Forum Overview :: Reviews :: Vol. 3

[quote name="FABIO"]New complexity rating! 1-10 1 = War, 5 = Risk, 10 = Starfleet battles <b>Shadowlord</b> by laudablepuss request! 2 or 4 players. Move your starting 3 characters around. Recruit new characters. Some are warriors with high attack, some produce ships that increase your strength and mobility, some are diplomats that can recruit new characters. Interesting twist was that there was a fifth faction of evil entities called shadows that lived intheir fortress in the middle of the board. Some of them would periodically be released and wander around the board attacking everyone. You could storm their fortress and capture the Showdowlord's crystal of power that gave you a large advantage. The longer you waited, the more shadows left the fortress and the easier it was to take, but if you waited too long (5 reshuffles of the deck) then the Shadowlord grew too powerful and everyone lost. Bought this when I was like 8. I remember thinking it was good, but too complicated for any of us to ever try again. Tried playing it again twelve years later. I remember we ran into a bunch of blind spots in the rules and were stumped on how to resolve them, so we just went back to playing Shogun again. Maybe it'd work if we gave it another shot, which we never did. Recommendation: Nostaltia says it was good, recent memory says it didn't work. Availability: Bought it in '88. Most likely long discontinued. Complexity: If you're eight years old, then an 8. If not, then about a 6.5 <b>Dark Tower</b> by laudablepuss request! This thing was the shit when I was 5 years old. Totally radical early 80's work of electronic genius. Move around a board, hit the button on the dark tower according to the space you landed. Motors rotated a screen inside and lights lit up the panel with your result. Get money from raiding crypts, use gold to buy more food/warriors/etc. Collect the 4 keys to attack the dark tower itself. Game was mostly random luck on whether or not you won battles, found a lot of gold, etc. No player to player ineraction, just racing each other to beat the dark tower first. Recommendation: Boring for anyone but little kids who can wow at the sounds and lights. Availability: Selling for hundreds of dollars on ebay. Definately not worth it. BUT Complexity: 4, keeping track of all your gold and everything makes it a bit too complicated for the only demograph it would be fun for. I had to get my father's help to play when I was 5. <b>History of the World</b> A very decent, simple, not too long game. Sort of like Risk with 5% of the dice rolling and units to keep track of. Basic gameplay is each round is an "epoch" of history. Each epoch has a certain number of civlizations that can sprout up. Each player gets dealt a civilization to play that round, and no one knows who's which until it's played. Start out in a territory with a certain number of armies (usually 2-8, can sometimes go as high as 16) and expand just like Risk. Past epoch pieces remain on the board and never move again, but can be fought and taken over by future epochs. Scores are calculated each round based mostly on how much territory your pieces from all epochs control. The only problem is that they try to balance the civilizations, but aren't entirely successful. It doesn't ruin the game, but sometimes someone can get an early Indian or Chinese civ and hold that valuable territory unopposed for multiple epochs for a huge advantage. Getting the Romans during their epoch puts you at an ungodly advantage. There was some dumb rule that the person in first place got bonus points every round, which we never used because it just helped cement someone's early lead. Availability: High (Sold through the new Avalon Hill) Recommendation: A pretty fun Risk alternative for the non-hardcore crowd, though the hardcore should still have fun with it. Complexity: 4. People who don't normally play games can pick it up. <b>Battlecry</b> Tactical civil war game. Infantry, Cavalry, and cannons move around and fire on a simple hex map. Board is divided into thirds: left, right, and center. Each turn you pick a card that will tell you to move 1 to 3 units on the left, right, or center part of the board (along with a few other special cards). Even though you may be in a good position, you have to hope you get the cards to take advantage of it. Not the largest amount of strategy involved, mostly down to the luck of the cards, but still fun and relatively quick & simple. The biggest problem though is that most of the scenarios heavily favor the Confederacy. The union outnumbers them, but the south always gets more cards to reflect better leadership. Even though the union usually outnumbers them, it doesn't matter for shit because they can't move all of them, and battles end when you simply kill six units, regardless of how large your starting force was. We have yet to play a campaign (playing all the scenarios in order and keeping track of battles won) where the North wins. The only fair way is to switch sides and see how badly each side can win as the confederacy. Recommendation: Kind of fun, balance tilted to the Confederacy though. It helps that the games are quick. Availability: High (sold through the new Avalon Hill) Complexity: 5 <b>The American Civil War</b> Another civil war game, this time on a strategic scale. Plays pretty much like Axis & Allies. Receive production points based on territories owned and build things with them. Battles are sort of interesting. You set your units up on a 3x3 grid representing your left, center, and right flank with the middle row being no man's land. Each unit can move one space or fire in a round. You don't (usually) see your opponent's setup until the battle starts. First person to lose all their units on just one flank loses and must retreat. Ultimately though, this game just doesn't pass muster. Again, the balance is off. I'm starting to think all these civil war games are made by redneck armchair generals who swear that the south could have won, if only <i>they</i> were in charge. The advanced rules give ridiculous bonuses for cavalry and leadership, which the south has an advantage in. Games play out with historical inaccuracies on par with the Japanese closing in on Moscow through the middle east in Axis & Allies. Southern cavalry runs amoke and captures northern cities like Chicago(!), Philadelphia(!!), and New York(!!!), which is always the Southern player's best bet. The northern player's best bet is to amphibiously land a large force in Florida and move up and capture the southern most Confederate cities. It's a race to see who can bite the other's tail off first, with Confederate leadership and cavalry bonuses dominating battles. There's also the poor manual, which is a bit confusing and fails to clarify a lot of points, leaving you to guess. Move into an enemy city and their rail network is reduced by one point. Fair enough. But you could just move in and out of a citiy every turn. Do you reduce the network by one everytime, destroying their entire rail system just by sacking one city over and over again? Does each city only count once, even though you can always buy more rail points? Things like this and more are never clarified. Recommendation: Could have been a fun Civil War version of Axis & Allies, but the balance sucks, the behind the lines city capture raids ridiculously overpowered, and the rules murky. I guess you might have some fun with it for a play or two if you have plenty of freetime, but Battlecry is a more fun, simpler, and quicker civil war game. Availability: High Complexity: 7 <b>Awful Green Things from Outerspace</b> This is supposedly some cult classic. God knows why. It sucks. Premise is a "wacky" version of Alien. A ship's crew starts scattered around the ship, with an adult alien to start (or a few alien eggs, I forget). Aliens can be eggs, babies, or adults. Each turn you can choose to promote one life cycle stage (all eggs hatch to babies, all babies grow to adults, or all adults lay an egg). The crew must kill them all before they are wiped out. You can pick up weapons around the ship, some attack all aliens in a room, others attack only one alien. You don't know what effect each weapon will have until you use it; it's totally random. It could have no effect, stun them, kill them, or cause them to multiply. The entire game boils down to getting lucky and ending up with an area effect weapon that's lethal to the aliens. If you get one, the crew wins. If not, they lose. There's nothing else to this game. Recommendation: "Zany" until you realize it's all about getting a lucky weapon. Then it's crap. Availability: Discontinued, yet in high demand for some unknown reason. Not worth it at all. Complexity: 3.5[/quote]