, as my opponent could have taken the time to just build feeding troughs and better utilised her farm space.

We both actually misread the rules and thought you had to have at least three of each animal to avoid losing points, but it turns out that you lose three points for each type of animal you have three or fewer of.

I should also have bought more stalls when I could, and used those walls, as I realised I didn't really have the optimal barrier placement, and stalls are another thing that are limited in supply (there are only 4, though if you upgrade to an open stable, one goes back into the stockpile).

Overall, I thought it was a nice 2-player game (note: It's only for 2 players). It's surprisingly difficult to find good 2-player games, probably because people tend to play board games in larger groups. But someone did ask me for a recommendation for some 2-player board games, and while this game isn't overly sophisticated, and I don't think it's the kind of game you could play very frequently, it was still really enjoyable.

Game Review: Nefarious

Played Nefarious today, a board game where you play a mad scientist. The goal of the game is to invent 20 victory points worth of crazy inventions. All the inventions are mad scientist themed, with things like cloning, and buttered toast cat array. Being a mad scientist costs money, so part of the game is balancing the various ways to earn money / cards vs actually building things.

There are 4 actions that you can choose from each turn, and each player chooses at the same time which action they want to perform. 1: Espionage, 2: Invent, 3: Research, 4: Work. The first step is to get gold based on your spies. Then the game cycles through each of the phases in numerical order, starting with espionage, and all the players that picked that action get to perform it.

The interesting mechanic is espionage. During the espionage phase, you can choose one of the 4 actions to place a spy on. The espionage and research actions are free to place a spy, work costs 1 gold and invent costs 2 gold. If either of your neighbours performs the action that you have a spy on, you get 1 gold. You can place as many spies as you want on an action, up to a maximum of 5 spies, because that's how many spies you have. The goal is to try and predict which actions your neighbours perform in order to maximise your income.

A lot of people tend to perform espionage at the start, but it peters off towards the mid-game. Eventually, people are going to need to invent things, so placing your spies there will pay off eventually, but it means you are at a gold disadvantage at the start. One player put all 5 of his spies on invent, and by the end of the game, he was getting 5 or 10 gold every round, which is huge. He ended up winning, but a few other players were only one turn away from winning, so it's hard to tell if it's the optimal strategy.

The invent phase allows you to spend your gold to invent one item. Inventions are worth victory points, but some inventions will also have effects on you, your opponents, or both. Things like losing / gaining cards, losing / gaining gold, placing / removing spies. You might create an invention that's cheap, and worth a lot of victory points, but it'll be in exchange for your opponents all getting a free card.

The research phase allows you to get 2 gold, and draw an invention card.

The work phase allows you to get 4 gold.

The game itself was pretty straightforward to pick up, and despite having 6 players, the fact that the rounds were short, and it wasn't a "clockwise around the table" style game meant that you didn't have the problem of people at one end of the table becoming disengaged while the other people had their turn.

I really liked the crazy invention cards, Sure, they're really cheesy (machine that blots out the sun), but the pictures that went with them were cute and funny.

For a casual, light game, I think this really hit the spot. There are so few things to choose from, so it's not overly taxing, and easy to pick up for people who don't care to pick up a serious strategy game. It was enjoyable, but I'm a bit wary of replayability. The game has a "secret twist" mechanic, that we didn't play with, but I'm told it introduces a random mechanic change partway through the game, so it could be that inventions cost half the amount of gold.

Undercover Agents

Had our first housewarming-ish party today, which also doubled as my sister's boyfriend's birthday celebration somehow?

It was nice to have my siblings over to play games. I think Codenames was an interesting game to play with the people present.

The game has two teams (red and blue). Each team has a spymaster. On the table, are 25 cards laid out in a 5 x 5 grid. Each card has one word on it. The spymasters also have a grid that only they can see, and certain squares on the grid are coloured different colours. Each square corresponds to one of the cards on the table. The goal of the game is to get your team to work out which cards on the table correspond to the squares of your team's colour before the other team does. However, there is one black square, and the team that uncovers that square automatically loses.

The spymasters are allowed to give a one-word clue (or more than one if it's a "combo word", such as a name of a famous person like Leonardo di Vinci), as well as a number, which is a hint to how many words match that clue.

I don't know if it was by design, but we ended up learning a lot about each other from the game just from explaining the clues that people missed. For instance, one of my clues was about a car we had as kids, except I forgot that we sold it before my youngest sister was born, so she didn't know about it. It was also a good way to learn about how other people think, and the links that their minds make. I think a lot of my clues were really obscure, and I completely forgot about the assassin. In the game where I was the spymaster, we were quite far ahead, but I made a clue that made MrFodder immediately think of the assassin card as one of the options, and unfortunately, the team decided to pick it, so it was game over for us.

Overall, I think the game is incredibly simple to pick up, and though it can be quite tricky once you start to think too deeply about some of the clues, it's not like you have to be incredibly intelligent to play.