Cthulhu Wars

This is Han's game, and it has a ton of miniatures. This box you see is just for the basic components, including the game board, the player boards and the player markers. However you cannot fit the miniatures into this box. There are at least two other huge boxes needed for all the miniatures in the game. When you need to bring this game to game night, you'll be carrying several bags like you're going on a trip. Or to war. 

Cthulhu Wars is an area control dudes-on-a-map wargame. You play the Great Old Ones competing to dominate Earth. Every player controls a different faction. Some basic game mechanisms apply to all factions, but each faction has its own set of abilities, units, and ways to score points. One thing everyone has in common is the cultists. You need cultists at interdimensional gates to summon your monsters. Monsters come in three classes - small, medium and large. Your large monster is your Great Old One, the lord of your faction. This is a point scoring game. Sorry that doesn't sound very wargamey, but I assure you there is still lots of warring. Some of your points are public, but some are kept secret. So you don't know for sure who is the true lead player and how close they are to winning. One of the basic ways to score points is to be in control of gates. You score points every round. 

This is the player board for one of the factions. They are all different. At the start of a round, you receive actions points, and this is marked using the track near the top. Not everyone gets the same number of action points. Factions have different ways to generate action points. Cultists in play are one way to generate action points, but there are other ways too. Whenever you perform an action, you spend action points. Once you run out, you can't do anything else and need to wait for everyone else to also use up their action points. 

The player board lists all your faction specific units, their combat strengths and their special abilities. The six spaces on the right are for your spell books. They specify conditions which you can fulfil in order to earn spell books. Spell books are faction specific abilities. They are all useful. You need to earn all six spell books before you qualify to win. 

Han's copy of the game is all painted. He did all this painting during the pandemic when he was stuck at home. It's a lot of work! 

Cthulhu Wars is a very Ameritrash-style game. You get a majestic view with so many pretty miniatures on the board. Nowadays Ameritrash games incorporate some Eurogame elements. You are not just blindly attacking. You choose how to attack and fighting is a means to an end. You must fully utilise the abilities of your faction to maximise your points. Some factions are natural warmongers. For example there is one which gets monster upgrades whenever a monster survives a battle. Fighting is no longer just about winning, it is also about surviving and coming back stronger. Cthulhu is the king of the seas. It can submerge and disappear and then emerge somewhere else (must be a sea zone) bringing troops. However there are also factions which benefit from coexisting with others. 

One of the stars of the show - Cthulhu

This is a low granularity wargame. You only have a handful of units of each type. You can't spawn units indefinitely. When you need to move units, each unit being moved costs an action point. Moving about takes a lot of energy! You have to use your action points sparingly. Your units can coexist with those of another player. When you enter a territory with units from other factions, you don't automatically attack them. In fact, if you want to attack them, you need to wait for your next turn and spend an action point to do so. Big battles take much coordination to make happen.  

Battles are resolved using dice. Some die faces have no effect, some force enemy units to retreat, and some kill enemy units. You may not necessarily score points by killing enemy units. You should fight only with good reason. Else you are wasting your action points. 

In our game I was rather passive and I focused primarily on getting all my spell books. I did not work much on points. Eventually I did get all my spell books, but not that much sooner than the rest. By then I was rather far behind in points, and it was difficult to catch up. I should have been more aggressive earlier in the game, to make sure I don't fall behind too much. To truly enjoy the game you need to know the characteristics of the factions in play. This shapes how you play. We had a 6-player game. By the time we saw one or two players pulling ahead from the group, we should have already ganged up on them to keep them in check. However most of us were busy learning the game and did not do much leader bashing. I certainly was absorbed in doing my own stuff and stayed out of fights. In hindsight that was unwise. I played a wargame like a Eurogame. That wasn't going to end well. 

The most interesting part of Cthulhu Wars is the distinctness of the factions. Your play experience varies greatly depending on which faction you play. You must learn to make good use of your faction's unique abilities. The game experience also differs depending on the combination of factions in play. If you like the Cthultu theme, you will likely enjoy this. 

Betrayal Legacy

Betrayal Legacy was published in 2018. It is based on Betrayal at House on the Hill, published in 2004. The original game already has an interesting premise. A group of friends explore a haunted house. The game starts off in a cooperative mode. They explore the house and pick up items they discover. Then something triggers a haunt, and this is when the twist occurs. One player will turn traitor, and the game transforms into a one vs many conflict. The traitor will be given an objective, and the others - the heroes - will be given a different objective. Sometimes it can be as simple as killing the other party, sometimes it can be more complicated. Whichever side achieves its objective first wins. The game comes with many different scenarios, and they are all horror stories and thrillers.

With the legacy mechanism added, in Betrayal Legacy, the group of people exploring the house will be family members and descendants from five different families. The campaign story starts in 1666, and spans 14  games - a prologue game (tutorial) and 13 campaign games. Each time you play, it will be a different year, about 30 years after the previous game. You will play a different family member, perhaps a son, daughter,  nephew or grandson. Or if the previous family member is still alive, you can play him/her again. The finale game will be in 2004, which is the publication year of Betrayal at House on the Hill. Nice touch!

