Abstruse here. Douglas Adams was one of my favorite authors growing up and it’s times like these I recall one of my favorite quotes by him. “I love deadlines. I like the wooshing sound they make as they fly by.”
FORTUNE AND GLORY REVIEW
A little over a year ago, Flying Frog (creators of LAST NIGHT ON EARTH) released an artifact hunting adventure board game called FORTUNE AND GLORY. It’s based on the tone and style of the old serials and adventure movies that INDIANA JONES and ROCKETEER were pastiches of. The game is incredibly fun, but I’m here to warn you about it so you know what you’re getting into when you pick up this game.
First off, this game is a beast in more ways than one. It’s got a $99.99 MSRP, which means this thing is massive. To put this in perspective, my current “game bag” that holds all my board games currently has comfortably: Pandemic, Small World, Settlers of Catan, a card box with every Cards Against Humanity card, Castle Panic, The Resistance, Dixit, Tsuro, a folder with the entire 500ish pages of the D&D Next playtest, two Crown Royal bags filled to near-bursting with dice, eight Chessex dice sets still unopened, Star Fluxx, Gloom, Zombie Dice, and six full-size clipboards with plenty of room to spare. This game DOES NOT FIT IN THAT BAG BY ITSELF . So if your group wants to play this game, I highly recommend the person who owns the place where you game be the one to buy it because you do NOT want to haul this thing around.
There’s also a lot of components to this game, and the vacuum-formed inset meant to store them isn’t clear on what goes where since everything comes in sealed bags (Note: The front of the game advertises over 160 plastic game pieces, but be warned that probably around 100 of them are the plastic coins you use for scoring). But if you can get over that, this game is GORGEOUS. The only way this game could look better is if the map had terrain and the pieces were painted. But that would shoot the price of this game over $200 I’m sure. Even with most of the pieces being the coins, there’s a lot to this game. The game pieces are decently sculpted plastic minis (at scale for use in RPGs, for the record), with eight for the player characters and around two dozen minis for the villains (the mob and FUCKING NAZIS!). There’s also temple tokens and a MOTHERFUCKING ZEPPELIN! Yeah, the cards are printed well and the images are the same posed photo style artwork and the cardboard tokens are sturdy and the character cards are well-organized and blah blah blah…but I feel I really need to emphasize FUCKING NAZIS ON A MOTHERFUCKING ZEPPELIN!
The biggest…now, I don’t want to call it a “problem” because I don’t mind this and the game is worth the effort, so let’s say “issue”. The biggest “issue” with this game is the set-up. Because of all the pieces, it took my group a little over an hour to set up the game for the first time. You also need a LOT of table space (we took up all of an 8-place dining room table). The board is huge, and it doesn’t have any outlined places to put any of the various game pieces aside from the characters and items actually on the board. There’s five or maybe six decks of cards to shuffle, game pieces to set up, items and cards to hand out to certain players. And that’s not counting the time it took to learn the game. Our first turn took us another hour.
This brings me to my first piece of advice for this game. The side of the box says “1-8 Players”. IGNORE THAT and stick to about 4 players,at least until you learn the rules properly. And the game itself is not that complicated, but a few of the mechanics are very unique to this game (I’ll get to that later) and aren’t as intuitive if you’ve never seen them before.
The rules are pretty simple. You have two main “phases” to your turn. First you move, then you adventure. Moving involves rolling a d6 and you have that many movement points to spend. And everyone finishes their Movement Phase before you go into the Adventure Phase. In the Adventure Phase, you draw a card depending on if you’re searching for an artifact or if you’re in a city. City cards have adventures that are based in a city (like the car chase from TEMPLE OF DOOM) or out in the ancient temple chasing down artifacts.
