Project: ELITE

Plays: 4Px1.

The Game

Here's the scenario. Earth has been invaded and overrun by aliens, and only small pockets of humans continue to resist the invaders. The human resistance forms an elite team, and sends them on critical missions in the fight against the aliens. You are part of this elite team.

Project: ELITE is a cooperative game and a real-time game. Each game is a mission. You have a fixed number of rounds, and you need to complete your mission before the final round ends. Sometimes you need to kill specific enemies, sometimes you need to retrieve some artifacts, sometimes you need to sabotage some facilities. The game is partially real-time, and this is what makes the game different. At the start of a round, new aliens appear on the game board. Then you, members of the elite team, get to perform actions. Finally the aliens perform actions. The human action phase is the part which is done in real-time. You only have two minutes. Everyone has a set of four dice. You roll your own dice, and use the icons you roll to perform actions. After you use an icon, you may reroll the die and use it again. If you don't like what you roll, you can simply pick up the die and reroll. It seems that the faster you roll, the more you will get to do, but there is a catch! If you roll the alien icon, you must move an alien. This can result in the alien attacking you or your teammate. So rolling dice comes with risks.

The white dice are the player's action dice. The red icon is the alien icon, which is bad news. The other icons let you do various different actions. The green dice are the attack dice. You roll them when you attack. Each weapon has an attack value - you need to roll a certain number on the attack dice for them to count as hits. The card on the right is a character card. Each character has a special ability. The three circles at the bottom are spaces for life tokens. You remove a token each time an alien hits you. When you lose all three, you lose one die and then refill the tokens. You start the game with four dice. If you lose your last die, your character dies and everyone loses the game.

Before the game starts, you draw two cards per player. This can be any combination of equipment cards and weapon cards. You lay them all out, and then as a group you decide who takes what. The icons on the cards specify what die icons are needed to activate the card. The two cards on the left have icons with red backgrounds. This means when you activate the card with a die, that die is locked. You only take the die back next round. This means the card can only be used once per round. Also once you use it, you will have one die less for the rest of the round. Normally a weapon has three properties - range, the number of attack dice you may roll, and the minimum die value required to score hits.

My special ability is if I kill an enemy in melee combat, I may move into its space for free. This is why I have chosen the duel blades as my weapon. They are melee weapons so they synergise with my ability.

This is the game board. It is two sided and the two sides are different. On this side, the players' base is at the bottom left. This is where you start out, and this is also where you must return to after completing your mission in order to win the game. At the three other corners, there are spawn points for the aliens. All over the board you can see small arrows. These indicate how aliens move. The arrows all flow from the spawn points to the player base. You must not let any alien enter your base. If this happens you lose. On the board there are structures which block movement and line of sight. At the top left there is a schedule, which needs to be set up based on the scenario you are playing. In specific rounds there will be events (usually bad), and in some others there will be alien bosses appearing (also bad news).

These grey aliens are the foot soldiers. Each soldier type has its own set of characteristics, e.g. how fast they move, how strong their attacks are.

Player characters are beige in colour. This kind of situation is very common - you are often swarmed by aliens. There is wave after wave of aliens. While trying to stay alive by mowing them down before they overwhelm you, you also need to remember to complete your mission objective.

In the game we played, our mission was to retrieve four artifacts - those large tiles with red backgrounds and yellow hand icons. They were scattered around the board and we had to go out to them and bring them back. To move an artifact by one step required committing a die with the hand icon for the rest of the round. The number of hand icons on an artifact is also the limit on how many moves it can make per round. At the time of this photo three artifacts had been retrieved, but the fourth one was still some ways away.

Green coloured aliens are the lieutenants. They are stronger than the foot soldiers. In the background you can see a blurry red patch. That's a boss-level alien. They are tough nuts to crack and often come with very annoying powers.

Standing in the path of an alien is dangerous. If the alien moves, it will push you back and also injure you. Alien movement is performed by the players. You decide the order in executing their movement, and sometimes you have options where they move to. Naturally you want to execute all these while minimising damage. However there are often too many aliens on the board and it is not easy to completely avoid damage.

The Play

Project: ELITE is a dungeon crawl style game, in a sci-fi setting. You have special abilities, you carry weapons, and you kill monsters while trying to complete a quest. What makes the game different is the real-time execution of player actions. The real-time segments come in short bursts, unlike in Escape: The Curse of the Temple where it is all in a single 10-minute take. Still, the game does deliver adrenaline-pumping excitement. It is certainly more complex than Escape. There is more admin work, like handling alien movement and attacks, so it may not be possible or desirable to make the whole thing real-time. I think the experience would be even better if it could be done.

