Zombicide

Zombicide has been around for quite some time. I have never been a zombie fan, so I never got around to trying it until recently, when I played the second edition of the game. This is a cooperative game. Every player controls two characters. You try to survive in a zombie apocalypse. The game is scenario based, and every scenario has a different set of winning conditions. Sometimes you need to escape through a certain location. Sometimes you need to find certain items. If any of your party dies, you lose. 

The game is intuitive to learn. Every character has some action points. You spend them to move, attack zombies, break doors, search for items, exchange items with other characters and so on. After every character has acted, it is the zombies’ turn to act. They move towards you, or if they can’t see you, they move towards noise. Making noise to redirect zombies is a valid tactic here. Zombies in the same space as you attack you. You don’t want to end up in the same space as any zombie still alive. Hah! “Alive”! 

One mechanism I like is how zombies slow you down and even completely bog you down. Moving costs one action point, but it costs an additional action point for every zombie in the same space. You really don’t want to share space with zombies. If there is just one, you can try to kill it first then move. If you are swamped by several, you are probably going to die and lose the game, unless you have some special ability or powerful weapon, or your friends manage to help you. In one game I was trapped by four or five zombies. Thankfully I had the legendary Japanese sword which could deal much damage. I barely managed to kill that group of zombies which surrounded me. 

Characters have either two or three life points. You die quite easily. Once anyone dies, everyone loses. Every character has an adrenaline meter. Various things increase this adrenaline value, like killing zombies and completing missions. As your adrenaline reaches certain thresholds, you unlock new abilities for your character. This is fun. However adrenaline value also increases the number of zombies spawned. The spawn rate is determined by the highest adrenaline level among all characters. There’s escalation in the game. Your characters get stronger. You also get more zombies, and stronger zombies. Sooner or later you will be overwhelmed by zombies. You must complete your missions before you get overrun. The build-up of zombies is effectively a timer. 

One exciting element I like is how searching for items can get you unexpected zombies instead. I always like searching. Maybe I like that lucky draw feeling. Now I have learnt (the hard way) that you probably shouldn’t search with your last action point. If you find a zombie, you won’t have any action point left to try to kill it. 

I like that the scenarios are pretty challenging. This is not a feel-good cooperative game. You need to play purposefully and not waste actions. I find this an accessible game. There is a fair bit of rules and the many characters, weapons and zombie classes have various abilities. However the rules are intuitive so you don’t feel you have to learn them. You’re just doing what you’d be doing if you were in a zombie apocalypse. 

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.

Detective: City of Angels

Plays: 4Px1.

The Game

The setting is Los Angeles of the 1940's. You are detectives from the Los Angeles Police Department. This is an age when police detectives are pretty much like licensed gangsters. You get to extort money from the real gangsters. Every scenario you play is one case. You need to solve the case within a time limit, after which the trail goes cold and the case is never solved. It is a race among the detectives to solve the case. During the course of the game, you only get one chance to solve the case. If you fail, you still continue to play, but you will need to wait until time runs out before you get another chance to solve the case. If no one solves the mystery when time runs out, everyone gets a second chance to solve the case. If everyone fails his second attempt, then the mastermind player wins the game. The mastermind player is the dungeon master. He sets up the game and knows the solution. He determines how the non-player characters (NPC's) behave when being questioned or body searched by the detective players. His objective is to prevent the detective players from solving the case.

Of course the hat is too big, it's not meant to be used this way. Hats are generic player markers. You use them to indicate who has seen which pieces of evidence, who has leverage on whom, etc.

The game board is a map of Los Angeles, divided into five regions. Moving between any two locations within the same region takes one action. Moving to an adjacent region usually takes two actions, the first one to move to a location at the border between the two regions, and the second one to get to your final destination.

The crime scene is marked with a red circle. In this photo it's the pier at location #99. During setup, the identities and locations of some of the key persons are already known, and the characters are placed at their locations. The row of cards at the top are the case cards. They can be persons (suspects / witnesses), murder weapons, or simply pieces of information. Some of these are already revealed during setup, some are face-down and need to be uncovered by the detectives during play.

These are the case cards of the first scenario. The first one is the murder victim, the next three are suspects, the rest are unknown.

You need to read a story before you start playing a scenario. This page tells you how to do setup and also specifies whether there are any special rules for the scenario.

Game components for the green player.