When setting up a game, you lay out only a few tiles - the doorway in front of the front door, the downstairs corridor, one upstairs room, and one basement room. These tiles have doors and paths leading to other rooms and tiles, for you to discover (and add tiles) as you play. The house map grows as you explore it. Each time you play, the house architecture will be different. This may not sound logical, but hey, it's a haunted house. Or think of it as being regularly renovated or rebuilt.

In the photo above, the colours of the character bases represent the families they are from. The game supports 5 players, so you have 5 families.

Green is one of the family colours, so I picked that - my favourite colour. This is the player board. The tracks along the four edges are four attributes of your character - Might, Speed, Knowledge and Sanity. If any of these attributes fall to the skull icon, your character dies. Some equipment and events in the game modify your attributes. Might is used for fighting. It determines how many dice you roll. Speed determines how many steps you may move on your turn. Knowledge and Sanity are used to operate certain equipment. Sometimes the outcomes of events depend on die rolls, and the number of dice you roll is determined by these attributes.

There is one heirloom mechanism which I quite like. If your character picks up an item, you may decide to name it and make it an heirloom of your family. You do this by attaching a sticker with your family emblem. In future games if your family member draws this item, it becomes more powerful because it is an heirloom. If the item is drawn by another player, you can try to persuade him to give it to you so that you can unleash its full potential.

The legacy story is driven by a very thick deck of cards. They tell you what to do, which section of which booklet to read, and how to make permanent changes to the game components depending on the decisions you make. Other than the prologue, the stories for the legacy games can differ. Your decisions, and incidents in each game, will have implications on future games you play. If a character dies, he or she leaves behind a ghost icon (you add a skull sticker to the tile). In future, spooky things tend to happen where many people have died. Sometimes new cards will be added to decks, sometimes some cards will be removed.

So far I have played three games with Benz, Ruby, Xiaozhu and Edwin, and one game with Moon, Charles and Plabon. The game with Moon's group was played using the same set, just to let them experience the game. After they tried it, they immediately decided to buy a copy so that they could launch into their own campaign. The copy I bought was mainly intended to be played with Benz's group.

During play, the period before the haunt can be dull, since you don't know the story yet. You are just exploring the house and picking up as many items as you can. At this stage nobody knows who will be the traitor, so your best course of action is buffing yourself up. If you turn out to be the traitor, then you'd be strong and your odds of winning are better. If you are on the hero team, your improved skills will be useful to the team.

When the haunt is triggered, the traitor needs to go to another room to read a specific section of the traitor's scenario book. The rest of the players, the heroes, stay put to read a specific section of the heroes' scenario book. Both parties will learn what they are supposed to know about the story at that point, including how to win. The passages are usually different, and there is usually information which one party knows but not the other. Such information is only revealed at an opportune moment. I've had some such surprises sprung on me.

One difficulty my group has is the rules reading. I'm the only gamer in the group who has familiarity with boardgames and boardgame mechanisms. The rest are casual players. Usually I am the one teaching games. During play I explain the game rules when there is confusion, and I remind people about rule details. With Betrayal Legacy, I can't do this for my opponent team, because I haven't read their part of the rules. My friends on the opponent team need to read and interpret the rules by themselves, which is a little challenging. We spend quite some time digesting rules when the haunts start, sometimes even needing a dictionary. Be aware of this if your group is not used to reading English rules or game rules in general.

Dice in the game are customised - two faces with 0, two with 1 and two with 2. You roll dice when you fight and when you resolve events. This customised distribution reduces the range of possible outcomes and reduces luck somewhat. In one of our games, we came to one situation where we needed to roll 4 to win, and we only had two dice. That meant we only had one ninth of a chance. To our surprise we rolled two 2's! Everyone cheered. I was so excited I asked everyone stop for me to snap a photo.

The game comes with many different types of markers. There are many different stories and story elements, thus the need for various markers. In this photo you can see an animal marker, and a nest marker.

Spooky music coming from an unfinished room...

The water drop shaped markers are monsters. Many scenarios involve monsters of some kind, and monsters are typically controlled by the traitor.

So many monsters! We were getting overwhelmed!

The legacy campaign in Betrayal Legacy is best played with the same group of friends. It would be a shared journey, a story which spans four centuries and many generations. This is certainly an experience type game. Nothing spectacular about the game mechanisms. They are pretty straight-forward. And straight-forward is good. On your turn you typically just move some steps, then perform an action, e.g. attacking someone. The game mechanisms being simple means you can focus on and enjoy the story. There are quite many different scenarios, so you will be experiencing many different stories. By the time you play all 14 games in the campaign, it's almost like have played 14 different games. Good deal, yes? After completing the campaign you can still play in a free play mode. There will still be some scenarios you haven't seen. However the game components won't change much after the campaign is over.

When playing Betrayal Legacy, it is best to get into the role-playing mood. It is an immersive experience.

I am still halfway through the campaign. Unfortunately now it's a bit harder to arrange to meet up and play. I wonder when our next game will be.