The issues start when you realize exactly how many choices you can make with those simple actions. This is not a bad thing by any means in a game, as it keeps the game from getting stale and repetitive. But it’s a big problem the first time you’re learning to play the game. Here’s how our first turn took us over an hour. First, we explained the basic rules. Then the first person went. We explained the options for movement in more detail. It took several minutes. Everyone else at the table got bored waiting for their turn and started checking their phones or talking about Game of Thrones. Next person’s turn, we had to start all over again. Repeat again with the Adventure Phase. This was complicated every time one of us would forget how to do something or remember a rule differently and have to consult the rulebook.
Now, this only happened in the first time I played the game. If I’d bothered to watch a playthrough video first or if I’d played the solo game and done all my fumbling around with the rules before I brought it to the table, this probably wouldn’t have been a problem. We actually ended up just giving up playing the first time through after four hours total including set-up (and only doing three and a half turns) because one player had a commanding lead already and half the table had to get to work the next day. I immediately went home and read the rules again. “Oh, that makes a HELL of a lot more sense now!” It wasn’t until after I’d actually played the game that some of the rules and interactions started making sense. And the rules really are that simple IF you’ve been exposed to them. There’s several mechanics that are completely foreign to me as I can’t think of any other game that does something like them. Once you see them work, they make complete sense but because they’re so unique, it’s hard to wrap your head around the first time.
One of these mechanics is how you get an artifact. When you get to a location on a map where an artifact is, you begin to Adventure. This means you turn over an Adventure Card and roll a skill check to try to overcome the challenge. These challenges are presented in a cinematic style, telling you the story of what your character is doing. For example, one of them involves something happening to your plane. You have to fix it while you’re in the air, so you’d roll either your choice of Agility to try to land the plane yourself or Cunning to try to repair the damage. If you succeed, you get Glory equal to the value of the card and score one point toward getting the artifact. You then have the choice to Press On or Camp Down. If you camp, you “bank” your Glory points you’ve earned this turn, heal all your wounds, and your turn is over. If you Press On, you take on another Adventure which puts you one step closer to the artifact if you succeed.
If you fail at the skill test, however, your turn is over and you go to the Cliffhanger. And this is where the game starts getting REALLY cool. All the Adventure Cards are double-sided, with the back being the Cliffhanger. They’re complications that arrive because of your failure at the original challenge. Take the previous example, the Cliffhanger might be “Jump out of the plane without a chute!” So you’re itching to find out what happens? Can you grasp onto victory in spite of failure, or will it slip between your fingers? WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?
Sorry, you’ll have to wait until your next turn to find out! Dissolve to: Next player’s turn!
And that’s what makes this game cool as fuck if you’re playing with the right group. You’re actually CREATING A PULP ADVENTURE STORY as you play through the game. The Adventure Cards, City Cards, and Cliffhangers hit pretty much every single pulp trope there is. The more you and your group plays up this story aspect, the more of a blast this game will be. Especially when two people are going after the same artifact, because you trade off doing adventures one after the other, racing each other to try to get the artifact. It’s a blast.
Glory points are basically victory points for the game, but they can also be spent as currency for things like allies. You get Glory for completing Adventures, but you get Fortune by retrieving and selling artifacts. Fortune lets you buy Equipment, which gives you advantages in Challenges, giving you a chance at more Glory and more Fortune. This is what you use all the plastic chips for, to keep track of your Fortune and Glory.
I’ve played this game a couple of times after the first play-through (including one attempt at the solo version to nail the rules down better) and the game gets much more fun. I haven’t explored the Advanced Rules yet since I haven’t played this game with the same group twice yet, but MOTHERFUCKING ZEPPELIN! The advanced rules seem like they’ll take a little bit of fumbling the first time through as well, but not nearly as much as the first time you play the game. I’ve also not played the cooperative mode, where you’re racing the mob and FUCKING NAZIS! to the artifacts in order to hit a goal of Glory based on the number of players in the game.
