23 September 2021

• Reply: City of Gears:: Rules:: Re: Help for those 3 gears

  by Karmic_devil

  Sure!
  
  Top: Gain 2 points at the end of the game for every tile that you have a robot on but which you don't have the majority of robots/gears (someone else gets the points for the tile, but you get 2 points for having a robot there)
  
  Right: Spend 2 steam and swap the location of any two robots in the city (can be yours and an opponent's or 2 opponents'. (This can be good for getting your robots to a spot you want to activate or to change majorities for control of the tiles)
  
  Bottom: Gain 2 points at the end of the game for each of your robots that is on a tile that is adjacent to an opponents factory (their starting piece that connects to the board)
  
  Hope this helps!
  
  Josh
  Grey Fox Games
• Review: Martyr: Bloody Theater 1528:: Musical Stakes (a Space-Biff! review)

  by The Innocent

  
  Musical Stakes
  
  I’ve been playing a game about Anabaptist martyrs getting burned at the stake. I’m resisting the urge to call John Ratigan’s Martyr: Bloody Theater 1528 “metal,” although it practically begs for the descriptor. The gilt artwork, paused somewhere between reverential and an iconoclast’s pasticcio. Its sole resource, your stolen final breaths. A transparent disc indicating the Holy Spirit, drifting among onlookers. Even the sweetish wood smoke smell of the Game Crafter’s laser cutter, like some theme park’s attempt at “four-dee” entertainment, slathered so thick with verisimilitude that it kicks down the sauna door on bad taste.
  
  What is this thing? And why does it remind me, more than anything, of a prayer spoken in an unfamiliar tongue, clumsy and unaware and maybe even vaguely offensive, but so earnest that it demands a clemency of its own?
  

  
  Imagine being burned at the stake for a belief. Something for which you have an ironclad conviction. The belief itself doesn’t have to be religious, although it can be. Your fate is sealed; there will be no escape, nobody riding to your rescue, no cords slipping away, no handspringing to safety. A throng has gathered to watch you die. Some are jeering, but there are a few seekers among the crowd who might still be persuaded. You open your mouth to say, to speak, to sing — what? Maybe a line from a hymn. From a song. Something familiar. Something everybody would understand deep in their belly. When you open your mouth, smoke scratching your throat, the words aren’t beautiful. But they’re clear enough to understand. You can see the wetness on somebody’s face. You’ve touched a soul.
  
  And then the guy chained to the stake beside you belches out the hymn’s next line. A line which, incidentally, has nothing to do with your intended message. The spell is broken. The moment passes. The flames lick higher.
  
  That’s Martyr: Bloody Theater 1528 in a nutshell. With a dwindling supply of cubes — your final breaths — you intend to persuade as many people as possible to your personal heterodoxy. The first major hurdle (apart from the bonfire) is that each player has their own hidden articles of faith. Where one martyr might decry church authority and the doctrine of just war, another might hope to throw down the swearing of oaths and the state-controlled church. Oddly, there isn’t a doctrine of infant baptism to denounce. Maybe you’re all unified on that point. Either way, it’s a sublime inconvenience that not everybody at the stake is in agreement about the finer points of doctrine they’re being killed over.
  

  
  There are plenty of gamey terms and phrases for what this accomplishes. “Shared incentives” is foremost among them. For a game about being martyred for your beliefs, at its best Martyr revels in getting your fellow Christians to do your dirty holy work for you. The process isn’t easy to describe, largely because it’s quirky even in action, but the gist is that you’re offering prayers to select which three articles of faith you hope to promote, singing hymns to touch the hearts of particular onlookers, and delivering sermons to tweak the turn order. Or, ideally, sitting back and hoping somebody else takes the actions you want.
  
  Put these together and you’re presented with a scoring system that has to be seen to be believed. Praying functions like a wager: you select not only which article of faith to pursue, but also how many tiles of its type you believe will be scored either in support or condemnation of it. These don’t only have to be claimed by you personally, generating some not-insignificant tension between claiming these issues first for lots of up-front points, or later once you’ve gleaned some details how many martyrs will be pursuing each article. For example, wagering that a particular issue will be roundly condemned, and then only claiming a single tile for it, can still be worth quite a few points. Meanwhile, those aforementioned tiles can only be claimed if you played the proper intention card at the start of the turn and the last sung line of a hymn matches it and the Holy Spirit can reach a corresponding tile during the resolution phase—
  
  Look. There are a few takeaways here. The first is that Martyr isn’t the sort of game that leans into easy characterization, including when it comes to gameplay. Although there are only three actions, their interactions are interwoven in interesting, unexpected, and, yes, oblique ways.
  