AuZtralia

Plays: 4Px1.

The Game

AuZtralia is a design from Martin Wallace, and the story follows his other design A Study in Emerald. In an alternate universe where Earth used to be ruled by the evil Old Ones, mankind has now overthrown his cruel overlords. What he doesn't know is the Old Ones have not been vanquished. They have retreated to their hideouts in the Australian outback, and are regaining their strength, waiting for the right time to strike again. It is the 1930's, and Western civilisation has just discovered the Australian continent. There is arable land near the coasts, and the hinterland is rich in minerals. It is a continent ripe for colonisation. As the nations develop their cities and farms, they discover danger lurking in the outback. Monsters awaken and start attacking farms and ports. Players need to work together to fight back, else the world will fall to the old masters, and everyone will lose. Only if the threat of the Old Ones can be contained then players can compare who has done best and will be declared the winner.

The game board is two-sided, and the two sides play slightly differently. You get two games in one. This side is the southeast of Australia, the other side is the southwest. Before the game starts, you go through a procedure to randomly seed the interior with monsters and minerals. The face-down square tiles with red, green and yellow backs are the monsters. The red monsters are the strongest and hide the deepest in the outback. When the game starts, you set up your ports on the coast, and then develop inwards. You build railroads and farms. You mine. You build armies. You may take the initiative to attack the monsters. When you attack a face-down monster, you activate it and reveal its identity. For those which you don't attack, the game mechanism will gradually activate them. Once they are active, they move towards the nearest farm or port and attack.

This is the player board. The two rows of boxes along the top are actions you can execute. Whenever you perform an action, you move a cube from the HQ space to the corresponding action box. If you want to perform an action which already has one or more cubes in its box, you have to pay gold. The action at the top right corner is the reset action, where you get to move all cubes back to HQ. This mechanism encourages you to perform actions as evenly as possible.

AuZtralia uses the same time track mechanism as Thebes. There is no fixed player order. Every action takes time. When you perform an action, you move your disc a number of steps along the time track. Once you are done, you check whose disc is the furthest behind on the time track. That player gets to go next. So it is possible for the same player to take two or more actions in a row. There is a finish line near the end of the time track. Once you reach or pass that point, you may take no more actions. You just wait for the rest to finish.

There are five types of combat units, and you pay gold to buy them. Once bought, you place them in your barracks at the bottom right of your player board. Different unit types have different capabilities. There is a finite number of units in each type. For some types the number is low and if you are slow, they may be sold out before you can afford to buy any. You will need to wait for some to get killed in battle before the supply is restocked.

The round purple tokens are sanity tokens. You have three at the start of every battle. As your soldiers fight, they may lose sanity tokens and start going crazy. If they go completely mad, you will lose the battle and all the units committed.

One of your actions is to recruit a specialist, like this one. Specialists have a wide range of abilities. E.g. some help you fight more effectively, some give you points at game end. The more you recruit, the more powerful you will be.

In addition to the players' discs, there is also an Old Ones disc on the time track. This disc starts at position 22. It is activated after all player discs pass position 22. It works the same way as the other discs, so there will be an Old Ones player controlled by the game system competing with the human players. The Old Ones disc always moves one step at a time. On the Old Ones player's turn, face-up monsters on the board may move towards the nearest farm or port. On every other turn, an event card is drawn. Sometimes a face-down monster is activated. Sometimes specialists are assassinated. If the Old Ones player successfully attacks a port, the game immediately ends and you total up the scores to see who wins.

This is an Old One card. These cards serve two purposes. The first is monster movement. You draw two cards to see which face-up monsters move. The monster types with the white circles are those which will move. In this example its Cthulhu (1st monster) and zombies (4th monster). The second use of these cards is combat resolution. Each round of battle requires drawing and resolving one card. Let's take an example. Let's say you are fighting a zombie and you draw this card above. The infantry on the left side of the zombie means if you have an infantry in your army, you deal one point of damage to the zombie. The purple cube on the right side of the zombie means the zombie deals one point of damage to your army. The purple circle means your army loses one point of sanity. A battle is a series of drawing and resolving Old One cards, until one side is defeated or you decide to retreat. It's a question of who can last longer. The more unit types you bring to a fight, the better your chances of scoring hits, but is also more costly. Different unit types are effective against different monster types. The artillery is effective against most monster types, but is average against Mi-go (flying monsters), and poor against zombies. Armoured cars are useless against temples. Don't bother to bring any unless you want to use them as fodder.

When the game ends, the Old Ones player score points as if it is just another player. If it scores the highest, then all the human players lose to the game system. Humanity is lost. Human players score points based on farms built, phosphates mined, monsters killed, and certain specialists. The Old Ones player scores points very differently. It scores based on farms destroyed and monsters still on the board. Monsters not yet activated score double. So it is important for the human players to scout out the monsters and to defeat them. Else the Old Ones player will score many points.

The human players do have to compete for points. This is not a cooperative game. You can't win together. However you can certainly lose together. So you still need to collaborate to fight monsters and stop the Old Ones from winning.