The break time between the real-time segments is useful. You want to catch your breath, discuss tactics, assign responsibilities and decide what to do next round.

We won the game, but it was not easy. Early on we decided to split into two teams of two, each team going in a different direction to retrieve different artifacts. Ivan's team did their part quickly, but my team struggled. We were swamped by aliens and could barely keep them at bay. Our progress was slow. There were three spawn points for aliens, and we couldn't predict where and how many would enter the board. It depended on the cards we drew.

Sometimes we had to make personal sacrifices. In one situation we had options in moving the aliens, but both options would result in some of us to getting injured. It was not just a matter of seeing which option would result in less injury, or which option would prevent already injured players from getting further injured. We also had to consider who were in more useful locations and would be able to contribute more towards the objective. Ultimately, the objective was most important. Well, unless someone was going to get killed, because then everyone would lose.

The Thoughts

The real-time gameplay is exciting. I rarely see such being implemented in dungeon crawl type games. I can only think of Space Hulk. The dungeon crawl aspect of the game is common, nothing that strikes me as outstanding. It works well enough. It is the real-time mechanism and the dice mechanism which gives the game its novelty factor.

Mansions of Madness

Plays: 5Px1.

The Game

Mansions of Madness is a Cthulhu mythology game. It is scenario-based, and the scenarios are one-overlord-vs-multiple-investigators affairs. Every scenario is a mystery, with the overlord setting up the solution and knowing how the scenario works, while at the start of the game the investigators don't even know what they need to do to win. The investigators need to look for clues to piece together the winning condition, and they need to achieve the winning condition before time runs out.

The scenario I played was from the Call of the Wild expansion. I have not played scenarios from the base game so I can't make comparisons. I just know the scenarios in the base game happen indoors, while in Call of the Wild the scenarios are outdoors.

Most players play investigators, and there are many characters to pick from. As an investigator you explore the map to search for clues, you encounter events and resolve them, you try to work out the objective of the scenario so that you can work towards victory. The overlord player is the dungeon master. He can summon monsters to attack the players. He gets to play bad events on the investigators. He manages the scenario, and he tries his best to prevent the players from winning.

The card at the top left is a character card with the basic information and stats. The two cards at the bottom are configurable traits of the character. You have options and you can select a specific combination that you like, or that you think will be most suitable for the scenario you're about to play. The card on the top right is an equipment card.

Those tiles at the top left are a minigame. When you encounter certain events, the overlord will set up such minigames for you to solve before you can proceed further. In this particular minigame you need to connect the start and end tiles, and you only have a limited number of moves per turn to turn the tiles or to swap their positions.

Our particular scenario started with the four map tiles in the lower left forming the initial play area. The two additional tiles in the upper right were added as we explored the edges of the map. Edges with cards mean you can explore and thus extend the map.

That one on the left is one of the monsters. The one on the right is one of the investigators. The investigator is in a shed now, and when she exits she will run into the monster.

This is an event card. It says you need to solve a puzzle (i.e. a minigame) before you can enter the location you are trying to access.

As the investigators explore more, the map area grows.

That disc is a non-player character (NPC) in our particular scenario. He is a source of clues.

The Play

Spoiler Alert: I will talk a little about the scenario I played. No specifics and no answers, but if you want to play this scenario completely fresh, you may want to skip this section and go straight to the next section - The Thoughts.

Ivan taught the game and played the overlord. Jeff, Sinbad, Kareem and I were the investigators. At the start of the scenario, we the investigators regained consciousness at a camp surrounded by a mysterious mist. We couldn't remember what happened or how we got there. We just had a nagging feeling that there was something important we needed to do. But what? There was a dodgy-looking stranger at our camp urging us to move. We had to keep questioning him for clues. He obviously knew something we needed to know. We kept him close as we explored the area, trying to figure out what it was we were supposed to do here. Our scenario had a countdown mechanism, so we knew time was not on our side. There was an urgency to quickly find out our mission.

The monsters summoned by Ivan in the early game were more annoyances than threats. We could kill them if we wanted to, but they were just distractions Ivan threw at us. Killing monsters was not how to win. We needed to focus on learning the winning condition, and then achieving it.

