Curse of the Dark Pharaoh

Curse of the Dark Pharaoh is the first of the small expansions for the Arkham Horror board game, of which I have written about previously.  Unlike the large expansions, which add new towns for your characters to explore and encounter eldritch horrors therein, this expansions serves to change the theme of the existing town of Arkham, Massachusetts, where the base game takes place.  There is a new exhibit at the university, showcasing ancient Egyptian relics and artifacts, but of course things aren't as they may seem on the surface, and the exhibit is the tool for an ancient evil to arise.

Players can use the expansion in one of two ways.  First, you can simply mix the location encounter cards into the existing decks (the permanent exhibit method), which gives the players a small chance to encounter cards specific to the expansion each turn.  Alternately, the players can use ONLY the encounter cards from the expansion (the traveling exhibit method), which focuses the game squarely on the expansion and its events.  I actually prefer to play with the second method, though due to the small number of location cards, after a couple games it will likely get old.  So, I recommend playing a game or two using the 'traveling exhibit' method, and then you can decide if you want to mix the cards into your base game on a permanent basis or only use them on occasion.

I think this is a good expansion (though if you dislike ancient Egyptian themes, maybe not one for you.  It works for me, though.  Please note that there is the original edition of this expansion from 2006 (the one I have), as well as a revised edition from 2011.  The primary difference is supposed to be improved game mechanics and some rewriting of card text to add clarity and remove confusion.

Gladiator

The next random game from my collection is a game that at the time of this writing almost 35 years old, Gladiator.  I have the standalone game from 1981, but the system was part of the original Circus Maximus game (which included the gladiator combat and chariot racing) from the late 1970s.  The standalone game was published by Avalon Hill.  In this game, each player controls a gladiator, and the game can handle up to six players, working either individually or in teams (though teams makes the most sense if using different types of gladiators).  Gladiators are rated based either on their armor type (light, medium, or heavy) or by their weaponry (the Retarius).  The mechanics are that the game is simultaneous.  Each turn is composed of eight movement phases, and in each phase the players will write down on their gladiator record how they want their gladiator to move (if he moves at all).    This makes for an interesting "cat and mouse" game, where knowing how your opponent is likely to move can give you an edge.  The whole point of movement is to get you next to your opponent (where combat takes place, unless you are a Retarius), but preferably in his rear, not his front.  Being in your opponent's rear gives you combat bonuses.

Combat is a mix of plotted actions and die rolls.  Each gladiator has a number of Combat Factors, which indicates how well they fight.  These Combat Factors are divided up between attack and defense, and then further sub-divided for the five different body areas (head, chest, groin, arms, and legs).  Attacks against a body area are handled by taking the attack amount, subtracting the defense amount, and then using the total to find the proper column on the combat table.  You then roll three dice to determine whether the attack misses entirely, gets blocked by the defender's shield, gets parried by the defender's sword, or if you hit.  A shield block gives the attacker a chance to damage the defender's shield, a weapon parry gives the defender a chance to drop their sword, and a body hit means you roll on a separate damage table to determine how many hits you do.  Each body area has its own pool of wounds.  If all wounds in an area are lost, the gladiator is killed.  In addition, as wounds are lost the gladiator's Combat Factors are reduced.  So getting wounded reduces your ability to attack and defend effectively.

Overall, this game works fairly well, and can feel nice and tense.  It does bog down a bit in the mechanics, though (lots of dice rolling, lots of table lookups).  It's a nice game to have in my collection, but it isn't going to hit the table much.

Conflict of Heroes: Awakening the Bear

Long time no blog.  No real excuse for it, just haven't been in much of a boardgaming mood recently.  But!  I have pulled out a "blast from the recent past" from my collection for you.  Conflict of Heroes: Awakening the Bear is the first game published by Academy Games.  It is a tactical combat game focusing on the Eastern Front of World War II, so Germany vs. the Soviet Union, in the early part of Operation Barbarossa.  There is a second game, Storm of Steel, that focuses on battles from the later part of the war.  Awakening the Bear was popular enough that a second edition of the game has been published.  I, however, own the first edition and my comments reflect that edition.  No, I don't know what is different between the versions.