  That said, players need to understand these interactions before they can really get down to the business of manipulating the game to their advantage. Snubbing another player of their chance to earn a convert is often as easy as singing the next line of a hymn. Despite the ease of such an act, this isn’t always a winning move. The first time we played, Martyr was entirely about blocking. “O praise Him! Alleluia!” one of us would cry, only for Brother Dirk to belch out, “Thou fire so masterful and bright, that givest man both warmth and light!” Thou spoilst the moment, Brother Dirk. It was only with time that it became something more. Blocking, sure, but blocking plus long-term resource conservation, some mild cooperation, and just a hint of soft-pedaling to prevent an arms race of verses. Be firm in your faith but don’t be a bitch about it, as one churchgoing friend once opined.
  

  
  This process gradually shifts from confusing to interesting, but always remains a distraction. So much so that it often comes across as unintentionally humorous. Whether it’s one martyr belting out a hymn to distract from another martyr’s plea, the Holy Spirit flitting into a corner to prevent it from touching another soul this round, or martyrs playing musical stakes to finesse their turn order, Martyr has a habit of getting in its own way, both as a plaything and as an examination of its protagonists’ last breaths.
  
  It’s easy to misconstrue earnestness for parody, is what I’m saying, even for someone comfortable with the idea of games as worship. Games, after all, have primordial roots in worship, tracing all the way back to the divining powers of dice and cards and canes, a god’s favor uncovered through the upsetting of chance. Representing religious history is a more recent phenomenon, but not, I suspect, one as far removed from that older playful worship as we might think. For all its clumsiness and its cumbersome scoring, there’s a core of reverence beneath Martyr’s exterior, only partially unearthed during the game’s less rambunctious moments. An entire section of the crowd moved to song by the martyrs. Everything going calmly and quietly right despite the best efforts of chance and disruption. In these stillnesses, the game’s protagonists are no longer slapstick playthings jostling for position. They become emblematic of all those who have given their lives for an ideal. Snap your fingers — or shift the turn order — and the moment is gone. But that’s always the case with such things.
  

  
  Martyr: Bloody Theater 1528 is a strange beast. It’s more of a game than you might think, in both the best and worst senses. Fascinating on the one hand, overburdened on the other, and stuffed with admiration for its characters, the hymn it sings is both raspy and easy on the ears at the same time.
  
  
  This review was originally published at Space-Biff!, so if you like what you see, please head over there for more. https://spacebiff.com/2021/09/20/martyr/
  
  Also, I suppose I ought to plug my Geeklist of reviews: https://boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/169963/space-biff-histori...
  
  A complimentary copy was provided
• Review: Desolate:: Desolate, Yet All Undaunted.

  by Ghenipus

  If you take up Biology in college, before long you get to hear all about the humble fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster. Not because it’s the biggest bug out there, or the most dangerous or most interesting, but because its characteristics make it an ideal model organism for research in genetics, embryology, and a variety of other specializations. It’s easy to breed in a lab, its genome is comparatively tiny, and it exhibits a plethora of well-described, highly visible mutant phenotypes. For science, the species is a simple tool that can be readily used to demonstrate a variety of genetic phenomena.
  
  If anyone ever teaches a graduate course on how to design a single-player card game, Jason Glover’s Desolate should be their Drosophila.
  
  Despite its concise package, this well-designed strictly solo game demonstrates all of the elements you’d want to have mastery over if you were making your own. There’s a time clock in the form of Oxygen consumption. There are rounds of combat dictated by dice roll, and there are beneficial or harmful locations dictated by card draw. There are item cards that let you improve your odds, but most of them are consumable, so you have to use them wisely. But most importantly, there is Balance, with a capital “B.” Any single-player game is inevitably a case of player vs. random chance, but the death knell of a poorly designed game is inability to mask this fact. No one is too eager to play a game where “all you do is draw a card and do what it says,” or “all you do is cross your fingers and throw dice.” In a good game, luck-of-the-draw and luck-of-the-dice need to be countered by player choices, most of which usually boil down to some sort of resource management. Glover clearly knows this, and has demonstrated it almost to textbook precision with Desolate.
  