The clues we picked up were mostly mumbo jumbo. We could not make much of them. It took a while to collect enough mumbo jumbo for them to start making sense. And they still didn't make a lot of sense. We were mostly Eurogamers, so we applied more of our Eurogamer instincts than our Ameritrasher skills. We worked out that to win the game, we needed to bring one artifact off the map in one specific direction before the countdown ended. If we picked the wrong artifact or wrong direction, we would lose instantly. It was not just about beating the clock. We started the game with four artifacts. Now one of the them was consumable, i.e. if we used its power, it would be discarded from the game. Obviously that could not have been the key artifact. If it were, the investigators could have used it up before they realised that it was the key to winning. There was no way a scenario could be designed with such a flaw. It turned out that we were right (of course!). This was doing deduction based on our experience as gamers and the logic in game design. It was not based on being immersed in the story of the scenario. For the rest of the mystery, we had to rely on the written passages in the clue cards, i.e. the mumbo jumbo. We probably took them too much at face value, e.g. we just considered whether the clues were hinting at a particular artifact (or direction), but we didn't think deeply enough about whether the clues meant to tell us to pick that artifact or not to pick that artifact. At least in my case, that was the Eurogame mindset working. I hadn't immersed myself in the narration enough. At one point we, the investigators, made a wrong conclusion about the direction we should exit in, and Ivan reminded us to think deeper about the clues we had on hand. It was then we realised that a particular clue which we had thought meant to tell us to go in a particular direction actually meant to tell us not to go in that direction. Ooops! Communication breakdown!

Eventually we agreed on what the clues were trying to tell us. What remained was to get the job done before time ran out. At that point the board was infested with monsters. The big monsters were out too. We knew we had no time to fight them. We needed to run for it. I was a little thankful that we had "wasted" some effort in killing the little monsters in the early game. Otherwise there would have been even more of them around to drag us down at this crucial moment. I'm still not exactly sure how to balance between killing monsters to prevent a build-up, and ignoring them to focus on getting the scenario objective completed ASAP.

Kareem had a Spider-tingling feeling that our conclusion might be wrong. In Star Wars-speak that's "I have a bad feeling about this". There was another artifact which we had considered being possibly the artifact. Kareem hadn't completely dismissed it. However it was in a house far away from where we were, and that house was now a party house for monsters. Even if we could get to it and avoid getting eaten by the monsters, we likely wouldn't have time to bring it off the map. So we stuck to the plan. Well, mostly. Jeff, Sinbad and I ran in one direction with our prized artifact. Kareem went on a side quest. He ran towards the second artifact. A bold move, but eventually it just got him killed. Jeff, Sinbad and I managed to force our way through the tangle of monsters, and we succeeded in getting our artifact off the map. It was then time for the final reckoning. We got the direction right, but unfortunately Kareem's hunch turned out to be right. We had the wrong artifact all along. The real one was the one he died trying to extract.

Running with the wrong artifact, we got lost in the mist, and ended up back at camp, and we collapsed into unconsciousness. We came to only to find that we had forgotten why we were here, and what we were trying to do. We just had a nagging feeling that we had something important to do, and we had to do it quickly. Then a suspicious stranger walked up to us and said, "Hurry up!".

More and more monsters were popping up and we were starting to get overwhelmed.

The big ones were here now. These were a major pain. We didn't have to fight them, but even if we tried to leave their presence, we might still get injured because monsters get a free attack whenever you try to run away from them.

This was the climax. We were ready to exit the map with the artifact which we decided was the right one. It was the moment of truth. And.... truth hurts.

Game end. Kareem died a horrible death, torn to pieces by three monsters.

The Thoughts

The most important part of Mansions of Madness is the stories and the narration. To fully enjoy the game, you need to immerse yourself in the narration, and not play it as a mechanism-first game. You need to be imaginative. The system is much more than a mathematical problem. The flavour text is not just flavour text. It is part of the core of the game.

The solution to a scenario is variable. It is determined by the overlord when he sets up the game. The clue cards being used will differ depending on the solution the overlord decides upon. The map grows in different ways depending on how the exploration cards are distributed. So a scenario will rarely play the same the next time round. However if you have played a scenario, you will know much about it such that the second play will have fewer surprises. You will already have a rough idea what clues to watch out for and you may already be able to devise a general strategy. In fact if you see the same clue cards coming out again, you will know that the solution will be exactly the same as before. Thus, I would argue that a scenario is technically replayable, but in practice your subsequent plays will be less interesting. This may not be a problem. My copy of Tragedy Looper comes with 10 scenarios, and I haven't even done half of them.