On your turn you get four actions. These four cubes help you remember how many you have taken, and what you have done. In addition to moving about, you get to question the key persons, body search them, and search locations. All these may yield new information. One important twist is what the key persons tell you may not be true. They may be outright lies. This can really throw you off. When you question a key person, other players may decide to employ snitches to eavesdrop. If they do, they will learn what you learn. The mastermind can sometimes prevent this, but you have no way of preventing it, other than doing questioning when everyone else is too poor to employ snitches. This snitch mechanism is important, because it makes investigation much more effective. It is nigh impossible to investigate everything yourself. You don't have enough turns or enough actions. You need to make use of snitches to gain information on other players' turns.

One of the things you can do is to visit businesses owned by gangsters, and extort money from them. This is likely something you'll often do. In fact it is so lucrative that you are limited to doing it only once per turn. You can't just camp at a nightclub and take all their hard earned money. You need money for many actions, like paying snitches. You can spend money on hooligans to rough up the people you are questioning. If they are trying to lie to you, this would force them to tell the truth. You'll also end up having leverage over them, because they are caught lying. On the other hand, if you rough them up when they are already telling you the truth, the mastermind gains leverage over you instead. So you do need to think twice before employing hooligans. Leverage is just a currency you can spend, e.g. to force someone to tell the truth during one particular session of questioning. The mastermind can use leverage to prevent a player from hiring a snitch.

Everyone gets one such record sheet. You use this to record information you have gained, and also your theories and deductions. Each row corresponds to a suspect whom you may question. Each column corresponds to a case card, which can be a person, a weapon or a piece of information. You can ask any suspect about any of the case cards, and this grid is for you to record who said what about which case card. Of course you can also use your own convention of taking notes.

The two sections at the bottom are for you to try to solve the case. To solve a case you need to write down the murderer, the weapon, and the motive. The solution usually includes a few motives, and you just need to get one right. If you correctly guess the murderer, the weapon and the motive, you win immediately. If you fail, the mastermind will tell you how many you get right. After that you continue to play, until someone else wins or time runs out. If time runs out, every detective gets a second chance to solve the case.

This section of the rulebook lists all the possible motives.

The setting is Los Angeles of the 1940's. Slang is used, and there is a glossary section to help you if you are not familiar with 1940's L.A.-speak. I would never have guessed cabbage means money.

Blue locations are police stations. You can visit police stations to get information about case cards already known by other detectives. Orange locations are gangsters' business. That's where you collect extortion money.

When you meet an NPC, you may question him and body search him. When you meet another detective, you may obtain information he knows. Sometimes detectives try to avoid one another because they don't want to share information.

Sometimes detectives claim evidence found and carry them with their persons. In such cases the detective's hat marker is placed here so that everyone knows who is carrying which piece of evidence. If a detective already knows about a particular piece of evidence, his marker is placed below the position of that piece of evidence.

This is the countdown track. You have a limited number of days to try to solve the case. One day is one round of play.

The Play

Essentially the game is a race to solve the case. There is tension between wanting to be fast, and wanting to collect enough information so that you can be more sure of your guess. If you are fast, but wrong, then you will be praying that the others get it wrong too. Your next opportunity is when time runs out and nobody has solved the case yet.

The game is all about collecting information, and piecing them together to form a story. Some information you collect is not very useful. Some is downright misleading. What stands out to me in this game is how some of the information may be lies. You need to immerse yourself in your role and in that world, so that you can judge who to trust and what to believe. On the whole it is better that the detectives investigate different people and locations. Collectively they would gather more information, and it would be easier to solve the case. However you are competitors and you don't really want to share information. Everyone wants to be the one questioning the right suspect and finding the right weapon. No one wants to go take the unlikely path for the sake of diversity or the common good. Strictly speaking there is no such thing as common good. This is not a cooperative game.

You need to have some imagination and creativity. You collect bits and pieces of information, and you try to assemble a likely story out of them. You put yourself in the shoes of that detective facing down the mafia boss, and you need to judge whether the guy is hiding something from you. You glean clues from the reactions of the NPC's. The actions of your fellow players will also give you hints. You need to watch what they are doing, even what they are not doing.

There is a limited number of possible murderers and murder weapons, so you can make use of the process of elimination to figure out the likely culprit and weapon. This is a little gamey. In real life, things would not be so simple. Solving a murder is not a multiple choice question. I guess this gamey aspect is unavoidable. Without some limit being implemented, the game may not be playable at all. The motives are a bit trickier. There are many of them so it feels more real.