  Consider a standard turn in the game. You play as an astronaut who has been stranded in an abandoned lunar base. Invading aliens, similar in appearance to the classic grey from UFO lore, have overrun the base and killed the other inhabitants. Your depleted ship needs five fresh power cells in order to launch, and you can only find these by rummaging through the base, level by level, fighting off alien attacks as you go. In any given turn:
  
  - You draw two cards from the exploration deck, which represent two alternate paths through the base. One is dealt face up; the other stays face down (luck of the draw.)
  
  - You need to make the “Let’s Make a Deal” decision of whether to go with the option that you can see, or to discard it and go with the option that you can’t see yet, in hopes that it winds up being the better of the two (player choice.)
  
  - Some exploration cards are beneficial, and will provide the player with free resources, or even one of the five needed power cells (luck of the draw.)
  
  - Many exploration cards are hazardous. If you buy the two Dark Matters expansion packs, you get a greater variety of hazards, but in the base game most of the hazards are alien attacks (luck of the draw.)
  
  - You almost always suffer some initial damage from each alien attack before you can defend yourself. This initial damage is determined by drawing a card from the conflict deck (luck of the draw.)
  
  - The strength of the alien, and the size of the reward you get for defeating it (although not the actual identity of said reward,) are determined by combining the exploration and conflict cards that were drawn when you first encountered it (luck of the draw.)
  
  - You choose how much of your limited ammunition you want to use to fight the alien. “Ammunition” translates to number of dice rolled in an attempt to beat the number showing on the alien’s conflict card (player choice, resource management.)
  
  - You roll your chosen number of dice, taking your shots at the alien (luck of the dice.)
  
  - If you fail to defeat it in one round of combat, you suffer more damage, determined by drawing the next conflict card (luck of the draw.)
  
  - You repeat the previous three steps until you either defeat the alien, or run out of ammunition (player choice, resource management; luck of the dice and draw.)
  
  - Provided you survive, you claim your reward by drawing the next encounter card, inverting it, and either taking both printed rewards if the alien was stronger and held a large reward crate, or choosing one of the two if the alien was weaker and held a small reward crate (luck of the draw, some player choice and resource management.)
  
  - In the base game, you get two items out of the item deck at the start of the game, (luck of the draw, although you get to draw three and keep two, so player choice is also a factor.)
  
  - You may use items at any point to improve your chances of survival, but many of them are one-use-only (Player choice, resource management.)
  
  - At most, and this is using the expansion packs, you can only draw a maximum of four fuel cells in your first run through the encounter deck. Usually, you’ll be lucky to happen upon two of them. Depleting the encounter deck represents having completely explored one level of the base. You re-shuffle the discarded encounter cards, and you work down (or up) to the next level of the moon base, hoping to find the remaining cells necessary for the win. However, since your character is wearing a spacesuit with a finite supply of breathable air, you lose two units of your Oxygen resource every time you complete a level. Since you only start with a paltry four units, and running out means death by anoxia, you have a limited amount of time in which to find your five fuel cells (time clock.)
  
  - Certain locations will automatically reward you with a small amount of free oxygen, ammunition, or health points, but since all aliens carry reward crates, deliberately choosing an alien attack, preferably from a weaker alien, becomes a necessary strategy for replenishing your resources before you die or become all but defenseless (player choice, resource management.)
  
  - Using the expansion packs, a few locations or alien rewards are actually hazards that either waste your valuable oxygen or give you psychoses. These afflictions either alter the rate at which you consume resources, or remove the option of choice when claiming a reward from a small crate, which impacts resource consumption indirectly (luck of the draw, resource management.)
  
  The point is, whenever Glover’s game throws elements of luck in your path, it usually also throws a player choice down, too. Desolate never puts you entirely at the mercy of bad luck; the player always has a role in determining how best to use their available resources to survive. Synergy between random actions and player strategy lies at the heart of designing a single-player game, and Desolate is a quick to learn, easy to play, uncomplicated card game that serves as an excellent demonstration of how to achieve that balance. It’s an ideal model.
  
