Martin Sample - Mar 22, 2005 3:57 pm (#833 Total: 883) "Kent, meltdown is one of those ugly buzzwords . I prefer to use the term ' unrequested fission surplus' " - Montgomery C . Burns Well, I am trying to catch up from being away from work for BROGFEST . Here is a brief recap of games played : - 2 games of STRUGGLE OF EMPIRES . We all really enjoyed the game, although the second one with 7 players seemed a bit too many . 5-6 is probably optimal . But the open ended nature of the system and the relatively quick play of each turn make it a great club meeting game . Would be interesting to see it make WBC as a tourney, although I could see people, the Euro weenies especially, falling to analysis paralysis to mini max their VP point haul . But for a beer and pretzels type sitting, it fits the bill . Now I am going to have take a look at Empires of the Ancient World ( same designer/company ) to see how it stacks up . I played Prussia and came in one point behind the leaders due to having to deduct 7 VP for the highest Unrest level. - 1 game of FREDERICH . Don't read the rules - have someone who knows them explain, or just start playing . Anyone who knows it can teach it in 10 minutes . The card combat system has some subtle parts - everyone will gang up on Freddy and try to fight him in the same suit . Our game ended when the yellow Austrian ally ( can't remember the name ) came back from being wiped out to take the game for Austria . High tension watching Freddy race from battle to battle and pray the Hand of Fate card would send one of his tormentors packing . Another big thumbs up. - 3 games of BANG! With all the expansions . Good late night filler . In one game the 3rd player on the first turn almost killed the sheriff . With the expansion you have TWO Dynamite cards . House rule doesn't allow them to be discarded . Several times both were in play at once, chasing each other around the board . Will bring to GMT East to see how many Stein flushes we can see . - a quick game of Hannibal with Wray Ferrell . He made the mistake of going first as Rome and then playing interrupt cards several turns in a row . This meant Carthage had 2-3 unanswered card plays at the end of the turn . Scipio fought a big battle and lost on turn 8 and Wray threw in the towel . - SWORD OF ROME . We were playing with the Carthaginian expansion that Wray wanted to test . The Carthaginians and Greeks were going at it hammer and tongs in Sicily while the rest of us dealt with each other . As Rome I went on an Al Swearengen like tirade after rolling 4 times in a row and getting either a 2 or a 3 result on fricking Antium. I recovered later on, but Mark Hinkle's wife took the gold as the Etruscan Samnites . - Manifest Destiny . Eh . As Wray pointed out, it is hard to imagine why Sports gives on an advantage on the attack and there are other weird disconnects . But some clever mechanics . Seems like SOE, it could REALLY drag in the endgame, as there are no secrets other than the cards in your hands . Some felt that the one per turn limit on MD cards was harsh - Richard was stuck with 3 of them when Era 1 ended . - Revolution . Wanted to see what $85 gets you . As it turns out, a seemingly impenetrable rule book . The individual components are stunning to look at ; but the map gets crowded with all the counters and they kind of blend in with one another. This game begs for an extended example of play . We set the game up and gave up halfway through a rather lengthy pregame turn. - Cave Troll . Another Fantasy Flight el cheapo small game . Not as bad as Wreckage….but few things are. It only took about 30 minutes. It reinforced my motto of being wary of anything suggested by Todd Goff. - Mercantile Kings - Wray's game on trading in some Roman time period . A simple Euro that is basically the trade phase of Civilization with some random events . As he put it, you could change " Gold" to " Delithium Crystals " and voila the game could take place in space. Not my cup of tea. Kind of bland. - Plague . An older British game on transporting bodies of plague victims to the graveyard . Simple mechanics and some very good tongue in cheek humor . If Phalanx did this with some of their top notch graphics instead of the pastel board that only Craig Grando could like, this might be worth a reprint as a fun Euro . Larry Burman - Mar 23, 2005 11:56 pm (#858 Total: 883) "You want my advice? Go back to Bulgaria." - Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca A Swell BROG Fest Another great BROG Fest! Thanks to Richard for his gracious hosting, and to Kevin for his excellent reporting. I enjoyed Medieval; one of the truly great