I’ve been playing a few games of The Doctor Who Card game by Cubicle 7.  Here is what I think

Mechanics-This game is pretty simple to play and easy to learn.  What makes this game interesting is you don’t get to keep all the cards you are dealt.  You MUST pass a number of cards to the player on your right.  This means you know you will give great cards to your opponents, but you have to by the rules.  Every turn you start with five cards in your hand.  With these cards you have a few options.  You can play location cards that give you points at the end of the game.  You can play enemy cards to attack other players’ locations and gain their points.  You can play heroes to defend locations.  Attack and defense cards are played face down with higher number winning a combat.  This aspect makes both sides gamble to see who will come out on top.  You can play support cards to give effects listed on the cards.  You can discard cards to gain time points that allow you to buy extra cards.  The final option is to place cards in your reserve.  Since the only thing that really ends your turn is handing three cards to the player on your right, reserved cards basically function as extra actions in later turns.  Attacking and defending is a simple  The game runs till you run out of cards or one player has defended five locations or taken over five other players’ locations.  My Thoughts-This is great.  Game runs quick and is easy to learn.  Doesn’t need a whole large back story of Dr. Who to play, but it does make the game more fun to see who fights and think up what episodes that came from.

Theme-The game does reflect the Dr. Who world very well.  Its harder to defend places and save everything while destroying things is much easier to do.  I’ve won two games so far and both victories came from capturing other player locations.  As that’s a theme in the Dr. Who Mythos, it reflects the TV show pretty well.  However, don’t expect any characters from beyond the current seasons with emphasis on the Matt Smith Doctor.  My Thoughts-Good execution of the show on a small scale.  The Mechanics and theme work well together.  I’m pretty much up for this game whenever I get a chance.  I would like to see more Doctor Who enemies and characters, but that might be the realm of other expansions.  There is a free idea Cubicle 7!

Art-The cards are nicely done, but they used a painted art style.  The paintings are semi-realistic.  My Thoughts-I don’t hate the art style, but some of the paintings are juussst slightly off.  You know who it is, but you do a double take when you see them as you think something is up with the character.

My one problem with the game-A major part of this game is handing your hand to another player.  While this sounds simple, I’ve found I’ve become confused a few times.  If there was an insert or a direction of play vs direction of passing card, I would be less confused.  But this is nit picking.

Final Thoughts-Great game!  Go get this.  Its less than $30 on Amazon or in your friendly local game store.  Go give this a try.  If you are a Whovian, then this is a must! 9/10.

My wife is a Tolkien-o-phile, and I love co-op games, so I bought the new Wizkids dice game.  Here’s what we thought…

TL;DR-6/10.  Fun, but some execution problems.

Basic Mechanic-if you played quarriors, you kind of know this game.  Here is the game for the uninitiated.  You start with a base bag of dice.  These dice are six sided dice.  Every turn you draw five dice and roll them.  The dice have faces with characters, abilities, or resources.  You have to pay for character and these can be used to attack or be prepared to help other players battle.  This is where this game takes a major departure from the quarriors game.  In quarriors your battle the other players, but in this game you battle the forces of evil (more on that in a bit).  After paying character for battle and battling evil, you can buy characters or items.  At the end of the round, the first player then rolls the evil sides dice.  As the first player rotates, everybody gets a chance to be evil and everybody will lose if you don’t work together.  The evil dice represent  monsters and difficulties on the journey through the three Lord of the Rings books.  If all the monsters are defeated at the start of an evil turn, the players move through the books/movies and go to a new location.  As this is a Lord of the Rings game, every dice that the evil player has at the start of an evil turn gives corruption to the evil side and this cause the first player to lose points or to make dice unusable.  Make to many dice useless   games over.  Use to many points to lower your score?  You lose the game as the other players have a higher score.  That is the main conflict of the game.  You have to pick and choose your battles.  Take a loss for the good of the team or make other players dice useless so you have a higher score.  Also in the mix, you can ready dice for other players to use.  When people use your readied characters, you gain points.  If they don’t, then you might gain corruption ..thus the balance game begins…  My thoughts-Once you figure the conflict between players and the evil dice pool, the game is fun.  Getting to that point is a problem….

Presentation-Again, if you player quarriors in the new flat box, not cube tin, the game looks similar.  The game has some great packaging.  The box has nice rows for the dice AND the game comes with a plastic cover that goes over the dice to keep the in place if the box is tipped over!  As someone who plays these dice games, HAVING THINGS GET MIXED UP IS A VERY BAD THING!  The art is Lord of the Rings movie art, so beautiful.  Wizkids payed for the rights to it, so it should be!  My thought-I do have one major grip with the game and its size.  The game uses tokens for corruption and a ring for the first player.  Wizkids used cardboard tokens.  Ok, that’s fine for corruption, but for the ring?  Really guys?  This game was $50 bucks.  For that price I expect at least a plastic ring to pass back and forth!  What makes it worse is the size of the tokens.  The tokens are way to small!  The box has some decent storage space left so there is room for much large tokens, so I don’t know why the tokens are so small!  As with quarriors, the dice are a bit to small for me, but for $50 bucks you get about 100 custom dice.  As a dedicated RPG player, getting that many dice for $50 bucks isn’t that bad of a deal!  Also, I have a gripe with the rules, but I will save that for a separate section