Level 7: Omega Protocol

Plays: 5Px1.

The Game

Level 7: Omega Protocol is part of a series of games by Privateer Press which share a same backstory. The individual games have different mechanisms and are about different parts of the story. An alien race fleeing an enemy race has sought refuge on earth. They made a secret pact with the American government, sharing their alien technology in exchange for human test subjects for their experiments. In Omega Protocol, something has gone wrong at the alien lab, and the government now wants to destroy it and all evidence of its existence along with it. So a team of elite soldiers is sent in to get the job done.

This is a dungeon crawl type game, similar to Space Hulk, Claustrophobia, Descent: Journeys in the Dark, Earth Reborn and Castle Ravenloft. One player plays the dungeon master (called the overseer here), and the rest are part of the same team trying to fulfill the objective of the scenario, killing monsters and exploring the map along the way. The game is scenario based, and the map, the mission, the types and number of monsters, and the events differ by scenario.

The monsters in the game, mostly the results of experiments on human subjects performed by the alien scientists.

Every round the soldiers decide their turn order and then take actions, e.g. moving, shooting, melee-attacking, opening doors, healing. Each action has an adrenaline cost - you take adrenaline tokens - and depending on the Stance card you've picked for your character that round, there is a limit to the number of adrenaline tokens you can take. The Stance card you pick (out of three) determines your walking speed, defense values and special abilities for the round. All the adrenaline tokens you collect when executing actions are eventually handed over to the overseer, and the overseer later spends them to take actions, e.g. activating monsters to attack the soldiers, and triggering his special abilities allowed by the scenario. This is very much like Stronghold - the more actions you take as the soldiers, the more actions the overseer gets to do too.

This is a character board. The two sections on the left are the basic ranged and melee weapons, the cubes indicating what type of dice you roll when attacking. The three icons at the top right indicate your max health level, intelligence and strength. The right section is actually a Stance card placed onto the character board. The Stance card determines movement speed, ranged defense and melee defense. It also determines your special ability for the round, and the maximum number of adrenaline tokens you can take. The four blue cards at the top right are skills that I have picked for the game. The two orange cards on the right are items I picked up during the game.

This grid is the overseer's special actions, and the types of actions is determined by the scenario. When the overseer executes an action, he places the required number of adrenaline tokens into the appropriate square. At the end of every round, some tokens are removed. After all are removed, the action can be executed again.

A scenario is set up with each room having some event cards. The event cards are predetermined, but the overseer gets to decide which ones to be placed in which rooms. The doors which the soldiers need to open may contain events too, e.g. being unusually hard to open or having traps. The soldiers have some options too as part of setup. They get to pick which special abilities and weapons to use. Some are unique for their characters, some are generic.

Trying to explain all the rules details will be a long and boring exercise. Let's talk story.

The Play

Ivan had read the rules, and taught Jeff, Dith, Sinbad and I the game. Naturally, Ivan played the overseer, and the rest of us played the soldiers. Jeff very innocently and conveniently slipped the team leader role to me, while he claimed the support role. Wait, what...?! Little did he know that the team leader was not necessary the one to do all the hard work, and the support guy was not necessarily the one to leisurely stay behind at a safe distance from the monsters...

The character I played.

This was the scenario we played. The soldiers (dark grey) started at the entrance on the left (the larger middle room). Our mission was to find the ventilation control room, turn on the ventilation for a few rounds to purge the toxic air in the lab, and then turn it off. We did not know the exact location of the control room yet. It was either at the top right corner of the map, or the bottom right corner. We had to make a guess. The red cards in the unexplored rooms are the event cards.

At the start of the game, we decided to head towards the right. The first door had just been opened, and now we were waiting to see what events Ivan had placed there. Monsters, of course!

We were quickly surrounded by monsters. Jeff (the guy in the middle in heavy armour) had strong firepower, and Ivan decided he was the biggest threat. Ivan focused his attacks on Jeff, ignoring Dith who was in front.

As the game progressed, we found that we were quite bogged down by the wave after wave of monsters. We spent too much effort swatting these pesky flies, and we were not moving swiftly enough. The more effort (i.e. adrenaline tokens) we spent on killing monsters, the more resources Ivan would have in sending more monsters at us and doing bad things to us. We decided we had better start running and ignore some of the monsters. These were small ones anyway and did not always attack successfully. An opening had just been created at the top left, right next to us, and four fresh monsters popped out. We had opened the door to this corner room on the right, but the control room we needed to find was not here. We now had to head to the other corner room.