The Play

We did a 4-player game, which is the highest player count.

When playing the southeastern board, players' ports cannot be too near one another, so we were forced to be further apart and our areas of operations overlapped less. E.g. I (green) was in the east and Allen (blue) in the west, and we had very little interaction. In buying armies we still needed to compete, since units came from the same finite pool. Airships, armoured trains and artillery were limited in numbers. There were plenty of infantry units though, no need to fight over them.

In the early game I ran into this monster - Shoggoth. This was the second strongest monster after Cthulhu. My army was still small, and I didn't have many specialists who could help me in battle. This Shoggoth was only three steps away from my port. If it captured my port we would all be screwed. The game would end immediately, and surely the Old Ones player would outscore all of us by a mile. There were still tons of face-down monsters, and we hadn't done much development yet. This was an emergency!

Now Shoggoth had destroyed two of my farms - the cracked green disc, and another one under its foot (well, tentacles). It was only one step away from my port.

Allen (blue) had been busy building railroad tracks into the interior, but hadn't built any farms. Ivan (yellow) had built the most farms, and was now competing with Player A (sorry I forget your name) (red) for land. All of them watched nervously as Shoggoth marched towards my port, unable to do anything to stop it.

Thankfully this specialist turned up. If my port was attacked, it would help in defense and instantly deal two points of damage to the attacking monster. Eventually the crisis was averted and everyone sighed in relief.

AuZtralia is all about hunting and killing monsters. To get to them, you need to build railroad tracks. To build railroad tracks, you need to mine the necessary minerals. All the actions are closely related and meaningful. In addition to railroad tracks, you also need an army. To build up your army you need gold. You can either directly mine gold, or you can sell other minerals for gold. Fighting monsters is the main story line. You need to kill monsters to bring down the Old Ones player's score.

Players will compete in building farms. They are an important source of points. They will also compete for monsters to kill, but of course this comes with risks. You need railroad tracks to reach new plots of land to build farms and to get in range of the monsters. The spatial element is a big part of the game. You will compete for space and access. There will be blocking. There will be grabbing resources before others claim them. One interesting thing is you can build farms to lure monsters to your area. Monsters are attracted to farms. If you are confident you can kill them before they rampage through your area, by all means lure them in before they go off to other players' areas.

Among the monster tiles are some kangaroos. If you reveal a kangaroo, that means the spot where you suspect a monster is hiding turns out to be a false alarm. It's just a kangaroo. Now in real life some kangaroos are dangerous - they kick, they box, but in game terms they are harmless. We had an unusually high number of kangaroos in our game. Even one of our Level 3 monster tiles turned out to be a kangaroo. Our game became anti-climactic. By the time we defeated most of the monsters, we still had much time left. What was left to do was to build as many farms as we could before time ran out. Ivan said this was not normal. In a previous game he played, the players struggled to contain the monsters all the way till game end. I wonder whether we should consider ourselves lucky or unlucky.

Recruiting specialists is important. They can be very helpful. A decent combo can make battles much easier and less luck-dependent. We had some such combos in our game. This photo above highlights the spatial aspect of the game. We had a temple in the red player's area, which he held off attacking for a long time. He had blocked it off from other players, and it would take much effort for others to get near the temple. That was why he could afford to wait until he further built up his army. Near the centre there was a loyalist (square tile with a white background), a type of monster. It was one step away from the red and yellow players' networks, but two from green and blue. Red and yellow would want to hurry to defeat it first.

At this point there were only two monsters remaining on the board, the zombie heading towards Allen's (blue) farms, and the temple in the red player's area. The temple is considered a type of monster, but this type does not move. The white mineral at the top left is phosphate. Phosphates are worth 3VP per piece, so Allen needed to make sure he had enough time left to build tracks to that spot and then to mine the phosphate.

The Thoughts

It's tricky trying to categorise AuZtralia. You build armies to fight, but this is not a war game. You work together to defeat the Old Ones, but this is not a cooperative game. I would categorise it as a train game and a development game. You are developing your network inwards, you mine resources, and you build farms. There aren't many development games which feature warfare against a common enemy. The premise of the game is unusual and interesting stories will unfold. There is a big spatial element, which is not surprising, and because of how it works, player interaction is low between some players. In our game Allen and I started at opposite ends of the board, so we could not interfere with each other much. You mostly jostle against your immediate neighbour or neighbours. This may not be a major issue. Many games are like this. There is physical distance keeping you away from some other players. There is luck in battle, in which monsters you get, in which specialists being available. I think that's good. It creates excitement and it varies the game experience. AuZtralia is ultimately a competitive game, but throughout most of the game the players must work together to fight the Old Ones.

Hit Z Road

Plays: 3Px1.

The Game

Hit Z Road is a zombie game from Martin Wallace. Now that's not something you hear often. What I noticed most about the game before getting to play it was the art direction. The components and artwork were designed to make it look like a game hand-made by a child, reusing parts from other games, using unwanted rubbish like bottle caps, pasting stickers onto the components and even directly writing on them. The child made this game based on his experience during an arduous journey through USA. The world had fallen apart and devolved into an apocalyptic zombie wasteland. The child was part of a group traveling from Chicago to California. They had decided to make the trip because California was a safe haven. They succeeded and the child lived to tell the tale, through this boardgame.