Gameplay/Rules-The game plays pretty well when you know what your doing.  Each location give you so many options to buy from.  Get to a new location, unlock new dice/character/weapons to buy.  At each location you also get new evil dice and as you buy dice, more area evil dice go to the evil pool.  Since more players mean, more buyers for the dice and thus more evil dice in the evil pool, the game scales pretty well!  Also, if you want a much more touchy feely game, you can play a full co-op game too.  My thoughts-This game works well, BUT you have to know HOW it works.  I recently bought this game and the game just came out.  The copy I bought had rules printed on some basic, white folded computer paper.  Now I’m not a snob on looks, but it kind of was tacky especially for Wizkids and the Lord of the Rings license.  Things like this would not be an issue, EXCEPT, on the Wizkids web page they have the rules up as a PDF.  These rules look GREAT AND REALLY EXPLAIN THE GAME!  The rules I got with my copy are nowhere near as good.  I LOVE really complicated board games, but this one is not the most in depth thing I have ever played and it took my wife and I three times to play this game according to the rules.  Having the version 2 rules on her kindle helped, but why were these not in the copy I bought?  Again for $50 bucks I expect a rock solid game from a solid publisher.  When I have the right explication in front of me, this game is great, but you CAN’T play the game as intended by the base rules.  Heck, there is even a major typo in how to use items in the game in the copy I received.

Overall-I asked my wife what she thought as I bought this game for her as a gift.  I thought I might be a little to harsh with my review of 6/10, but that is exactly the same score she gave this game.  When you know what your doing, this game is great.  But as presented, it has some major problems.  Maybe later copies of the game will be much better or have an insert telling you to go online for errata and updates.  That would have really helped.  All and all, if your friend has a copy and knows how to play, give it a whirl.  Its a great time and has a surprising amount of strategy compared to the basic quarriors game strategy of buy the most expensive dice possible.  However, if you are off by yourself with your friends, then this game might not be the best if you don’t have a baseline for this game.

At my favorite coffee shop, I ran an intro to advanced game of  Kobolds Ate My Baby! (KAMB!).  This is one of the quintessential slap stick, beer and pretzel RPGs of the day.  What did I think?

Mechanics-In KAMB!, you have four stats.  When you want to do something, you get a number of d6 based on the difficulty and must roll lower then the stat of your character.  That’s it.  The GM or as its known in this case the Mayor, may add or subtract from a stat, but that is it.  My Thoughts-Slick and easy to do.  I loved this!

Character Generation-  Characters are made in less then 5 minutes.  Let me do it from memory-Roll 2d6 four times for your stats, roll 1d6 for an edge, roll 1d6 for a bogie, roll 2d6 for armor, roll 2d6 for weapon, and roll 2d6 for a random item.  Choose skills (up to six or your extraneous skill)  if you choose the magic skill, roll 2d6 for a spell.  That’s it.  Since your characters have a 5 minute half-life, you will make them as quickly as they die.   My Thoughts-This is BRILLIANT!  Game doesn’t stop when you die, a new character starts up quick and we move on fast.

General Gamplay-Kobolds die quick and the game plays like the bastard child of a game of DnD and improv.  The goal is to have fun and to roll with punches with as little plot as possible.  The hope is to just have fun.  Piss of the DM/Mayor?  Take a death check and see if random arrows spear your player.  Die from an epic fight with a cat?  Stand up, and tell the noble story of Fuzzybutt the wizard and join back in right away.  Table pissed at the DM for a roll?  Have the party sing a Kobald Drinking song to make that ass reroll!  My Thoughts-All this makes the game pure awesome!  Dont look for a plot, but look for some fun!  But honestly with the system and mechanics, you could do a serious game.  I wouldn’t want to because of the fun, but you could.

The Book-The KAMB! book is 42 pages.  You can read this in 5 minutes and it comes with an adventure.  Best part is the adventure gets you into the game fast.  Go to drive through RPG and you can pick up another adventure right now for free and a third parody adventure for 2 bucks!

My Players Thoughts-The group I played with is my DnD Next group.  After 4 hours of KAMB!, my players now want to stop DnD Encounters and switch entirely to KAMB!. It doesn’t get much better then that.  I wish I could take all the credit for this as the Mayor, but this system makes it easy.

Final Thoughts-Get this!  I got this through the kickstarter and for the money I payed, I’m getting the color edition later.  Bur right now I got the B&W edition and while color would make it look pretty, this games awesome start to finish.  Go buy now and remember ALL HAIL KING TORG!

Random Awesome?!- John Kovali, the main artist of the game talked with me and my players via twitter during the game.  That made of of my players squee when she realized that the also did art for her favorite game Munchkin.