07 Feb 05
What a great sound: a handful of dice being thrown across a plastic board. That’s not the only thing that brings back vivid memories of childhood when you play Heroscape, the new return to ye olde days of big games with lots of plastic components from Hasbro. Sure, open that big brightly coloured box, see all the plastic bits and you might think we’re starting to cross over that nebulous line between game and toy here, but the important thing is, is it fun? You bet it is. If you used to play miniatures games but rapidly got sick of spending valuable game time reading all those intricate rules, mucking about with tape measures, and painting figures, then this is the game for you.
Heroscape comes in a big flimsy box bursting with plastic bits. You make up your board from snap-together 3D plastic hexes that come in a variety of types: grass, rock, sand and transparent blue water tiles. Choose your armies using one of the scenarios supplied or use the simple points system, and have at it! The figures are good quality and well-painted (though I shudder to think of the Chinese sweatshop where this is being made … someone out there is painting just the sword on a samurai figure then passing it to the worker on her left) and best of all, ready to fight.
There are Basic and ‘Master’ rules, but go straight to the easy-to-learn Master rules. There’s nothing new here; it’s roll for initiative, move, and attack, but simplicity is what makes Heroscape such a blast to play. The combat system is spot on: the attacker rolls a bunch of red dice and the defender rolls blue; every Shield on a blue dice blocks a Skull on a red dice; those that get through cause a Wound. This makes for a lot of enjoyable head-to-head dice rolling. Special abilities for different figures mix things up a bit.
Our first game was a fast and furious battle that came down to a close fight between our last two figures; and if you don’t enjoy a slug-a-thon between a WWII paratrooper commander and a robot that looks like it wandered off an episode of Dr Who, you’re not going to enjoy this game. Yep, the background rationale is flimsy—warriors gathering in Valhalla to slug it out over some mystical Wellsprings—but that’s not what this game is about. Hasbro are onto a winner with Heroscape’s flexibility and expansion potential, and the inevitable extra figures are already hitting the shelves.
You’ll find my Heroscape rules summary sheet in the Freebies section.
The perfect ‘beer-and-pretzels’ wargame. Four and a half plastic hexes out of five.
Boardgames
26 Nov 04
Remember those classic road combat scenes in Mad Max? Ever felt the urge to flip the little red plastic switch mounted on the dash and send a rocket at that idiot that just cut you off in traffic? Tried go-cart racing and got in touch with your inner hoon? Fallen prey to road rage? You’ll love this game. Battlecars is a forgotten classic from the golden age—the 80s—of Games Workshop games, before the company became a billion-dollar giant churning out miniatures for kids with parents with extremely deep pockets. Battlecars is simple, fun, and incredibly cinematic.
What do I mean by cinematic? Well, it’s when a game is not only fun to play, but during the course of the game a little story develops, and you find yourself effortlessly filling in the game mechanics with imaginative, and usually hilarious, descriptions of what’s going on. For example, I recently played a game where one player abandoned his car, which was then rammed by the other player. The pedestrian shot at the attacking car with his machine gun, missed, was missed in turn by the car’s weapons, and then made a move and was shot and killed by the car on it’s next turn. End of game. But as we played you could easily imagine the driver scrabbling for the door handle as the other car sped towards him, just making a frantic dive onto the road as his car was rammed, then shooting as the driver desperately rolled up his armoured window just in time, and the look on his face as the car’s machine-gun turret slowly turned in his direction … as he makes a frantic run for the trees, the car slams into reverse and swings around to pepper him with bullets … you get the idea. A little Mad Max scene, only a lot funnier.
A Battlecars game usually ends up with cars spinning, smashing or blowing to smithereens, and drivers making a run for the nearest building to escape the mess. The game comes with two generic boards crossed with movement lines, counters for grass, trees and buildings and some car templates that slowly get covered by (somewhat fiddly) red counters as they get more damaged, and on which the player places counters for various weaponry—rockets, shells, flame, MG rounds and perhaps a clutch of passive weapons such as smoke, spikes and oil. A supplement, Battlebikes, adds rules for armoured bikes.
Score a copy of this gem on eBay, you won’t be sorry. And this way, no one gets hurt.