Hit Z Road is an auction game. After listening to the rules explanation, I expected it to be a very Euro, light-to-medium weight game. What surprised me was it turned out to be more visceral. It had more story and it was more immersive than I had expected. I was pleasantly surprised.

You start the game with a group of 5 survivors. You are the leader and your pawn is in the player colour (green in my case). The other survivors are white in colour. The bottle caps are the three types of resources you have in the game. The red ones are fuel, the blue ones bullets, the yellow ones adrenaline. Your first goal is to survive. As long as at least one person in your group reaches California, you succeed. Only among the surviving players you then determine who is most successful by comparing score. Throughout the game you may collect cards with point values. If you have the most fuel, bullets, adrenaline or survivors at game end, you also score points.

This burger joint customer loyalty card is used as a player order marker.

There are even stamps on the back.

A three player game is set up this way. The deck of cards on the right is set up depending on the number of players. It is divided into three stages, the first stage having the easiest cards and the third having the hardest. At the start of a round, you draw three sets of two cards each. The players bid for turn order to pick sets. Everyone must pick a set. The small board at the bottom is what you use for this bidding process. During the bidding rounds, you may bid a higher amount or pass. You pay your bid using any combination of the three types of resources. When you take a set of cards, you execute whatever is specified on them.

At the top you can see various round tokens. These are miscellaneous items you may collect during your journey. Some cards tell you to take a specific token, and then later on some other cards tell you what happens or doesn't happen if you have or don't have a particular token. E.g. if you pick up a teenager, you may later find that he helps your group with a task that nobody else can do, or you may find that he steals your resources and vanishes. The items augment the values of the card sets. A card set becomes more attractive to the player who has a certain token which he can make use of. A card set can also be shunned by everyone except for a single player who has the right token to prevent a disaster on one of the cards. These affect how players value card sets and how they bid for turn order.

The black pawns are the zombies. The dice are used for combat. The black dice are regular dice, the red ones are the tougher ones. Combat consists of two stages. The first stage is ranged attack. You may spend bullets to shoot at the approaching zombies. You have one chance to decide how many bullets to spend. You then roll the dice. Each crosshair icon rolled kills a zombie. If there are zombies left, you now have to decide flee or fight. You may spend two fuel resources to speed away. If you don't have enough fuel, or don't want to spend it, you enter melee combat. This is a fight to the death. One side must be completely wiped out. You kill zombies by rolling the crosshair icon. If you roll a lightning bolt, you may spend an adrenaline resource to kill a zombie. If you roll crosshair + lightning bolt, you either kill one zombie, or spend an adrenaline resource to kill two. If you roll the skull icon, one of your survivors dies. If you roll skull + lightning bolt, you may spend an adrenaline to save the survivor. Skulls on the black dice always come with lightning bolts, but the red dice have skull-only faces. That's why they are tougher.

I find it interesting that the number of dice you roll during combat depends on the number of human survivors and not the number of zombies. When there are many humans and few zombies, more dice means more opportunities to kill zombies, which makes sense. However it also means more chances of getting bitten by a zombie. I try to explain it this way - since there are so many humans, there is a higher chance that someone becomes careless and gets bitten.

When there are few humans and many zombies, the smaller chances of scoring a hit against zombies makes sense. Fewer humans means less killing power. However it is also harder for zombies to kill humans. This is easier to explain - when there are more zombies than humans, not every zombie can get close to a human. The zombies will get into one another's way.

These are the bonus cards to be claimed at game end. You claim the corresponding card if you have the most fuel, bullets, adrenaline or survivors.

The Play

In our game, this was the situation after 2 rounds. Strictly speaking, any cards you claim should be added to a face-down stack and not laid out this way. I like it this way because the cards become my picture book telling my story. On the cards, the star icons at the top right mean point values. They are only meaningful if you make it to California. The icons at the top left mean resources you get to collect. The numbers at the bottom right are the zombies you need to fight. You claim the resources before deciding whether to fight the zombies. You may claim resources then flee by paying two fuel resources. You don't need to return the resources you have just claimed. However you also won't keep the card (or its point value). Some cards have additional instructions you must follow.

That card with a big #2 is another player order card. Every time you complete a bidding round, you take the corresponding player order card. You follow this player order not only when taking card sets. You also follow this player order for the bidding next round.

With these three sets of cards, naturally the top set is least desirable, since you have to fight zombies twice. Cards being grouped into pairs creates interesting combinations and variability.