Now Dith had sprinted ahead and taken up a defensive position in the control room, at the lower left. The rest of us were on the way. As dictated by the scenario rules, both of Ivan's big monsters were on the board now. One came in through the opening at the upper right. The other came in through the main entrance. Both were heading towards us. Imagine the Jaws theme music. We needed to turn on the ventilation as soon as possible. One annoying thing for Ivan was he had a bunch of small monsters at the top left blocking the way of his big monster. He had to spend adrenaline tokens to get them to step aside to let the boss through.

Now imagine the music of the Star Wars Imperial March. The little monsters had stepped aside to let the big one through. The green tokens are poisonous gas. They were triggered by Ivan's big monster, so we the soldiers were not affected. We didn't come through this way. The poisonous gas did not affect monsters, so no harm to Ivan's minions.

Jeff the slow and heavy had to spend effort healing himself and had not caught up with the rest of us. He was feeling the pressure now, especially when the group of monsters on the right started dancing to Michael Jackson's Thriller.

Now I had reached Dith's side, and the few monsters near the control room had been shot to pieces. Dith had deployed his sentry - an automatic machine gun that shot at any enemy that moved.

Our formation was almost complete. We just needed Jeff to take his place. The ventilation was now on. We needed to hold on for a few rounds, and then turn it off, and then we would win. Turning the ventilation on or off required a die roll, and it was not exactly easy. My character only had an intelligence of 2 (don't ask my why the team leader is dumber than his team members), which meant I could only roll two dice if I were to attemp turning the ventilation on or off. We needed someone with intelligence 3 to do this to have a better chance.

Our formation was now complete. I stood at the corner at the top, touching four monsters. I had a Stance card which prevented monsters from attacking me as long as I was adjacent to another soldier. They must attack him instead. This effectively made me an unbreakable shield. It's legal, but it's rather gamey. In this particular situation it was very handy. The two large monsters were almost upon us. Ivan could afford to let a row of small monsters surround us. The big monsters could stand behind the small ones and still attack, because they had a melee attack range of two. Normally the melee attack range is one.

Dith's character was replaced with a token now, because he was heavily injured and had passed out. One more hit and he'd be dead. Ivan was very close to killing him. Ivan focused his attacks on Dith, using not only the big monster, but also the gunner at the far right. In this game soldiers and monsters do no block line of sight for ranged attacks. Dith could not do anything now. One of us would need to revive him first, and only then he could start healing himself. We were surrounded and trapped, but the toxic air was almost fully vented. Eventually we managed to hang on until the air was clear, and we succeeded in making the roll to shut down the ventilation. It was a difficult roll, and all of us (well, except Ivan I guess) stood up and cheered when we made the roll.

It was a very enjoyable game. It's partly because I didn't have to read or remember the rules, so I could fully immerse into the story. It was also fun to be able to discuss the tactics openly while playing, since I was on the soldier team. It was fun to work on a problem together. We watched one another's backs, we reminded each other about dangers. I hope I don't make this sound like some silly corporate team-building activity. It's much much better than that.

The Thoughts

If you ask me what's different about Level 7: Omega Protocol compared to other similar games, I would say not much. It does have some interesting mechanisms, e.g. more actions by the soldiers translates to more actions by the overseer too, the overseer's grid of special actions, and the soldiers' Stance cards, but I think the overall feel when playing is not significantly different from other games of this type. I can say it is well crafted and it works. I certainly had a lot of fun.

The scenario setup allows variations. The overseer has some flexibility in how to place the doors and the event cards. The soldiers can also customise their abilities before the scenario starts. They can try to come up with a strategy specific for the scenario, and pick skills and weapons appropriate for that strategy.

Heroes of Normandie

Plays: 2Px2.

The Game

This is a Kickstarter game which Allen supported, and he got a ton of stuff for it. It is a squad level combat game with World War II as the backdrop. The game comes with a number of scenarios. Players can also play custom match-ups using a point system to build customised armies. The points are used not only to buy infantry and vehicles, but also to buy special equipment and special abilities.

At the start of a round, both players place order tokens on units they want to activate for the round. Each order token has a number which indicates the order of activation, and since the order tokens are stand-up blocks, these numbers are hidden from your opponent. So he knows which units you will activate, but not the sequence in which they will act. You get to place one decoy order which doesn't have any number and is only used for bluffing. Once all order tokens have been placed, players take turns activating units. Units can either move or shoot. If moving, one special move type is the assault, i.e. entering the same space as an enemy unit and fighting it. Not all units can assault. An assault will result in one of the units getting killed or being forced to retreat.