Each counter in the game represents either a squad of men, a weapons team, or a single vehicle.  Squads can be armed with rifles or SMGs, weapons teams can have machine guns, mortars, or AT guns, and vehicles can be jeeps, half-tracks, or tanks.  Each turn the players each roll two dice to determine initiative, higher number goes first.  That person with initiative then selects one of their units to activate.  You either assign seven Action Points (AP) to that unit, or you can optionally roll two dice each time a unit is activated to determine how many action points they have.  If you play the game solitaire, this optional rule is highly recommended to add additional "fog of war" to the game.  You then spend that units action points to move, fire at enemies, and rally.  Every action has a cost, and different units pay different numbers of APs to do different things.  Weapons teams might cost more AP to move, but less to fire, for example, so getting them into a proper fire position that they can use to command a lot of the board is important.  Infantry generally move good (as do tanks, though not in woods), so you use them to grab objective hexes on the board.  The activated unit spends its APs until either it runs out or the player decides to end its activation.  The unit is then flipped, and the opponent chooses a unit to activate.

One thing that mixes things up is that each turn each player gets a set number of Command Action Points (CAP).  These can be used by any unit during the game, and you can even spend CAPs on the other player's turn to interrupt their action by having one of your units take an action.  CAPs can also be spent to improve one of your die rolls, useful for trying to hit a difficult target, or rallying a unit that you need to get out of a bad situation.

Combat is simple.  Each unit has a firepower rating.  You roll two dice and add the unit's firepower, and compare it to the target's armor rating.  If you meet or beat that number, the unit is hit.  You then draw one of 20 counters out of a cup or other opaque container and apply the results.  While you can get a "unit eliminated" result, you probably just panic the unit, or make it freeze in place, or otherwise hamper it.  The unit can still be activated and take actions, including rallying to remove the damage marker on its player's turn.  If a unit takes two hits, it is eliminated.  Infantry and vehicles have separate damage counter pools to draw from.

Lastly, there are cards that each player gets, depending on the specific scenario rules.  Cards can be played to affect the game in various ways.  They can improve a combat result, or change the battlefield, or otherwise improve things for you or hinder things for your opponent.

The game comes with 10 scenarios of increasing complexity and size.  I think that the rules work well and the game is generally enjoyable, but it just doesn't grab me.  If I want to play a World War II game at this scale I lean towards GMT's Combat Commander series.  Yes, Combat Commander doesn't have any vehicles, but I still find that game more enjoyable for reasons that I don't fully understand.  So, while Conflict of Heroes is a perfectly fine game, it just doesn't hit the table, and I expect to sell or trade it away at some point in the future.

Nothing Gained But Glory

Nothing Gained But Glory is the fifth game in the Musket & Pike series by GMT Games, which I have written about before.  This volume moves the action past the Thirty Years War, and deals (primarily) with the Scanian War, a war that I had never even heard about before I encountered this game.  The war involves Sweden defending itself against the Dutch and their allies (primarily the Brandenburg Germans).  The time frame is late 17th century, generally in the 1670s.  The title comes from the fact that at the end of the war, even though Sweden had lost a fair amount of territory, the peace treaty basically gave Sweden everything back that it had lost.  So, a war that really accomplished nothing but killing a bunch of people and making a few commanders famous.

But what about the game?  It is the same Musket & Pike rules, with all of the enjoyable and annoying features that I have written about before.  However, there is one thing here of note: there are NO two-hex heavy infantry units.  All heavy infantry units are one hex only, purportedly due to the smaller infantry units used during the Scanian War.  That actually does have an impact on the tactics used, as the two-hex infantry units could be quite unwieldy to maneuver, which is not a problem with the one-hex units.

Perhaps because I did not know anything about the Scanian War before playing this game, I must admit that while the game is fine, I don't like it as much as other volumes in the series.  It just feels... different, and not in a good way for me.  Thus, I'm not sure how much more this game will get played.

One Year Without Cable

Last March I decided to "cut the cable" and went back to having only antenna TV service for the first time since 2004.  Are there things that I have missed?  Sure.  I liked watching Pardon the Interruption on ESPN, and I liked watching English Premier League soccer matches and the occasional Cardinals baseball game.  I can't do that anymore.  However, I was paying about $102 per month for that privilege.  When I cancelled my cable subscription I picked up some sports packages that I can watch online, like NHL Center Ice and the MLB.tv package, as well as the MLS Live package.  Put all of those together and that costs around $330 per year.  So, I actually have more sports to watch and am saving around $800 per year.  All told, I'm content with my decision.