I did a three-player game with Ivan and Allen. Ivan taught Allen and I to play. The early game felt mild. I could collect resources in a leisurely manner. I could spend resources to claim cards with points. The zombies were not that scary, and sometimes we gained new group members. It was only later that I realised the early game was just the calm before the storm. It was the chance to brace ourselves for what was to come. I should have been more thrifty with my resources in the early game. I had underestimated how many resources I needed for the rest of the game. Ivan was better prepared. In the early game he often forwent opportunities to score points in order to preserve even just a little bit of resources. It turned out this was prudent indeed. Cards worth points are normally cards with zombies, i.e. you often need to spend bullets and adrenaline to kill the zombies before you can claim the card. Sometimes it is better to only spend fuel to flee and forgo the card, preserving bullets and adrenaline.

Among the three of us, I was most resource-poor and ended up last. No surprise there. Both Allen and Ivan managed their resources better, but even so by game end they more or less ran out of resources too. Ivan had a little bit more, and managed to claim some of the bonus cards at game end. He won the game. Despite coming last, I had a blast with the game. This was what happened.

As things went from bad to worse, I found myself down to three survivors, and no resources. We were surrounded by six zombies, and they were a horde. We had to use at least two red dice when fighting them. Running out of resources was horrible. It meant every round I was the one forced to take the worst card set. I had no resources to bid any higher than 0. It was hard mode all the way for me.

I had thought being outnumbered 6 to 3 surely meant game over, but to my surprise I managed to survive with one last person. It was like I had plot protection and I was destined for greater things.

Unfortunately the so-called greater things turned out to be another zombie horde. This time it was 1 vs 6, and I had to fight with a red die again.

Ivan and Allen grabbed their popcorns and sat down to watch how I was going to deal with 6 zombies. Just the previous night at the airport I had killed three zombies single-handedly. That was already a minor miracle. Facing off six of them now, I muttered under my breath - you've got to be (insert-strong-emphasis) kidding me. To my surprise, and to the laughter of Ivan and Allen, I survived. The zombies fell one after another. I kept rolling, and rolling, and rolling, and the dreaded skull icon never came. I had run out of adrenaline. If I rolled a skull with a lightning bolt, I would have to die because I had no adrenaline to pay. Yet I rolled no skull plus lightning bolt, and no skull. It was an absolutely terrifying experience. Every time I killed a zombie, it was exhilarating, but I could not celebrate because I knew upon the next die roll it could well be my turn to die. I almost collapsed with relief when the last zombie fell. In total, my brave little survivor character killed 9 zombies consecutively.

For the past two months I have been writing about the many games played at the Broga Bliss boardgame retreat organised by Boardgamecafe.net. I played a good variety of games. I had not expected that the most unforgettable moment would be from Hit Z Road.

The next card I had to deal with was also the final card of the whole game I had to deal with. I needed to pay one fuel resource, or lose one survivor. I had no resource left, and I had only one survivor left - me. So I died. Poof! Most anti-climatic ending to my zombie story. I slayed 9 zombies only to die of... sorry sir, gas no stock. I guess the story was supposed to be me getting badly injured after the fight and eventually dying of my wounds. I met another survivor group which had medication, but they would only trade. They wanted fuel. I had none. They left me to die. Pricks!

I arranged all the cards I had claimed, and made this fancy storyboard. I had claimed a total of 15 cards. We played 8 rounds, and if I had claimed all cards, there would be 16. The one card short was because I had fled the zombies once.

The core game mechanism is a very Euro style auction mechanism. Cards you take are mostly independent cards, each card telling an unrelated little story or describing a scenario. However if you let your imagination take flight, you can easily link them all up into a convincing story. The items element helps. They can establish cause-and-effect relationships between some cards. The whole chain tells a consistent tale of desperate survivors scavenging, rationing resources and fighting for survival. I am sold that this is indeed a zombie game, even if my left brain teases me that this is a Euro auction game.

The Thoughts

If you remove the setting, the theme and the zombies, Hit Z Road is a game of resource management and risk management. It is an auction game. You need to spend your resources wisely. You gather resources in the early game, and you try to make them last till the end. This being an auction game means you need to be good at assessing the value of things. Is this risk worth taking? Is that victory point card worth this many resources? If you analyse with your brain that's the conclusion you will come to. If you play with your heart, it can be a rather different matter. When I played, I was immersed in the story. I built the story from the disjointed events depicted on the cards. I had to manage crisis after crisis. I had to make tough choices. I had to make sacrifices. Every bullet spent and every gallon of gas used felt painful. "Was it worth it?", I often asked. Many times I had to choose between taking a risk or not. Avoiding risk is not free. You can't afford to flee forever. You will eventually run out of fuel. Do you flee now or save the fuel so that you have the option to flee in future when you get into a worse situation than now? Every fight with the zombies is a death fight. You can never be sure which day will be your last.

The game is of low to medium complexity. Non-gamers and casual gamers can manage, so I think it will work as a gateway game. The zombie theme is a plus.

Zombie Tower 3D

Plays: 4Px4, 3Px1; 2 on easy difficulty, 3 on normal.

I sometimes get invitations to review games. Most of the time I decline. Only occasionally when the premise of a game intrigues me I would commit to play and review it. Playing boardgames and blogging are what I do to relax and to have fun, so I don't want to make any part of it feel like an obligation. When Cosaic first contacted me about Zombie Tower 3D, I had not heard of this game. It had some quirks which piqued my curiosity, so I thought why not.