4 and a half rocket launchers out of 5.
Update: I’ve made rules summary and reference sheets, plus new playsheets that combine the car/bike sheets with their appropriate driver sheet plus modifications specific to that car/bike. Available here.
Boardgames
05 Nov 04
I’ve become obsessed by zombies! This great little game is for all you zombie movie fans out there… not only is a lot of fun, but it’s a free download. There’s also a little community of zombie game fans adding new rules to it all the time here.
I downloaded the game, mounted the boards and cards on foamcard and card, and found some some old painted zombie and human miniatures which made a huge difference to the game atmosphere (told you I’m a game geek). If you happen not to have some painted zombie miniatures lying around (what’s wrong with you?) you can buy some via the game download page. The rules are simple to learn—the map is of a house and garage; the humans have to search all the search squares available for weapons, and the occasional nasty surprise, and the zombies have to kill all the humans. A simple action point system keeps the zombies slow, but since they keep coming until there’s four times the number of zombies as humans… the game captures the feeling of a slow but relentless zombie assault really well.
I played the zombies and my friend played three humans, two guys and a girl. Things got off to a big start when one of the guys ran straight for the car boot, discovered a ‘power drink’ and headed for the garage, only to be crash tackled by my first reinforcement zombie that appeared next to him on that side of the board and zombified him. Suitably chastened, the other guy and the girl, who had gone for the front door of the house, headed straight for the search squares. The zombies started piling in.
Eventually armed with the pistol and the rifle the two humans started dishing it out, but by this time the house was filling up with zombies. The girl was getting hemmed in the bedroom when she searched the cupboard and got a Surprise! card—an extra zombie—to add to her woes.
A few house rules on the spot always help when there’s a bit of confusion, so in our game we decided humans couldn’t make it out windows, used the extra Outta My Way! rules for dodging zombies, and decided that after an Oops! roll (a 1 on a dice) with a firearm, which usually means no more ammo and throwing the gun away, a human could keep it until finding an Ammo card and reload.
In the meantime the other human was being chased around the living room, occasionally stopping to use his ammo-less rifle as a baseball bat… he soon discovered a new tactic however, which was to back out of a door and then barricade the door from the outside… a pack of zombies lined up on the other side then proceeded to smash through the barricade to get at him.
The two humans met up near the garage and as luck would have the guy found the car keys in the boot and headed for the tyre-screeching escape… we then ruled he couldn’t escape without his girlfriend so, dodging a pack of zombies on the lawn and taking a couple out with her recently-reloaded pistol, she made it to the other side of the car and the two of them made a hasty getaway, no doubt glancing briefly at their zombified friend reaching after them in the rear view mirror as they escaped…
See how much fun board-gaming can be? Four double-barrelled shotguns out of five.
More: You can download my own re-work of the cards (with colour backs) here.
Boardgames zombies
24 Jun 04
At the risk of cementing my geek credentials even further, I have to admit that one thing I enjoy in this life is a good boardgame. For the past decade or so I’d treated this as ‘the love that dare not speak its name’, until my new girlfriend encouraged me to vive la difference! and bring my boardgames out onto the bookshelf in plain view. Now I’ve rediscovered the joy of gathering friends around a table of an evening, downing a few bottles of good wine and laughing your head off around a well-designed game.
So I’m adding boardgame reviews to Headless Hollow. In recent years there’s been a rash of excellent, high-quality boardgames published, especially from Germany. My first review is of Citadels (2-7 players, 20-60min playing time), orginally German but now available in English from Fantasy Flight Games.
In Citadels the object is to build a medieval city of eight districts before the other players. The twist is, each round the game changes as players secretly choose who they are for the round—king, architect, merchant, thief, bishop, assassin, etc—and these new roles bestow different powers and income. All the classic ingredients of bluff, last minute reveal, treachery and diplomacy are there in an easy-to-learn and quite short game. The card artwork is beautifully done and has a lot of personality, and the little solid plastic gold pieces are a great touch. Though better with four players than two, the game is a winner and highly recommended for an evening’s entertainment.
4 and a half gold pieces out of 5.
Boardgames
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