multi-player games. It can't be hard to learn, either, as the winner always seems to be someone who is just learning the game. "Vinegar Joe's War" was a pleasant surprise. A very intriguing game from S&T. The British aren't tied down by any idiot rules either. As the Japanese, I rolled abysmally, and took much too long to take Singapore. Jim Anderson's Allies were well into a solid invasion of Siam by the time I finished down there. While it was technically a draw per the victory conditions of the short game, Jim was positioning himself to give the Japanese a very hard time. Interesting situation. I played Carthage in Wray's experimental 5 player version of Sword of Rome. One of the most exciting games I've ever been in. The piracy rules need some reworking, as they weren't much fun. However, as a simulation of Carthage vs Greeks in Sicily, it was spot on. Mark Hinkle nearly won the game using an incredible hand of cards to lay siege to Carthage. The main Carthaginian army at Lilybaeum used an emergency trump card to whip the army back to Carthage, and beat the Greeks in battle outside the gates. Then the shattered Greeks were driven back to a defecting Syracuse. Carthage followed for the coup de main, but were waxed at Syracuse as completely as they had won at Carthage. Then Greeks gallantly attacked Lilybaeum, and were eventually beaten off. Syracuse and most of Sicily wound up in the Carthaginian empire, but there wasn't much left of either army. What a fight! SoR is really a fine game. Also enjoyed the Ragnar Bros. games, King & Castle and Viking Rage. Hardly simulations, but they were fun and evocative, with clever strategies possible. BROG Fest is a true pleasure: laid back, informative, and friendly fun. Only regrets: No Pear Crisp, and I didn't get a chance to play BANG! Kevin Nikolai Payne - Mar 24, 2005 12:00 pm (#860 Total: 883) "Forget the gagwallers...my light sabre accidentaklly kicked on when I was putting it in my front pocket, and there's nothing on the cybernetic enhancement charts to replace what I lost!" --Brian Van Hoose, Knights of the Dinner Table Late, but here at last...BROGfest Saturday & Sunday Sorry for missing my Saturday night report, but the wine was flowing freely at the BROGfest dinner (about the only thing that flowed freely, but more on that later). Between that and too much O’Ryan’s Oatmeal Stout from the Smokehouse, I was the happiest I’ve been since my college days, and that’s saying a lot. Saturday saw the arrival of more guests, and at one point every table in the Crow’s Nest was full. The two round tables got claimed for multiplayer games, and there were quite a few run off on them, including BANG, GUNSLINGER (looks like we have a problem with shooting games, though I never did get a game of FRAG off the ground), OVERTHRONE, MANIFEST DESTINY, KINGS & CASTLES, and there may have been one or two others that I don’t recall. Elsewhere, there were some rounds of Phalanx’s NAVAL BATTLES, DRESDEN 1813 from NES, GRINGO (the Battle of Buena Vista), an attempt at Phalanx’s REVOLUTION, more VIKING FURY, the finish of THE FAR SEAS and beginning of CRUISER WARFARE, nd again, at least one or two others thsat slipped under my radar. Then there was…..(say in sepulchral tones) “THE DINNER”. Don’t get me wrong, the setting was delightful, the wait staff attentive, friendly and pretty, the food quite good…but slllooooowwww. We sat down at 7:30 and did not leave the table until after 10, and much of that time was spent waiting. There was good reason, of course: they had only one chef working, and the restaurant is new so they really weren’t quite cognizant of how to deal with a party of 25. They weren’t terrifically forthcoming about the delays, which was not good, and they failed to offer us anything to tide us through until entrees arrived. These trickled in to the three tables about 5 plates at a time over the course of 2 hours. Mind you, the food was quite good. The wait was rather long. Fortunately it seems that class of people who attend BROGfest are all excellent conversationalists. Still, it would have been nice to have a cheese plate, or more bread, or something. Some of us even slipped out at 9 p.m. to score some of the free cookies offered in the lounge at the Vendue. A bit déclassé, perhaps, but as Wray Ferrell put it, “If I sit for two hours and eat three prawns, and a lump of bread, I’m going to look for other nourishment.” After the dinner, Mike Cox and I went back up to the rooftop to try out CRUISER WARFARE. Unfortunately we were hampered by the miscibility of map and counters. That is to say, counters gorgeous (as you would expect from AP) but map