This is not the game for everyone. For one thing, the cheapest I have seen this game new ANYWHERE was $70. But when you see it, you’ll know where every cent of that money went. The pieces are great and the figures (if painted) would work great pulling double-duty in a CALL OF CTHULHU game or anything else set around the 20s-40s. There’s a slight learning curve to the game, but it’s really nothing compared to stuff like CASTLES OF BURGANDY or when you get more than one of the SETTLERS OF CATAN expansions. Once you get the hang of it, the game plays a LOT faster than I said above, with a full turn lasting about half an hour or so (it can be as fast as 10-15 minutes, but you kind of have to ham it up when describing what you’re doing). If you’re a fan of the pulp adventure genre and your game group likes to get into the “story” of a game, this is definitely for you.
WIZARDS OF THE COAST CASTS “SUMMON LITIGATOR”
I’m not going to say I told you so or anything, buuuuut…
Yeah, Wizards of the Coast (or more likely Hasbro, despite what all the media keeps saying) is suing Courtney Solomon’s production company Sweetpea Entertainment for violation of trademark amongst other things by setting up a distribution deal with Warner Bros for a DUNGEONS & DRAGONS film (but they’re NOT suing Warner Bros). Now, when I reported on this last week, the speculation was that Hasbro felt the rights reverted when they purchased Wizards of the Coast. This issue was part of binding arbitration on the rights when Wizards of the Coast was sold, which should’ve settled the rights issue and the assumption was Hasbro just said “Fuck that, I’ve got TRANSFORMERS money, bitch!” According to the court documents (and for the record, reading court documents is a great cure for insomnia), Hasbro is claiming that the license was not renewed beyond the original 5 year term because the two “sequels” were direct-to-DVD and direct-to-cable rather than theatrical releases. This argument would hold more weight if it weren’t for the fact that Wizards of the Coast pimped the BOOK OF VILE DARKNESS film like crazy to D&D fans, from posting interviews with Solomon on their website and even rushing the release of a tie-in product for 4th Edition, but it’s probably a case of the right hand not knowing what the left hand is doing.
So where does that leave us now? Expect injunctions soon on BOTH sides, and expect Warner Bros. (who has been quiet on the issue since the initial press release about the project) to backpedal fast, leaving Solomon all on his own. My guess is the issue will end up settled out-of-court with Solomon giving a huge chunk of money to Hasbro and keeping a more restricted version of the rights that allow him to use the DUNGEONS & DRAGONS name, but with more advantageous profit sharing to Hasbro, script approval rights, only access to OGL races/monsters/spells/characters (nothing trademarked), and probably a few more limits that basically bends Solomon over a barrel. Either that, or Hasbro will get the rights back and we’ll get our FAST DUNGEONS & FURIOUS DRAGONS barely in time for the release of the new edition and 40th anniversary in 2014. But that’s just my guess.
In news I actually do know a fair bit more about, the ADVANCED DUNGEONS & DRAGONS 2nd Edition is getting the same premium reprint treatment that 1st Edition got last year. Faux-leather bound with a complete rescan and restoration of the original three volumes that made up many of my childhood nights. Yes, these are the same series of reprints that Nordling gushed about in the inaugural relaunch of the column. I’ve gotten to thumb through one of the 1st Ed reprints and they are gorgeous. Unless you’re lucky in a garage sale, this is your best way to get hold of the original 2nd Edition rules. The core rulebooks aren’t currently available online, but many of the adventures and sourcebooks for the edition are.
Ed Greenwood, creator of the Forgotten Realms setting for DUNGEONS & DRAGONS, has teamed with Vorpal Games LLC. On their somewhat secretive new project called RED AEGIS. Vorpal Games is made up of brothers Brian R. James and Matt James, who have worked as freelancers on projects for Wizards of the Coast, Paizo, Open Design, and others.
Mantic Games, nominally a miniature company, has secured the license to MARS ATTACKS from Topps. There’s almost no details at this time other than that the game will be a “tactical miniatures game”. Not surprising as the game won’t be released until sometime next year. Yes, I know it’s the wrong comedic Martian invasion movie, but I have to say it…PREPARE TO DIE, EARTH SCUM!!
