Last Week's Games: Bubble Bath Bunny, Doom and Mordheim

How many tokens can you get?

This week I’ve had to balance being off work for half term with having my daughter for a lot of the time in between. I’d had less time to play games than I might have wanted, though she and I did get in a game of Bubble Bath Bunny at one point. This is a great little game that is designed to improve memory skills, and while I don’t know how much the game itself has been conducive to that in the eight months that we’ve owned it, it’s great to see that she’s getting better! We also had a go with Pop-up Pirate, Crocodile Dentist and Burp the Baby; kid’s toys that rely almost entirely on chance but they’re fun for the time we’re playing them, and it keeps them amused!

Cacodemons. Horrifying when you're low on ammo.

I carried on with Doom, which suddenly got a lot harder once I’d got on to the second chapter: The Shores of Hell. I found myself for the first time ever (while playing Doom) worrying about conserving ammunition. As with Wolfenstein 3D, Doom was developed before it became usual to program ammo dumps prior to finding yourself in a situation that needs it, and while it does help you out in certain situations, for the vast majority of the time you’re on your own if you burn through your ammo carelessly. This has created an extra level of challenge that I’m not used to with Doom and means that I’m going into certain sections of the game severely under-powered. I might need another run through the chapter in order to get it right, but it hasn’t stopped the game from being very good fun to play.

Nonetheless, high-octane action isn’t always the experience I’m looking for, and when I found myself preferring to take my time, I returned to my old sparring partner Mordheim: City of the Damned. People who read this blog regularly may remember that I became stuck on the third campaign mission of the Mercenaries campaign, as Luthor – the Dramatis Personae who, as a win condition for the mission, cannot be killed – was the only member of the warband who wasn’t reduced to a gibbering wreck at the sight of a Daemon. So, I rallied my troops, trained up an Ogre, took some skilled archers and gave my troops items that would assist them with fear and terror tests. I won the mission without suffering too much damage to any of my men, though I had some close calls!

Glad to have cleared this one...

The next mission is going to be one that haven’t done yet, and I’m wondering exactly how I’m going to approach it and whether to take the Ogre. Obviously, he’s useful against the enemy’s impressive characters, which they almost always use on campaign missions. It’s just that I haven’t forgotten the mission in the Cathedral with the Possessed warband – the Impressive character you have to fight there (the one that relates to the Sisters of Sigmar; I actually don’t know what that is called because I never recruited one) doesn’t appear until you’re several levels higher, which even if I had taken a Chaos Spawn, he’d never been able to approach.

It doesn’t help that completing those missions takes a fair amount of time that I can’t always guarantee that I have. If you don’t know what you’re supposed to be doing, it takes a couple of hours to explore the levels and find what you need to do – which, between work, family and the occasional need to have a rest, isn’t always possible.

But hey, I’m ready to tackle it when I’m ready, and until then I’m busying myself collecting Wyrdstone for when the inevitable requests come in. Although it is possible to have your warband all but destroyed, the only actual lose condition for the game is when you fail to complete those deliveries four times – I’ve been running this warband for so long now, and the requests becoming more and more demanding, that failing the delivery may be a distinct possibility if I don’t watch what I’m doing. But for me Mordheim is a game that’s always kept on giving, and I’m glad that nearly five years later I’m still finding new challenges.

Last Week's Games: Misty, Doom and Age of Empires

Last Friday we had Valentine’s day. Kirsty very kindly bought me a game we’d seen reviewed and talked about in Tabletop Gaming magazine and found intriguing: Misty.

Incidentally, I don't recommend
searching for Misty Game with
Google Safe Search turned off..

Misty is a simple card game that uses a couple of nice conceits and mechanics to make an engaging, if brief experience. The idea is that you’re drawing doodles on a steamed-up window in the middle of a storm, and once you have twelve, the doodles come to life and start moving about. Each player picks one card from a hand of six, reveals it by putting it in a 4x3 “window,” then passes the remaining cards around to the next player. Once all the cards are gone, another six are drawn for each player, then the process is repeated except the cards are passed the other way around. Once all the players have a 4x3 window in place, the cards activate…

What the cards do depend on the card. Anything that can move – a bicycle, falling leaves, balloons etc – moves one space in the indicated direction. And if you have a flower and a monster, the monster will eat the flower. You then score points based on how many cards you have left on the window that can score. Any that have gone flying off the window are gone and won’t score any points. And if a card has moved on top of another card, you’ve lost them both. If the monster eats the flower, you’ve lost the points for the flower – but not the monster. And if you manage to get two smiley faces next to each other, that’s worth an extra point.

The strategy involves building your window and watching out for what the other players are doing. Have they got a lot of flowers? Probably worth sending them monsters. Are they playing a lot of movable cards? Send them some cards that can’t move, so that they will have to lose at least some points accommodating them. At the same time, you must build your own window as efficiently as you can – How can you stop your cards from overlapping each other? Will it really be so bad if the monster eats the flower?