Units are thick cardboard tiles, and their characteristics and special abilities are all represented as icons on the tiles. There are various terrain features on the game boards, and their effects are all indicated using icons too. These are very handy once you learn all the icons. Basic unit characteristics include attack values against infantry units, against light vehicles and against heavy vehicles, movement ability, and defense value. Special abilities include things like being able to conceal itself, being able to cross water, opportunity fire, and shooting at multiple units. Combat is resolved by one die roll, with attack value, defense value, terrain effects and line of sight all affecting the roll needed to make a hit. When hit, some units are flipped to an injured side, while others are killed instantly.

Both players have a hand of cards, which grant special bonuses or trigger special events. There's a card which gives you an attack bonus when assaulting. There's another which lets you reroll a die. There's even one which lets you cancel a card play by your opponent. The cards are quite useful. There is no limit to how many you can play per round. At the end of the round you always draw up to your hand size. You can discard cards you don't want before you draw.

Cards in the game. Most can only be played at a particular phase of a round or in a specific situation.

Victory is determined by scenario specific rules. One common way of determining victory is the value of kills inflicted. Some platoons (and vehicles too) have kill values, and when you kill enough units in them, you will score the kill value.

The Play

This was the first scenario, a small one, using only two game boards. I played the Americans while Allen played the Germans. In this scenario, a spy plane drops a top secret document near the centre of the board, and both sides want to grab the document and then exit their sides of the board with it. There are five possible locations where the document may land, and the actual location is only determined at the end of Round 2. Allen and I carefully advanced towards the centre of the board while keeping our units under cover in the hedgerows. We used five random small square markers to mark the possible landing spots of the secret document.

My unit on the left managed to grab the document the moment it landed, and was now getting ready to run for it, while the other units prepared to get into position to hold back the Germans. My unit in the centre was standing exposed in the middle of the road and needed to get into cover ASAP. There were hedgerows on both sides of the road. At the bottom left you can see the terrain effect icons of a hedgerow. The yellow arrow with a +2 means infantry units here get a +2 defensive bonus. The stop sign on top of a grey and a purple arrow means both light and heavy vehicles may not enter the hedgerow. The triangle with a cross means the hedgerow blocks line-of-sight.

My letter bearer was now at the bottom right corner, running without looking back. At this point, which was past Round 3, both Allen and I had one light vehicle each which had entered play. I stopped mine right here in the centre of this photo. It was now hit and destroyed, but that was OK. I had intended to use it as an obstacle to stop Allen's vehicle (at the top left) as well as his infantry units.

I had the document in hand, so I had the luxury of playing defensively. Allen was forced to play aggressively because he needed to catch my letter bearer. By now I had killed a few of his infantry units, and his only unit left anywhere near the letter was outnumbered 3 to 1. I won this first match.

This is the second scenario - Saving Private Rex. The American general's dog (yes, dog) ran off into German controlled territory, so he commanded a platoon to sneak into enemy territory to get Rex back. At the start of the scenario no one knows exactly where Rex is, but there are five possible spots where he may turn up at the end of Round 2 or later. Every round he runs randomly around the board, unless an American unit catches him (somehow he recognises and hates Germans and will never follow them). If anyone fires near him, the shooting will scare him and he will run the other way. If the American unit accompanying him fires, it will scare him away too. The Americans' main objective is to get Rex back. Killing off the Germans will give a major victory.

I played the Americans again, and started at the lower left corner. The Germans had one machine gun unit near the centre of the battlefield, dug in inside a machine gun nest. It had limited visibility and could only look westwards. I had to be careful to stay outside its line-of-sight. The rest of the German units could enter the battlefield from any of the boards except for the lower left one. My units were now moving towards the centre, while Allen's Germans were closing in from the north and from the east. Rex had just appeared at the northern edge of the board. On his first random move, he ran straight towards the centre of the board, stopping right in front of the German machine gun nest. This was perfect for me, because I had a unit just two steps away from Rex. In such a situation, I could whistle to get Rex's attention, and I could order him to join one of my units. Good dog!