The Game

Zombie Tower 3D is a semi-cooperative game. You are survivors stuck in a crumbling building infested with zombies. You are separated by jammed doors and fallen walls, and have no means to reach one another. The best you can do is shout to communicate and coordinate your survival efforts. You can pass equipment to one another through small slits in the walls. You can't see what's happening on your friends' sections of the building - where they are located, where the zombies and (non-player) survivors are, what equipment they have found so far. You can only communicate verbally. To win, you need to get out of the building. You must also each get a vaccine before you leave. There are two ways of leaving. The first way is by having one player get hold of both the communication device and the battery, and then everyone meet on Level 3 (I shall avoid the USA 1st-2nd-3rd floor vs UK / Malaysia Ground-1st-2nd floor dilemma by calling the floors levels). The second way is by everyone collectively gathering enough flares and then meeting on Level 1. There is a timer mechanism in the game. If you can't escape by the end of round 12, you lose. If any one of you dies, you lose.

Now here's the twist - this game is semi-cooperative. If you win together, victory points come into play, and only one player will be the winner with the highest score. The others do win too, but not all wins are the same. You score points based on how many survivors you rescue, and based whether you fulfill the three objective cards dealt at the start of the game. These cards require you to have specific items when you escape, which means you need to either have found and not used those items, or you need to have convinced others to give them to you if they have found them. This mechanism creates hidden agendas and competition among players, even as they all try to collaborate to ensure survival. Sometimes you intentionally delay the game hoping to find the equipment you need for scoring, lying to your friends that you still haven't found your vaccine. Sometimes you pretend not to have the shotgun your friend is desperately asking for, because you want the zombies to catch up with the big group of survivors he is leading and kill those survivors, who are worth 1 victory point each.

Sharing equipment is essential. E.g. if you have a gun but no bullets, or vice versa, it is useless. If one player has a gun and the other the bullets, they need to decide who to give his item to the other. Also each player needs one vaccine. An extra vaccine is of no use to you, but you need to make sure all your teammates get one, else you can't win.

This is a 4-player setup. You are supposed to only see your side of the building.

Jeixel, Calvin. In this photo I can see the cards of the player on my right, but I am not supposed to. Those cards on the board determine where new zombies pop up and where new survivors are found.

The sequence of a round is straightforward. First everyone simultaneously draw cards on their respective sides of the building to determine where new zombies and survivors appear. Then the players take turns using 3 Action Points to perform actions. Some actions require AP's, some don't. You can move. You can search, which means drawing a card from the deck for the specific level you are on. You can pick up or drop off survivors. You can heal yourself. You can use equipment. You can drop equipment through the slits on the walls, or pick up equipment left by others. You can even gain an AP by taking injury. Sometimes this is necessary.

Calvin, Kit Loong. When you search, you draw a card. The 3 card decks for each level are placed on the roof of the building. They have different card backs.

Ah Pek (Uncle) is cautiously guarding the staircase. In this photo you can see the slits on the walls. There are slits on every level.

After all players have completed their actions, it is the zombies' turn. Zombies on the same floor as humans will move towards the humans, prioritising the non-player survivors over the players. After they all move, they bite the humans in the same room as them. Survivors who are bitten turn into zombies (of course!). Players who are bitten take one point of damage. If you hit your health limit, you die and everybody loses.

Zombies go for survivors first and not the players. In this photo there are survivors on the rightmost rooms on Levels 2 and 3. So the zombies on these levels will all walk towards the right. The player character on the left is safe, at least for now. There is no survivor or player character on Level 1, so the zombies there will just chill.

This is one of the player characters. Each character has a different start location and a unique special ability. The big white box is for placing survivors tagging along with you. Survivors don't move on their own because they are too scared. They will follow you only if you tell them to.

The Play

My first two games were played with non-gamers. The idea of the 3D building immediately caught their attention. They told me the rulebook looked intimidating, but after I taught them the rules, they were able to digest them just fine. They found the rules logical and natural. They kept referring to Left 4 Dead, which I have not played before. In the first game I decided to just go for the normal difficulty level, and we lost rather spectacularly. I later found out that I had played one rule wrong, which made the game much harder than it should be. I had thought that zombies knew how to take the stairs to go hunt down humans on other levels. Actually they don't. We had inadvertently played in hell mode. For the second game, I played with a different group of non-gamers, this time playing with the correct rules. I was scarred from the first game and decided to start at easy difficulty. The difference between difficulty levels is the number of starting zombies during game setup. This time we won rather easily, and never got into particularly difficult situations. I think the easy level is mainly suitable for teaching the game or playing with casual players or children. When I played, I treated the game as a fully cooperative game. When you are still familiarising yourself with the game, you can choose to play this way. However the intention of the designers is there should be competition and hidden agendas amidst the collaboration.

