Gary Robinson - 10:23pm Oct 13, 2000 PST (#1821 of 1823)
Curious about the revival of Absinthe in the U.K.

There were some posts about this game on the Columbia list that were so
interesting I will post them here in their entirety. I hope no one
minds.

------------ Steffan O'Sullivan:

I played my first game of Wizard Kings last night. This is based on only
one game, so obviously should be taken with a grain of salt.

The short version: I don't think it works as written, but it looks
fairly easy to hack into something I want to play.

A little more detail:

First, the rules need more blindtesting - they're still confusingly
written, though I don't think they're incomplete rules, themselves.
Well, not by much, anyway. Rivers need another sentence, and magic
spells need another paragraph.

It's simplified Victory, with elements of Pacific Victory thrown in. And
some new stuff.

After three readings, I think I got all the rules right, so I'll just
talk about what I liked and didn't like.

Pros: beautiful game - the wooden blocks are a bit larger and have
smooth runded corners. Nice art. Maps are lovely. Basic premise is
appealing, so it's worth tinkering with. Build your army system is good.
Simplified rules of Victory are good, such as clear hexsides allow 2
units to enter a battle, all others allow one unit - easy to remember.
Likewise, stop when you hit any terrain except clear - unless the piece
has the terrain symbol on it, which allows it to treat it as clear for
movement. I like the new A, B, C system for denoting combat units: units
are rated as A2, B3, C2, etc. The letter shows when they fire: defender
fires all A units, then attacker all A units, then defender all B units,
etc. The number is what you need to roll equal to or less than in order
to hit. So "A" units are wizards and archers - things that have ranged
fire, hence they shoot first. "B" units are cavalry, flying, or other
fast units, so they attack next. "C" units are basic infantry line
troops - slow but steady. Nice.

Dislikes: six units per hex makes for slugfests, turning the game into
who can roll the most 1s. Very bad - go back to four per hex limit. No
fast units - everything moves 2 hexes except one type which move 1 hex.
This contributes to the slugfest mentality - all you can do is make
obvious setup moves - no lightning fast actions to throw the opponent
off guard. You need some "armor," in the sense of speed. Buildup is too
easy - you can do it anywhere. We found we would lumber six-block groups
around until one person attacked, then both got slaughtered a bit. Then
we couldn't do anything until we built up strength - but by then the
opponent was built up, so we lumbered around all over again over the
same terrain.

The game feels a lot like WWI on the ground - boring. But then, Victory
by the real rules feels that way to me, too, but since I spiced it up a
*lot*, I like Victory. (See http://www.io.com/~sos/bc/victory.html#fluid
if interested.)

So I think this game needs spicing up, but when it gets fine-tuned, I
suspect I'll enjoy it quite a bit. It needs a lot more magic, BTW, with
some way to check off a spell once you've used it in combat. It gets a
bit boring using the same good spells over and over. Also, magic is
currently a bit underpowered: you have to reduce your wizard one, two,
or three steps to cast a spell (how much depends on the spell), which
*sounds* great, but in practice is kind of depressing. I mean, I cast
Lightning Chain with my wizard - he drops for a 4 to a 1. I then roll
dice to hit, and only hit with one of four dice. So he lost three steps,
cannot cast any more spells, but he only damaged his opponents one step.
The most he could have done is four steps (and that's rare), only one
more than he was hurt himself. Kind of depressing, as I said.

More - either here or on a future web page - after I've tinkered with it
some. I do know I won't play straight by the rules again - yes, I know
that after one game. Sad, eh?

-- -Steffan O'Sullivan sos@vnet.net Plymouth

Gary Robinson - 10:24pm Oct 13, 2000 PST (#1822 of 1823)
Curious about the revival of Absinthe in the U.K.

Chris Farrell:

I've now played a couple times, and I admit my impressions were much
more favorable than Steffan's. It's not going to threaten Rommel in the
Desert or EastFront as my block games of choice, but I definately like
it a lot better than Victory; and it generated immediately favorable
impressions in those I played with. And it's quite simple, cleaner and
easier to learn than Victory. I found the rules to be pretty good; there
are a couple of minor grey areas, but nothing close to being as severe
as the problems with the first version of the Pacific Victory rules.
Yeah, the river rules caused a double-take since they are different from
every other hex-block game, but I think it's more or less all there (the
rules for sea units might need some clarifications with respect to
hexside limits, but with only one sea unit in each army at this point it
doesn't matter much). It's not perfect, but for a pretty
reasonably-priced package, I think it's a good deal. And like all the
Columbia games, it's pretty attractive. Victory is it's obvious closes
relation in the Columbia line, but it's a huge improvement IMHO.