It took Kirsty a while to get the hang of what was happening and I won the first game we played, however we both agreed that it’s a great little game with mechanics that are easy enough to understand and use. We’re looking forward to having another go with more players!

In Hell, they have trousers...

I also downloaded and played the Ultimate Doom on my laptop. I owned this game in 1998 and it is still good fun today. The reasons for this lie with a lot of the things I was saying about Wolfenstein 3D back in the summer – the level design is excellent, and the core gameplay loop is solid. Hardware may have been somewhat limited back in the early 90s, but they squeezed every ounce of playability they could out of that they had to work with.

After rebinding the keys with some finnicky DOS-based lists, (now that I’ve discovered WASD for movement, I’m not going back,) and snarling over the fact that for some reason you can’t bind Left Shift (would have been great for running!) I set the difficulty to Ultra Violent (4/5.) I have played through most of the game on the middle difficulty; that was on the Xbox version with a controller, and I’ve got better at FPS since then so I thought I’d give the increased difficulty a go. I was very glad I did, because the general effect of this was to increase the number of enemies present in the level, leading to some truly thrilling battles! I’ll come back to this every now and then.

This is the level I'll be playing next, funnily enough...

Finally, I carried on with the Greek campaign of Age of Empires. I’m enjoying it, but I got stuck on the mission where you need to attack the temple. Whatever I tried, I couldn’t get my units close enough without the enemy priests converting them! I eventually did it by being a bit more economical with my unit building and pounding the enemy from afar with the catapults – standard procedure for Age of Empires!

Last Week's Games: Pathfinder, Age of Empires, Hey! That's My Fish, Sushi Go

The key to First Edition Pathfinder
is to attack something that isn't the
player character's hit points...

I’ll start this week by mentioning something I forgot to tell you about last week: Pathfinder. A weekg ago I ran Pathfinder: Rise of the Runelords for my roleplaying group, and we had a really good time. We’re quite high-level now, I think they’re all at level 11 which is high for a game that in all other times I’ve played it had been wrapped up long before we got to this sort of tier. The group had a fine time defeating The Scribbler, who had in the previous section managed to turn some of the group on each other and using their abilities to circumnavigate certain areas of the dungeon. “Forbiddance” spell denying you access to a certain room? No problem – burrow underneath it by having your Druid turn into an Earth Elemental and have the whole thing collapse out of the affected area. They also managed to dispatch an Ancient White Dragon with relative ease, although that probably has more to do with Ian’s Alchemist’s ability to fly onto his back and drop bombs on the dragon from above. There’s still a long way to go before we get to the end of this, but the other lads seem determined to see it through to the end! 

Not managed anything this huge yet...

I also had a go with a game that I downloaded on Chirstmas Day, according to my Steam records: Age of Empires. I owned this game a long time ago, but it appears to have been updated to run on modern computers and was a pleasure to play again. It’s a real-time strategy game that focuses on the pre-industrial eras of civilization, where society starts of as hunter-gatherers and ends up with huge armies taking over the world, or at least the parts of Central Europe we were familiar with at that point. I’ve played up to the end of the Egyptian campaign, which is more of a tutorial than anything else that introduces you to the game mechanics and win conditions. It’s been a great ride so far; I’ve enjoyed building up my armies, figuring out what I need to do to win and making the right moves at the right time – even if that generally involves turning it into a war of attrition, and waiting for the enemies to use up all of their resources before making my move! I usually enjoy strategy games and this one is no exception.

I also managed to play a couple of games with Kirsty: The first was our old favourite, Hey! That’s My Fish, where we battled our penguins for control of as many fish as possible. Known for its brutal simplicity and surprisingly competitive mechanics, we’re starting to get our heads around this game as we’re constantly watching each other’s penguins and our own, judging what would be the best move to make. I won, but it was close this time with only about five points in it!

A pleasure to play
after all this time!

The other game was a game I’d owned for a while and hadn’t got around to playing, which was Sushi Go. I bought this game for the third time at the UK Games Expo in 2017. The first time, I’d bought the game off Ebay – but it only had the cards, not the instructions, and I didn’t know how to play it at that point, so that was no use. The second time, I’d ordered it from Amazon, and when it arrived it turned out to be printed in Polish and Czech; I can read neither. I found it for sale with one of the stall holders at the Expo, who told me that this wasn’t uncommon; the bar code is the same whatever language it is printed in and the guys picking the list aren’t too careful about what they’re picking and for who! It is a “pick and pass” card game that’s supposed to represent a conveyer belt of sushi, where you pick the best card from the ones you’re given and pass the remaining cards around. With two players, it’s an interesting challenge, since you’ve got a decent idea of what will be coming when you pass the cards – it’s easier to plan a strategy! A fun game, in all.