ugly--and when combined, guaranteed to cause blindness in short order. We did get set up though and managed to play through a couple of turns before calling it quits for the night. We intended to get in a few more turns Sunday morning. Sunday morning was one of those "I don't want to get out of bed but damn, I'll miss breakfast if I don't". So I got up, had some chow, and got caught up in a wonderful chat with Our Noble Host. The discussion ran the gamut from admiring the young woman who was serving milk, tea, coffee, juice (where was she from again? One of the former Soviet Caucusus states I think, gorgeous eyes!) to many other subjects. Because of that, I am afraid and must apologize to Mike Cox because while he went up and waited patiently for me to arrive for CRUISER WARFARE, I kept yakking with Richard. After finishing there it was back to my room, throwing everything into my bags and hauling them back to the Vendue Lobby for storage while I went back to the game room. Mike had to get on the road, but we both agreed that we would be doing our own maps for CW as soon as possible. We'd like to try it Cyberboard but we're not sure AP would approve--actually we're darn sure they wouldn't approve, more's the pity. Throughout the morning, various of our confreres ran the gauntlet to say goodbye, but a good healthy core of folks still hung around, unwilling or unable to pull away from the Glory that is BROGfest. I got in on a game of MEDIEVAL, with Larry, Matt, and I'm fiddled if I can remember who else at this late date. I'll have to look at the pictures. Richard and some of the others sat down to a game of PLAGUE, approriately enough, so the whole atmosphere in the final hours was very historic and deadly. Once more I chose my usual Byzantium and Russia (the Greater Orthodox Co-Prosperity Sphere), but I believe in the future I will definitely choose a Catholic power at start. The other players cleaned up on Crusades in the first few turns and I was left--me, the Second AND Third Romes!--with a few dusty florins and a couple of dead rats in the treasury. We had a good time, especially when the new guys started to figure out the whole "have the mindset of a medieval king, plot, backstab, have fun" angle. The Mongols were fairly well spaced until the last three which all came out in two turns. IIRC, we also fought off two of them. Another mass exodus ensued after MEDIEVAL and PLAGUE were done, and I ended up popping over to the Smokehouse with Larry, Richard, Matt and his wife for a final meal together, Mike W., Wray and someone else were at another table. I must say, the crunchy grouper sandwich was quite good. Had one last glass of that Oatmeal Stout too, Larry's treat. Then it was off to the airport (thanks for the ride Larry!) and home to Quincy on three very crowded flights, with a 45 minute wait for security at Tampa. I have to say that it is clear that BROGfest is NOT just about games. It is about games, good food, camaraderie, and great conversation. It is small and friendly (I think we only had a total of 30 people or so, and they weren't all there at the same time) and if the same Vendue venue is used, you should give serious consideration to attending. While I was fighting an inner ear infection and sore feet, being able to meet and put faces with names I knew from CSW was a treat-and-a-half, and the whole event was, if not a well-oiled machine, a pleasant and surprisingly cordial affair. And the bar babes were hot too. That's it, that's all for the BROGfest 2005 Reports from me. I'll get the rest of the pictures off the camera later and get them posted. Thanks for listening, and good night! Tom Slizewski - Apr 3, 2005 10:55 am (#875 Total: 883) Long After Action Report Had some log-on difficulties so here’s my much delayed, though still highly relevant, AAR: Having just recently moved to South Carolina and being in driving range of Charleston, I wasn’t about to miss the much ballyhooed Brogfest. You can’t go wrong spending a weekend playing games in good company and this proved no exception. I started off learning how to play Sword of Rome. I’m a fan of Hannibal, PoG and TNW and was told this game was similar to Hannibal. It’s not. The two have only casual similarities. To me, SoR felt more like Successors. We didn’t have any experienced players in the game and played many things wrong so I don’t feel like I really played the game the way it’s meant to work and can’t offer any valid critique (I know that doesn’t stop most people). SoR is the type of game where each player has unique special abilities (each side has its own deck of cards exclusive to it for example) and rules that