Privateer Press announced their first card game based on their hit miniature wargame WARMACHINE. Details are light at this time, but the game will retail for $44.99 with four decks for each of the four factions from the miniature wargame, allowing for 2-4 players. The current release date is “this summer”.
Quiet for weeks and then we get a slew of SHADOWRUN 5th Edition news all at once. A new preview is up, and this one is from the Game Concepts chapter. The basic skill system that makes up the core of the game mechanics appears on the surface the same as 4th Edition (abbreviated 4A), but there’s a new twist. There’s a new mechanic called a “Limit”, which means you can only count a number of hits equal to your limit no matter how many you roll. So if you get 5 hits but have a Limit of 4, you only get 4 hits on that test. This seems to be the first attempt to insert a game mechanic to battle the “rolling thunder” dice rolling of Shadowrun. When I started my campaign several months ago, I specifically bought 200d6 off Amazon and thought to myself, “Is that going to be enough for Shadowrun?”
On top of the new preview, Line Developer Jason Hardy visited the RPGnet and did a Q&A. Several details about the new edition were discussed, but here’s the highlights:
Game mechanics will be more universal. If you learn the combat rules, it’s the same basic rules for magic, decking, rigging, etc. This will hopefully level off the learning curve for the game.The Matrix will be harder to hack, making deckers more unique again since not everyone can try to hack anything like in 4th Edition.Character creation in the core book will go back to Priority, with other options showing up in the Companion book. You’ll also get karma to spend as well, which spends exactly like karma you get as experience.Skills can be raised to 12 rather than 6 like previous editions.Missions Season 5 will take place in Chicago. Other cities that will be featured are Seattle (of course), Denver, Vladivostok, and Boston.Magic changes: Traditions will be more unique than in 4A with more of the flavor coming through, there will be a new mechanic called “preparations” that allow a spell to be pre-cast and triggered later, and spirits no longer have individual Edge (which fixes a major overpowered rule).The metaplot will be developed more in sourcebooks than in 4A along with Missions adventures. A plot sourcebook will be released shortly after the core rulebook.SR5 and Crossfire (the Shadowrun deckbuilding game) “should” be out sometime this summer.Core rulebook will be more “generalized” in background rather than tied to the timeline, though the core book will not support play in other eras (2050s, for example) out-of-box.The sub-core rulebooks that give expanded rules and additional gear will be released a few months apart from each other, according to the current plan.The various Native American cultures will be re-emphasized again.The first two books released after SR5 (an adventure and a rulebook) will explore the cybernetic body-snatching metaplot introduced in Storm Front.HeroLab (the character creation software) will be updated for SR5.
Catalyst Game Labs isn’t stopping there, though. They’ve also got some news in the BATTLETECH world. A reprint of the currently out-of-print Introductory Box Set for BATTLETECH will be released this fall. The biggest complaint (and frankly, my ONLY complaint) about the previous printing was the quality of the mech miniatures. The massive boxed set originally came with 24 models of various mechs with the quality of the army men you’d find at the dollar store. Honestly, it really didn’t bother me that much considering the price tag on the box was only $59.99 and I’ve bought games for that much that had NO minis whatsoever, let alone the amazing cardstock battlemaps and the full-color rulebooks this game contains. The new models look better than ever, and the set will again include two “premium” plastic models that look even better. Considering when I bought my first BATTLETECH boxed set, it had flimsy paper maps and cheap cardboard fold-up tokens, I was blown away at the quality of the new set. And considering the jump in quality while remaining at the same price in an industry where plastic prices are going through the roof, there isn’t a better time to get into the game.
White Wolf released the WEREWOLF: THE APOCALYPSE 20th Anniversary Edition PDF this week. The release is similar to the treatment White Wolf gave VAMPIRE: THE MASQUERADE on its anniversary and also make me feel very, very old since I remember when the game came out. Anyway, all thirteen tribes are presented and the mega-sized book is pretty much everything you need to run a Werewolf campaign with most of the options from the sourcebooks included (so no needing to get two more core sourcebooks and five tribe books just to have all the options for the various Garou tribes).