  Unfortunately, people buying card games aren’t looking for succinct academic models, they’re looking for stimulation and challenge. Many of the critics of Desolate find it lacking in one or both. How you play has a lot to do with how challenging a given hand is, and how much brain power you have to devote to it. Since most of the impact of any single turn comes from which of the two exploration cards you chose, it’s easy to wind up cruising through this game pretty much on autopilot, rejecting all alien attacks that are dealt face up and always choosing to throw one more die than the alien has showing so long as you still have ammo enough to do so. You may not win that way, since your gun tends to run dry pretty quickly if you don’t conserve, but since this is such a straightforward game, playing it with even an average chance for success doesn’t automatically demand a whole lot of thought. It also doesn’t require a whole lot of time; one game fits into fifteen or twenty minutes, and resetting for the next round takes about all of one. Anyone looking to this game for an entire evenings’ worth of fun will have to play several hands. The fuel cells that you need to find for winning can’t be created, they can only be luckily happened upon. (There is a multi-player expansion that does have a mechanism for cobbling a fuel cell together from random scrap metal, but I don’t know much about it, since I don’t own said expansion.) Your strategy boils down to trying to replenish resources in order to survive long enough for the random action of finding a fuel cell to eventually happen five times. That’s still strategic, but indirectly so. Some players may be turned off by the fact that how you play doesn’t make it much more likely that the prize will fall into your lap, it just makes it possible for you to stay in the game long enough to allow the fuel cells to fall when and where they will. People reading all the high praise that reviewers such as myself have heaped onto this game may mistake it for something bigger, bolder, and more involved than it’s actually trying to be, and they may become quickly disenfranchised by how small of a footprint it makes. This is a great game for fill-ins, when you don’t have the time or the desire to shuffle several decks or organize oodles of tiles and tokens. One YouTube reviewer (and I would give credit if I remembered which one it was) made a great point and said that it was a good game to have in the wings on game night, so that players who were dealt out of the main event early had something fun to do in the corner while they were waiting for the next deal-in. Personally, I’m glad that I have a game or two that doesn’t demand the entire evening in sacrifice, for nights when I only want to feed the beast intravenously.
  
  As for looks, Desolate relies on black and white, almost Moebius-like comic book art. The alien exploration cards and the conflict cards all have the same artwork, either a stereotypical grey alien head for the exploration cards, or a sort of undefined tentacled cone on the conflict cards that could be interpreted as a piece of the alien vessel, a piece of alien weaponry, or a piece of alien (and let’s not worry about which piece.) The alien head and the alien tentacle-cone-thing look like they should have come from two different species, but since the latter is more atmosphere than specific prop, it doesn’t matter. Our actual lunar footage is mostly black and gray, since the Crayola corp. just hasn’t made it there yet, so Glover’s stark monochromatic depiction of the sterile lunar environs is perfect for the setting and tone of his game. But, like the game itself, it can’t pretend to be any bigger or better than it is. If you use the Character cards from the expansion packs, you at least get a human face on your game (or half of one, since the characters’ helmets cover up their mouths and foreheads.) Other than that, it’s mostly location art or some very basic item art, and a lot of it is fairly similar looking. Given the price point of this game, you shouldn’t be expecting a masterpiece on every card.
  
  Desolate has been expertly crafted by a designer who clearly knows how the sausage gets made, but anyone expecting it to become their favorite child will be disappointed. It’s a good thing in a small package, but it’s junk-food fun. If you’re used to bigger challenges or more involved gaming systems, or if you demand a full-course banquet every time you sit down at the table, you’ll get bored with it fast. If someone really is looking for an educational model of how to balance luck with strategy within a single player game, you won’t find a more apt example than Desolate, and if you are interested in breaking into game design, even though I’ve never pursued that course myself, I would recommend you familiarize yourself with its anatomy. If you’re looking for fun, I still recommend it as a small potato, provided you aren’t going to ask more of it than it was engineered to provide. It’s a good quickie, and it’s a game that you can still enjoy when you just don’t feel up to a more complex one. Or, to put it another way:
  
  You can play it when you’re frazzled;
  You can play it when you’re fried;
  You can play it when you’re sick, or drunk,
  Or too pre-occupied.
  For those nights when tricky games just aren’t
  Jejune enough to take,
  You can shoot the moon with Desolate,
  And veg within its cake.