To beat the game you need to communicate a lot and coordinate carefully. It is almost impossible for everyone to find exactly what he needs. Usually you will need to find ways to pass equipment among yourselves in order to win. Even just the basic requirement to win - everybody getting a vaccine shot - can be quite challenging. Sometimes you need to pass an item to the player sitting opposite you. That means first passing it to the guy on your left or right, and then him bringing it to the other wall to pass on to the final recipient. That can be very tricky to coordinate when the place is swarming with zombies. When we played we had to keep asking where are you, which slit is easier for you to get to, how soon can you get there, what else do you have, etc. Even after we finally gathered all the items we needed, coordinating the right time to get to the assembly point was a challenge too. Get there too early, and you may find yourself surrounded by zombies before your teammates are ready to leave the building.

Zombie movement follows very exact rules. They are predictable, and you must make use of this. The new zombies and survivors that appear every round can throw a wrench into your plans, but that's all part of the fun. You want to make use of your understanding of zombie behaviour to control their movement, e.g. halting them in their tracks by staying away and taking survivors away from the level they are in, or steering them in a particular direction by dropping of a survivor that way. Cruel, yes, but sometimes it's necessary. Think of it as saving yourself first so that you can in turn save more other survivors. When you are about to be bitten, you can push a survivor traveling with you forward to take the bite for you. But then he'd turn into a zombie and you'd have more zombies to contend with next round. You need to think of that too.

My non-gamer friends enjoyed the game very much and asked to borrow it. They were disappointed to find that it had sold out, but I told them there would be a Kickstarter campaign starting in February. That's Cosaic's current plan as far as I'm aware of.

Benz, Ruby, Xiaozhu, Edwin and Eva. Only Ruby, Xiaozhu and Eva were actually playing with me, but the others were interested and sat down to join us.

Kit Loong and Calvin standing behind were probably grumbling about how I had taught them the wrong rules in the game we played earlier, causing such a miserable loss.

My 3rd and 4th games were played with gamers. I decided to go for normal difficulty level straightaway, since this was not a complex game. Aaaaand Sinbad died a rather horrible death. He was rather unlucky. He was unable to save any of the survivors on his side of the building. They were all bitten and they turned into zombies, resulting is a large horde. His character was good with guns and could kill an extra zombie each time he attacked, but he couldn't find bullets for his gun, so he didn't manage to make use of his special ability at all. In hindsight we were a little careless. We should have foresaw Sinbad's sticky situation earlier and worked out how to help him out a few rounds earlier. By the time we realised the gravity of the situation, it was already too late.

Sinbad, Allen, Jason and I decided to have another go. This time we were more careful, and eventually managed to escape. We had to coordinate carefully when and where we were going to pass items to one another, and when exactly we were going to meet at the assembly point. To win the game you still need to last till the end of the round after reaching the assembly point, i.e. after the zombies do their moving and biting. I still played the game as a pure cooperative game, not quite bothering about the victory points. However my gamer friends were not so innocent. They were already thinking about post-survival bragging. Jason had two objective cards which required having the dynamite and the detonator. Allen had announced that he had them both and asked if anyone needed them. Jason tried to convince Allen that he needed the equipment to kill some zombies. However he didn't sound desperate enough, and eventually Allen didn't pass the goods to him. If Jason had put on a good enough show and convinced Allen to hand over the goodies, he would have become the top scorer. I was oblivious to all this during the game itself. It was only post-game that we discussed this, and I was able to appreciate the self-interest, brinkmanship and lying aspects that can emerge when playing this game.

Allen, Jason. This time I was playing with hobby gamers.

This time the character I played was the doctor. His special ability was he could turn a zombie back into a human, at the cost of one health point.

All the survivor tokens have a zombie side at the back.

The Thoughts

Zombie Tower 3D is a game with a wide appeal. The 3D tower is eye-catching, and the core mechanisms are intriguing. That's at least enough to get many to be interested to give it a try. It is not a particularly deep game, so it's not something gamers will play regularly or do in-depth strategy analysis on. This is a light strategy game which feels like a party game. You need to communicate a lot, and you need to coordinate your efforts meticulously. It's funny that despite all players being restricted to different sides of the building, the game is very high in player interaction. The information barrier forces players to actively contribute to the discussion.

The victory conditions in Archipelago share similarities with those in Zombie Tower 3D. It's either everyone loses, or there is only one true winner, the one with the highest score. Some complain that this makes the game less fun because a player who can't be on top will try to make everyone lose. I don't see this as a problem. In my view, we should stick to the theme and setting. In Zombie Tower 3D, surviving will always be more important than having more glory.

What would be funny though, is a group of players who should have won the game end up losing because of the mistrust among them. E.g. a player claiming he needs the shotgun to kill zombies coming at him, but others who do have shotguns being unwilling to give it to him because they believe he only wants it for the victory points. That player asking for the shotgun may actually be in trouble. Can you trust your friends?

This is a game that I imagine casual players can keep on playing and playing. For regular gamers, it still provides some challenge because of the randomness and the luck element. The normal level is not exactly easy to beat. I have yet to try the hard difficulty.

I thank Cosaic for this review copy. It's a game I will treasure. If you are interested in the game, watch out for the upcoming Kickstarter campaign, estimated to start in February.

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