The victim in the first scenario is a pretty girl.

"If the police detective career path doesn't work out I'm going to be a hat seller."

When all three detectives converge around these two characters, it is either they are the most likely suspects, or the detectives are trying to gain information from one another.

The red circle marks the crime scene.

The Thoughts

The most important twist in Detective: City of Angels is information you collect may turn out to be lies. You are not just weaving together scattered pieces of information, you also need to assess which pieces are true and which are false. There is good immersion because you need to put yourself into that situation at that time to be able to make judgements, and to imagine what might have actually happened.

Playing the mastermind is probably less fun. His role is to become part of the story and the experience for the detective players. In both games that we played, Ivan was the mastermind, so it was mostly him entertaining us. However he did play the first two scenarios himself beforehand using solo rules. When playing solo, you get to play detective, and the mastermind is a special rule set which governs how the NPC's behave.

Western Legends

Plays: 4Px1.

The Game

Western Legends is an open world game set in the wild wild west. You are cowboys (in the loose sense of the word and not specifically cow herders). You freely roam the map and you get to do lots of different things, interacting with many different locations and people. You goal is to score victory points, here called legendary points (LP). Whoever reaches 20VP triggers game end, and whoever scores the most points wins. One big decision in the game is whether you want to be a marshal or an outlaw. Depending on the path you choose, you'd be doing different things. Either way, you can become a legend.

At the start of the game you randomly draw two character cards and you pick one to play. In the game I played, I happened to draw one good guy and one bad guy. I decided to be conservative and I picked the good guy (Wyatt Earp).

This is the back of the character card. Different characters have different starting resources and starting locations.

This is your player board. Your character card is placed on the left. There is a blood marker below the character card. That's for tracking injury. When you are injured your hand limit is reduced. You can visit the clinic to get healed. If you end the game with injury, you will be penalised. The three spaces at the top right are for equipment. You can buy equipment at the general store. Space is limited and once you've bought three items, you can't buy more. You have a separate single space for weapons and another single space for mounts. However there is no restriction on the number of weapons and mounts you can buy. The restriction is only that you may use just one weapon and one mount at a time. The three cards at the bottom left are missions. They specify what you need to do, and where. You get to score points when you complete a mission. These missions drive the story when you play. They are something you can plan for, they drive the behaviour of your character.

On each half of the map there is one town, and within each town multiple buildings which you can interact with, like the general store, the saloon, the bank and the clinic. In the northeast and northwest corners there are two ranches. In the southeast and southwest directions there are two gold mines. A train station is in the south. There are bandit hideouts in the four corners and in a valley in the centre. All locations with icons are locations you may interact with. On the left side of the board are two decks of story cards. The text on the card back describes what you need to do to place one of your markers here. Once a card has a certain number of markers (which depends on player count), it is revealed and resolved, usually giving some benefit to those who have contributed markers. These story cards drive player behaviour and create stories.

The important strategic decision you need to make in Western Legends is whether to be a marshal or an outlaw. This here is the Wanted track. When you become an outlaw, you earn Wanted points and you progress on this track. When you reach certain levels, you gain some benefit. Also, every turn you score victory points. This is very attractive. However if you ever get caught and jailed, you lose all your Wanted points, i.e. your status. On the bright side, you may now choose to turn over a new leaf. You may also choose to continue being a criminal. To earn Wanted points, you simply break the law. E.g. robbing other players, robbing the bank, and herding cows from a ranch owner to his competitor instead of to the train station.

This is the Marshal track. If you choose to be a cop, this is your career path. You gain benefits too when leveling up. However you don't score points every turn. You only do it at game end. The 9th level is a lucrative 6VP (blocked by the cubes in this photo). So if you're going to be a cop, you've got to aim to be the best.

These are all the things you get to buy at the general store. The card holder is superfluous. The only true use is saving a little bit of space. However it does look fine. I like it. There are four weapon types, and three mount types. The plus sign under the price tags means these can be upgraded. You need to be at a general store, and you pay the same price again to upgrade an item.

This metal box in the bottom right corner of the player board is for storing gold nuggets. You can store at most four. When you deliver gold to the bank, you earn money and points. The two round tokens are cattle from one of the two ranches. To gain the benefit written on the cattle token, you need to deliver the cattle to either the train station, or the competing ranch. Doing the former is legal, the latter is not.