Allen and I did not have the patience to find Rex's token among the mountain of tokens that came with the game, so we used another dog called Hardboiled instead. Let's look at the icons on that German machine gun nest unit. The two red triangles mean this unit has a restricted line-of-sight, being able to see only a specific angle indicated by these two triangles. The crosshairs icon means this unit has the opportunity fire ability. It can shoot during the opponent's turn if an opponent's unit moves into its line-of-sight. The row-of-bullets-with-flashes icon means this unit can shoot at multiple units at the same time. The row-of-bullets-with-red-arrow icon means this unit can do suppressive fire, which won't kill an enemy unit, but will reduce its effectiveness in both fighting and moving. The skull-in-red-circle icon means once hit, this unit will die, as opposed to being flipped over to the injured side. The yellow, purple and grey arrows mean +4 bonus when shooting at infantry, +2 bonus when shooting at light vehicles, and not being allowed to shoot at heavy vehicles respectively. The big 8 means a defense value of 8. The big arrow with an X means the unit cannot move.

Rex (represented by Hardboiled) had now joined one of my units, and that unit was getting ready to run Forrest run.

It was a little anticlimactic how easy it was for me to retrieve the dog and to leave the battlefield with it. By doing that I was guaranteed a victory. Now the question was whether I would be able to score a major victory by killing enough German units. So Allen and I continued to fight. Eventually I was able to kill more of his units, but it was not sufficient to achieve a major victory. But at least my general was happy now that Rex was rescued.

I was lucky in both the scenarios that we played, being able to grab the document first, and being able to catch Rex so easily. Both these were fun-type scenarios and did not have serious tones. We had to look up rules and icon meanings quite often, but soon we were quite comfortable with the game flow and the icons, and gameplay became much smoother.

The Thoughts

The gameplay of Heroes of Normandie feels similar to Conflict of Heroes and Duel of Ages, because of the similar granularity. Due to how most information is put on the units and the gameboard, the game plays very smoothly once you learn the icons. The game flow is clean and simple. The combat factor calculation is mostly straightforward. There is a bit of luck because of the die rolls, and also because of the card play. The cards can be quite powerful, and they are a big factor during play. The game in play looks serious, despite the cartoonish look of the box cover and the rulebook. I feel the game is of light-to-medium weight, slightly more complex than Memoir '44, but less so than Conflict of Heroes. I wonder whether my experience with the first two scenarios is making me think the game has a larger luck element than it actually does. At the moment I think there is a significant luck factor, so the game should be played in a light-hearted way, closer to how you play Memoir '44 than how you play Conflict of Heroes.

One thing that it has which these two other games don't is the point system for building armies. This kind of system is commonly seen in miniature games. I have not experimented with this aspect of the game, so I can't comment on it yet. It seems to offer much variability.

Duel of Ages II

Plays: 2Px2 (learning scenarios).

The Game

Duel of Ages II is about combat in a virtual world, where characters and weapons from many different time periods, even futuristic ones, can come together to create very crazy scenarios. The battles are a futuristic sporting event, where contestants are transported into a virtual world and can be transformed into any character. The game is scenario-based. The simplest scenarios are just about "killing" all members of the opposing team. There are scenarios where you need to score points, e.g. by killing enemies, capturing enemies, damaging the enemy base, contributing treasures to some god and completing encounters. Regardless of the scenario objectives, you will need to fight. This is a squad level combat game where you control individuals.

The things you can do are very much what you can imagine you'd need to do in real-life combat. You move about. You shoot (but only if you have a ranged weapon). You melee-attack. You exchange weapons with your teammates. You salvage guns from a dead opponent. You perform opportunity fire at enemies who move within your line of sight. Every character is defined by a long list of abilities, each for a different purpose. Your Melee value determines whether you successfully attack an opponent in melee combat. You Damage value determines how much you hurt your opponent in a successful attack. Your Power value determines whether you inflict more (or less) damage to your opponent. There are three different shooting-related skills - Aim, Point and Throw. They are used for different types of ranged weapons. You also have stats to determine whether you are physically strong enough to carry a weapon, and whether you are intelligent enough to use it.

There is no dice in combat. You draw cards instead. Depending on the skill difference, e.g. attacker's Meles vs defender's React when you are melee-attacking an enemy, the card will tell you whether you are successful. If you are successful, you'll draw another card to tell you whether you need to apply any modifier to the amount of damage to inflict. Naturally, your chance of success is higher when there is a positive skill difference, but due to the variety in the cards there is no 100% guarantee.

This is a challenge card. The third column (sword icon) tells you whether your attack is successful, depending on the skill difference between you and your opponent. The fourth column (starburst icon) tells you whether you inflict additional or less damage if your attack is successful.