Anyway, on to some details ...

The main win over Victory I think is just the variety among the units. I
think one of the reasons Victory didn't have many of the strengths of
some of the other block games is just that there was so little
differentiation amongst unit types, even if there were a bazillion
different units. Everything went to 4 steps, most everything hit on a 2,
everything costs a buck. Wizard Kings has a vastly richer set of units.
From the Dragon (fire A5 - so that's first in sequece, 5 or less to hit,
max 2 steps, costing 8) to the ubiquitous ground pounders (fire C1, max
4 steps, cost 1), there is a lot of variety, and thus some actual
suspense as to what is in each hex and some real tactics when it comes
to combined arms and scouting. Plus, with the much more powerful units,
and the 6 per hex stacking limits, it's actually possible for an
attacker to have a force advantage. Since there are now an unlimited
number of combat rounds, the attacker can actually win battles. And
since powerful units are now rather expensive (3-4 GP per step, although
some really killer ones are in the 6-8 range - like Victory, you get
10GP per turn), production decisions are actually challenging; and
unlike Victory, there is no way production is going to catch up with
attrition once the meatgrinder gets going. Also, the ability to add
steps to units anywhere obviously puts much less of a drag on
offensives.

I think Steffan may have underestimated the utility of the Wizards.
While it's true many of their normal attacks are borderline, their
targetted attacks can be very powerful for blowing up castles and
providing some counter to the most powerful units (Dragons, Vampires,
Catapults, other Wizards). And, if you have a Wizard and your opponent
doesn't, this is a powerful advantage not least because they fire first
and they don't count towards stacking. They're not like HQs in
EastFront, though - not a unit you absolutely have to have and build up.
Deciding when and how much to invest in Wizards (and when to use them)
is clearly a significant game decision. It does seem that the spells
without targetting could have their effects increased slightly, though.

OK, now on to the downsides. I really like the basic underlying system,
which seems to work great and to have largely solved my issues with
Victory.

BUT, the game still has the #1 problem Victory has - the basic scenario
is rather pointless (it actually is playable and can be interesting in
Wizard Kings, though, which it isn't in Victory IMHO). When I first
played Victory we played the basic scenario and I rather disliked the
game (OK, I hated it). I only came back to it after getting hooked on
Columbia's other games. I, like most people, was tempted to endlessly
fiddle with the game; I found though that all I really needed to do for
the game to basically work for me was to play the unbalanced scenarios -
Sleeping Giant, Two Front War. You still need to bid steps for the
attacker as the defender can have a very significant advantage if there
is a lot of difficult terrain on their board, but this works OK.

Anyway, I have always believed that because the defender has significant
inherent advantages, the basic scenario in Victory is broken. The same
can be said of Wizard Kings although to a lesser degree. The basic,
pre-selected forces in the rulebook are virtually guranteed to result in
either a drawn or unreasonably long game. In the build-your-own game,
the results can be much more dramatic as players can do some bluffing
and customization to take advantage of the unique strengths of their
Army, but still things can get a little wierd and an interesting game
requires both players to have a somewhat aggressive mindset. Obviously
if both players choose defensive postures (and there is no strong
incentive not to), the game breaks down.

This could all be solved by having decent, unbalanced scenarios which
force action onto one side or the other at any given time if they want
to win. Guys, this is really not tough. I think it's clear Wizard Kings
has a very good underlying game system, clearly markedly superior to
Victory. I'm looking forward to all the new army sets. But like Victory,
the game also needs a dozen or so solid scenarios with a bid-for-sides
mechanism to account for difficult terrain and Army mismatches.

There are some additional questions as to whether the armies are really
reasonably balanced. I have no reason to suspect they are not, but check
out the Undead Cloak of Mortod vs. Sacrifice and tell my why anyone in
their right mind would cast the latter :) This is clearly either a typo
or a distinct lack of playtesting :) If the latter, it obviously raises
some questions about how finely balanced the armies really are.

One last thing, I'd reccomend using 2 Wizards max per player on a
one-board game rather than 3.

Anyway, there is a lot to like here. After a couple plays, I and my
opponents have come away fairly impressed and the games have been fun.
It's much truer to the whole block game format than Victory was. We'll
see if it holds up - the relatively inexpensive new Armies and boards
will help, although new scenarios will be key IMHO - but the early
returns are quite favorable.

Chris