only apply to them. This increases the learning curve and you really need to play each of the four sides (or at least study their cards) before being able to formulate any effective strategies. I’d like to play it again sometime. We followed SoR up with Ragnar Brothers’ Viking Fury. This game has the map silk-screened onto what could serve as a dish towel. If your friends are prone to spill drinks, this may be the title to get (though I can’t vouch for its color fastness and there’re no laundering instructions attached. For all I know it may be dry clean only). “Fury” has little simulation value but is a fun game you can play with non-gamers. It’s a tad more complex than Risk but with more options and a bit less dicey. You’re often trying to roll higher than a 3 on 1d6 in this game. If you fail to do this consistently you will lose. It seems dropping off settlers in large numbers, while also keeping an eye on accomplishing the high VP Sagas is the path to victory. Given the era it’s representing the graphic presentation didn’t bother me as a player but Fury certainly won’t win any beauty contests. Its appeal and marketability would increase greatly if it didn’t look like it was cranked out on a mimeograph machine in someone’s basement. That was it for Friday. On Saturday we continued with our Ragnar Brothers theme. This time it was Kings and Castles, K&C is even uglier than VF but far less dice dependent, having none. Several novel concepts make K&C a winner in my book. My favorite is that you pick which English kings you will represent at the beginning of the game by placing one of your tokens on the chronological king track on the map. This track determines the turn order. You effectively pick when you will play and for how long you will sit out. K&C is low brain-drain and should appeal to gamers and non-gamers alike, though the strategy (combat is diceless and involves placing your various units for maximum effect) is something the casual gamer isn’t going to easily grasp: not because it’s hard, but because it’s unconventional. Speaking of unconventional, I managed to convince four others to play a game of Overthrone even though I told them they wouldn’t like it. Overthrone is a non-collectible card game from R&R games that almost no one likes the first time they play it. I first played this game years ago and thought it okay, not great. But after playing it a half-dozen times (a group of co-workers and I were stuck at an airport) it starts to shine. My coworkers and I have now played 100+ games of Overthrone and each of us bought a copy. It’s vaguely set in pre revolutionary France and you use cards representing nobles, musketeers, courtiers, gold and land holdings to try and score the most points and garner the king’s favor. It’s very good to be the king in this game. I think most players at Brogfest were more confused than impressed by Overthrone, but if I can get ‘em to play 5 more times they’ll be hooked, guaranteed. After that it was time for Avalon Hill’s old Gunslinger. My roomate, fellow Aiken-ite and self-proclaimed boardgame junkie, Todd Goff, loves this game and volunteered to serve as narrator. We randomly picked characters and I got the “Old Man.” For reasons not readily apparent, the OM is particularly good at hand-to-hand fightin’. He also favors the simple things in life: like the double-barrel shotgun. Gunslinger falls solidly into the simulation category. It seems everything is there just to try to mimic reality. This makes it very detailed with a steep learning curve. These kinds of games will probably never be made again as boardgames. There’s a good bit of drudgery and record keeping involved, something that computers handle without complaint and in 1/64,000th the time. In the game my OM loaded his shotgun, ran up to the closest cowpoke, dodged a few bullets, jabbed him in the ribs with the barrel and blasted him. To the game’s credit, a character hit by a shotgun from an adjacent hex skips the rest of his turns and wakes up dead. Without so much as a swig of Ensure or a change of Depends, the Old Man then turned on the other gunslinger and after a bit of maneuvering managed to land a pistol shot a half-inch north of his nose. In game terms it was characterized only as a BE (Bull’s Eye), but you gotta use your imagination to maximize the fun of these games. Gunslinger’s the kind of game you don’t want to have to learn by reading the rules. They’re dense, hard to follow and about as much fun to read as the novelization of the recent King Arthur film (providing there is such a thing). I found that adding the word C*******er at the end of every rule paragraph increases