Facedown encounter tokens are placed all over the board at the start of every game. You send your characters to challenge these, and if you pass the challenge, your character gains one or more pieces of equipment. To pass a challenge, your character needs to have a specific skill (e.g. Intellect Level 6). The first attempt is always a little iffy, since the encounter challenge is initially facedown. However once revealed, if you have failed in the first attempt, you can always try to get another character with the required skill to pass the encounter.

The Play

Allen and I played two learning scenarios. The first one was all about melee combat. Ranged weapons were not in play. It was a straightforward kill-all-enemies scenario. The match started with everyone rushing for the encounters to pick up weapons, but very soon Allen sent one of his characters after one of mine, and the fighting started. This was a brute force contest. The pre-determined characters on the teams were more-or-less equal, so to gain an advantage Allen and I had to rely on the weapons we picked up, and also on trying to gang up on opponent characters. He picked up some wild animals (they are a type of weapon), and set them loose on me! Fighting was generally short and sweet. Characters have around 5 life points, and usually 2 or 3 successful attacks will get one killed. It's not usually easy to injure an opponent though, because even if you successfully hit him, sometimes you do not cause any damage. So weapons are important.

My four characters in the first game. Notice the long list of statistics along the right edge of each card.

That character at the top left, William Wallace, is on my team - the white team. There are two white bands on the sides of the character token. Allen has just set a dog on him! The other two characters, the sergeant and the gladiator, are both on Allen's team - the black team. They are ganging up on Wallace.

The redhead on the left is one of my team members. That stack on the right is a melee in progress. It has one of my team members, one of Allen's, and also Allen's panther. The yellow token in the foreground is an encounter token. We should not have placed it there during the scenario setup, because that's deep water and our characters can't get into that hex.

The second learning scenario was all about ranged weapons - melee weapons were out of scope. The victory conditions were a little different. My team had six characters, and in order to win I must kill off Allen's team of four within 9 rounds. For him to win he just needed to have at least one survivor. Things didn't quite work out as expected. I had lousy luck with the encounters, and kept getting non-melee weapons which were also not ranged weapons. I kept getting armour or transportation tools. But I needed guns! I not only didn't get the right weapons, I also tended to get equipment which my characters were too stupid to know how to use or not skilled enough to use effectively. Allen's characters got guns early, and he came after me instead! By the time I managed to get some decent ranged weapons and also swapped weapons around so that my characters could use their weapons effectively, I was already down by a few members. Things were not looking good. The supposed hunters had become the hunted. It would be impossible for me to win if Allen decided to just run and take pot shots, but he stayed put and we duked it out just for the heck of it. In the end I took more losses and lost quite miserably.

This is the 2nd scenario. My football player and WWII soldier have climbed up the hills (white patches). They look like they are trying to get into favourable shooting positions, but the football player actually only has a grenade which has an attack range of 2, and the soldier only went uphill to get to an encounter token (from which he didn't get anything useful).

The orange marker on the top left is a machine sentinel, and it's currently shooting at my blond girl team member. The other four characters are all armed with ranged weapons now, so they are carefully inching towards each other. Hiding inside buildings gives some cover and makes it harder for your opponent to hit you, but doesn't completely prevent it.

The Thoughts

I think I have to admit to myself now that squad level combat games are probably not my type. I was reluctant to tell myself so after I tried Conflict of Heroes. I could appreciate the clever design and how immersive it was, but I wasn't sure whether I really enjoyed it. I also enjoyed the stories that unfolded when playing Earth Reborn and how action-packed the game was, but till now I have not revisited it. I think whether you like Duel of Ages II will depend on whether you like this genre of games.

The crazy combinations of characters and weapons is a little disturbing to me, because it is implausible. However I think it is precisely this which will draw many players to the game. It makes the game very colourful. Once you get past this, the gameplay actually feels quite realistic. You need to worry about line of sight, terrain effects, capacity to carry equipment, and making the most of your characters' abilities. You can imagine yourself standing in the middle of the play area, thinking about what to do next. There can be a fair bit of randomness in the encounters. Even if you pass, you may not draw the appropriate weapons for the scenario. The randomness in combat feels about right - your chances are better if you have the right skills and weapons, but you can never be 100% sure.

Modern day guy in the centre uses bow and arrow, while colonial age guy on the right uses a neutron pulse rifle. This is very normal in this game.