The icon with two masks is a cabaret. You visit the cabaret simply to spend money and earn victory points. $30 for 1VP. Your wallet has a cap of $120, so you can earn at most 4VP per visit.

When you mine for gold, you roll dice. The cross means you get nothing. The nugget means you get gold. The dollar sign means you get $10. Dollar sign and arrow means earn $10 then reroll.

A few things in Western Legends require the use of poker cards. You use them when fighting. Winning a fight is simply playing a higher card. You can fight one another. You can fight bandits. You need to fight the guard when you rob a bank. You also use poker cards when gambling at the saloon. Whenever the active player wants to gamble at a saloon, other players in town may choose to join. If they do, all participating human players compete among themselves; if they don't, the active player competes against the saloon. Gambling is done in a similar format as Texas Poker. Three cards (called the Flop) are revealed from the deck and become shared cards. Every player then secretly selects two cards from his hand to be played. These are revealed simultaneously, and the player with the best hand type wins. Only hand types matter and not the individual cards. A pair of Aces and a pair of 2's are considered the same rank. In the case of ties, the active player has the advantage. So if the active player has a pair of 2's while another player has a pair of Aces, the active player wins.

On your turn you get to perform 3 actions. Often you'll spend some of those on simply moving from place to place. You will often be interacting with the locations you visit. Another type of action you can take is playing a card for its effect. This card on the right can be played this way. You'll be drawing 3 cards, so effectively you are spending one action to swap one card for three, and hopefully they are useful for your current situation.

The Play

You can think of Western Legends as a race game, because you are racing towards 20VP. Reaching this threshold triggers game end. There are many ways to earn points, and you want to be as efficient as possible. That means making the most of the unique abilities of your character. The story cards inject short term, tactical considerations. You should not ignore them. If you do you are letting your opponents easily gain extra benefits. The marshal vs outlaw relationship is an interesting one. The marshals cannot allow any outlaw to become too notorious, because outlaws score points every turn and can become runaway leaders. Unfortunately in our game everyone decided to be marshals, so we didn't get to experience this tension. We were all good boys and we seldom fought. There are a few broad strategies in gaining VP's, and you need to focus in order to be efficient. If you want to be a true cowboy (as in cattle herder), you should get a workhouse which helps you herd more cattle. Get yourself the right weapons, mounts and items that match your strategy, and they will help you greatly. It is not a good idea to diversity too much because you don't have the luxury to improve your abilities in too many areas. You need to stay focused and play to your strengths, while grabbing opportunities that come your way.

In our game Ivan was the most efficient in scoring points and soon sprinted ahead of the rest of us on the score track. He was first to hit 20VP to trigger game end. When the game ended, we still had to do some score calculation due to hidden VP's and VP's which were only scored at game end. We had expected Ivan to beat us comfortably, but to our surprise the scores were close and he won by only 1VP. The end game scoring and hidden VP's cannot be underestimated.

Component design and artwork are evocative.

Figures with grey bases are non player characters (NPC's), while those with other colours are player characters.

The map design is cleverly done. Related locations are set just far enough apart for things to be interesting. E.g. the distances between the ranches and the station, the distances between the gold mines and the bank. They are far enough that it takes considerable effort to complete one cycle of work, e.g. collecting cattle and herding them to the station, or mining gold then depositing it at the bank. However once you buy the right mounts, which speed up your movement, this work cycle becomes shorter, making the whole enterprise much more efficient.

The sculpts do not match the drawings on the character cards. You can pick any sculpt you like to play. You only use the base colour to determine who's who.

Sculpts not picked by players are used as NPC's (grey bases).

Wyatt Earp's special ability is he gains an extra action after defeating a bandit. This makes him gravitate towards fighting bandits. However this ability only takes effect after he reaches 5VP. He doesn't have this at the start of the game.

With these three common cards coming up during gambling, it is possible for players to make a straight.

Having three 6's in hand looks strong, but actually isn't. When gambling, you can only add 2 cards from your hand.

I had completed all three of my missions, so I had claimed three tokens (the black ones at the top left). The tokens contain hidden VP's.

The Thoughts

Westen Legends is a very immersive game. It is an open world, and you get much freedom. It reminds me a little of Merchants & Marauders. Despite the free hand given, you should not flail about with no sense of purpose. This is a game of racing to become most legendary in the wild wild west. Be good, or be bad, just don't be undecided.