The newest PATHFINDER sourcebook, ULTIMATE CAMPAIGN, comes out this week. Built as a guide to “what happens between monster attacks and quests for ancient artifacts”, the sourcebook is a collection of rules and resources for building a more detailed campaign world, from reputation to politics to constructing a castle. There will also be new rules for retraining and even changing classes mid-campaign. If you’re running any PATHFINDER game that lasts longer than a month or two, this is a must-have. Trust me, I wish I had this book when I was running my game.
Two of Steve Jackson Games’s most popular tabletop games, MUNCHKIN and ZOMBIE DICE, are both getting expansions this August. MUNCHKIN gets a mini-expansion called MUNCHKIN DRAGONS, which features…well…dragons. And of course, their treasure hoard. If I need to sell you on this anymore, then you just haven’t played MUNCHKIN, something you should remedy immediately.
ZOMBIE DICE BRAIN CASE, on the other hand, is less an expansion and more an accessory. The sturdy cup for your ZOMBIE DICE also contains a scorepad for keeping track of how many brains your zombie has gotten to. ZOMBIE DICE has become a quick favorite at my game night since there’s no set-up and the game moves fast, but we’ve always hated the cup the dice come in as the bottom will pop out easily if you shake it too hard. We’re also using our MUNCHKIN level counters to keep track of zombie brains, which feels out of place. So this is something that’s definitely going to be welcome at my table.
What do we want! Kickstarters! When do we want them? In 6 to 9 months depending on printing delays!
I’ve mentioned my fetish for 3D terrain in this column before, but usually I stick to fantasy stuff. Mostly because modern or sci-fi stuff is hard to find. I’ve never played any western game before, but Acheon Creations is producing a line of terrain for the Wild West. What’s good about it? Most of the designs are generic enough that they can easily work for a fantasy campaign as well. The backer rewards are a la carte, meaning you have to pick and choose which items you want or go for one of the packages. So you can get just the pieces you want instead of a large package of terrain you’re never going to use. The Kickstarter ends on June 2 and is currently just $600 short of its goal.
Kitbashing is a practice with a long history in wargaming. You take all the bits and bobs you get when you purchase a mini and mix them up to create something new and unique. I’ve never been much of a miniature wargamer, but I have friends who are going to go nuts when they see this Kickstarter from PDC Gaming for sci-fi weapons, gadgets, and accessories meant specifically to be added to 28mm scale figures. All you 40K and WARMACHINE players out there, take note of this British-based project which is currently half funded with two weeks left to go. Again, a good rule of thumb is US$1.50 = UK£1 and watch those international shipping charges!
Since I’m sure you got in on the Dwarven Forge Kickstarter, you’re going to need some miniatures to use with it. Red Box Games is putting forward DWARVES AND GOBLINS AND ORCS, OH MY, a metal miniature line of very Tolkien-inspired fantasy characters. Shipping is NOT included for the miniatures on this page, so beware of that when pledging. You get one “rank” of figures for $25 or two for $45, witch pledge levels scaling up. This project is funded and working on stretch goals until June 16.
ADVENTURE MAXIMUS is intended as an introductory roleplaying game for children. The stripped-down card-and-dice based gameplay seems very intuitive and easy for children to pick up. If you’ve got any little ones around who you’d like to introduce to the hobby, this is something you may way to look into.
That’s it for this week. Feel free to click on some of the pictures to be taken to purcahse some of the games we've talked about this column. You can email me any tabletop gaming news at theabstruseone@gmail.com and be sure to follow me on Twitter at @Abstruse for more up-to-the-minute gaming news and random thoughts that pop into my head on work breaks. If you’re going to be at Comicpalooza in Houston this weekend, I’ll be milling about for the entire convention so feel free to say hi! I’ll be the guy who looks exactly like me.