reading enjoyment. And, if HBO is to be believed, realism as well. After that it was another round of Viking Fury with new players. The game’s got decent, not great, replay value. The highlight of the game was the ongoing strategy discussion between Richard and I, wherein I advanced the radical idea that spending all of your actions trying to score points and then going home was more efficient than staying at sea with just one crewman and using your following turn doing just one thing and then going home. The debate remains unresolved. The gods however obviously favored me as Richard rolled nothing greater than a two after we called a truce. We finished just in time for “dinner.” The word in this case isn’t meant in the traditional sense of eating. This dinner mostly involved waiting and talking. Talking is good. Waiting (like fire to Frankenstein) B-A-D. At random intervals a very large plate would arrive containing a very small amount of food. That’s the way tapas work and it’s fine if you’re with a small party. In a room with 20 hungry gamers, it’s scary. The only thing that averted a possible cannibalism incident was the hotel’s serving of free cookies at 2100 every night. At 2058 we sent several scouts to the cookie staging area and they returned with sweet, sweet nourishment. Our dinner party, having eaten all the cookies, exfiltrated the AO soon thereafter for a couple rounds of the game Bang. I managed to win the second game of Bang as Sheriff due entirely to my erstwhile deputy, Matt, sitting to my immediate right. He drew every gadget and power card in the game. Not satisfied to just off our opponents, Matt wanted to kill them in creative ways with howitzers and dynamite, earning him the nickname Dr. No. Many were the casualties that uttered the C-word before buying the farm of course. Brogfest ended for me with a game of GMT’s Medieval. It’s a title I’ve long wanted to try but hadn’t heard enough good things about to buy. Most of the players were relatively new to the game and though we got the rules right it seems we didn’t play aggressively enough. Few player-occupied territories were ever attacked. Rather than the times being nasty, brutish and short, they were merely inconvenient with occasional flare-ups of a violent nature. Overall I liked Medieval but can’t imagine playing it using the provided cards (there is no map). The cards are too small, too light, shift too easily and don’t work well considering the amount of counters they’re called on to hold. This game needs a map and I understand there’s one available on the web that repeat players of this game print out. Otherwise the components are first rate, with the various kingdom cards particularly pretty and functional. I’m loathe to judge games after one playing but my gut feeling is that it’s a solid expand-and-hold game but one that may hinge too much on a few critical die rolls. In our game the Mongols successfully invaded central Europe, the area with the highest defense value, and shafted the Holy Roman Empire player. It strikes me the Mongol rolls can make or break you in this game. After Medieval we packed up our toys and zipped back to Aiken on what turned out to be the nicest day, weather wise, of the con. I’d brought a playtest copy of my Crusades non-collectible card game but was loathe to try it out in this crowd, it being a rather simple affair concerned more with playing with cool knight cards than simulating anything (it will be marketed at the fantasy and renaissance fair crowd, not wargamers). A few impressions of the games I saw but didn’t participate in: Manifest Destiny: Looks like a Euro that abused steroids. Lots of fiddly-bits and interesting rules mechanics that don’t seem to add up the F word. Fun. Cruiser Wars (I think that’s the title of the Avalanche Press game that was being set up but not played). I can’t remember an uglier map in any game. It looks like a large sheet of coupons, complete with thick dotted lines indicating where you’re supposed to cut. It’s hideous without being functional (I’m told). Revolution. Like everyone in the room I was attracted by the tre chic components, interesting map and offbeat topic. Like everyone I looked it over, became confused, saw that it takes 4 to 8 hours to play and decided on something else. It remained unplayed the entire time I was there. Into A Bear Trap. The map looks like someone spilled long-expired Pepto-Bismol on an old SPI Fulda Gap mapsheet. Not hideous, just a curious color choice. That’s all I have time for. We’ll be holding a gameday in Aiken come May or June. Everyone’s invited: nice digs with lots of space, a pool, woods, food.