Gloomhaven

No shock I’m adding this one to the list. I love Gloomhaven. On my 2019 and 2020 Top 100 Games (of All Time) it was #1 both times. And the 2021 list is on-going. But this is a great big box game that is probably intimidating. In it you take different heroes or mercenaries and go off on missions, fighting monsters and unfolding story as you go. The game is spendy, but it’s worth it for what you get in the box.

You could also jump in first with Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lions. This game can be found for a whole lot cheaper and it brings you into the game nicely. It teaches you the game over a few scenarios, and while your characters won’t retire, you still get to level up and have the Gloomhaven experience, just in a much smaller and cheaper package.

Mansions of Madness

Mansions of Madness is one of two Arkham related games on the list from Fantasy Flight Games. This is the bigger one of the two. This is an app assisted game where you are investigating a mystery. In the introductory scenario you are trying to find out what is happening at a Mansion, where the owner has gone, and then how to stop the ritual that has been started.

The app works nicely because you can play a scenario a few times without it being identical. The story might unfold the same way as before, but the rooms will have moved around. And the app makes the game work really well. Plus this game is scenario based not campaign based. That means that you can play a single scenario and call it good and then pick up months later without missing any story.

Arkham Horror: The Card Game

The second of the two Arkham and Lovecraftian games from Fantasy Flight Games, Arkham Horror: The Card Game is a great little experience much like Mansions of Madness. You are exploring Arkham or Dunwich or Carcosaa, where ever it might be, trying to stop rituals. The game, however, doesn’t have an app and is just cards.

What is so amazing about this game is that you explore just using cards. And the game is different as you go through linked scenarios. At the start you might be trying to find a way out of your house and fight a ghoul. The next scenario you are hunting down cultists. The game just has a lot of fun to it and feels so unique with just using cards.

Detective: A Modern Crime Board Game

This one is a completely different theme, but it’s an adventure in it’s own right as it’s a great deduction game. In the base game you are solving linked cases that tell and unfold a story of a murder from long ago. This is done with the use of a computer with a database you can look things up in, as well as cards that unfold the story.

I call this a procedural cop show, but it’s fun. You are the cops, or the investigators. If someone you know really loves stuff like NCIS and CSI, this game might be a great one to play with them. It’s five scenarios long and 3 hours per scenario. So you can get a lot out of the game and it’s one of the most immersive games in terms of theme that I’ve ever played.

Aeon’s End Legacy

Finally we have a Legacy game on the list. A legacy game means that there are components that you destroy or permanently alter. Gloomhaven has a little bit of that, but Aeon’s End Legacy has a whole lot more. This is going to be a good game for someone who wants to build out their own character. While others on the list do that to some extent, Gloomhaven mainly, this one really gives you big choices on what you do.

This game also teaches you how to play Aeon’s End. Much like Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion brings you up to speed for Gloomhaven, Aeon’s End Legacy will teach you how to play Aeon’s End in all it’s forms. And th ere is a lot more content. But in the game you work together, build your characters, and fight off monsters coming through breaches. The story is lighter on this one but it’s still a lot of fun.

I have a lot more of these games on my shelf. I won’t recommend Deep Madness as it’s hard to find, and if you can it won’t be cheap. But Nemesis will give you a sense of adventure as well as Roll Player Adventures that just came out and Reich Busters thought both might be harder to find again. There are a lot of these big box games that tell you story, but I hope I gave you a good variety to checkout and for a number of different budgets. Do you have a favorite adventure game?

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In Detective: A Modern Crime Board Game, you are playing cooperatively as a team of detectives/investigators who are trying to solve a series of linked cases. But can you figure out the links between the cases, what information from previous cases will be useful, and how much, per case, should you dig into the big picture? To do this, you have to travel around from your Antares HQ to places like the Courthouse, Richmond PD, The Lab, or various places that are all at fieldwork. At these places you’ll look at cards which will allow you to investigate a crime scene, or talk to a witness, or get some reports run on various clues. Doing any of these things costs time, and you only have so much time during the day, 8 hours, to get your work done, or you can work overtime, but too much overtime and you become too stressed and the case wraps up. At the end of the case, when you think you’re ready, you answer a series of questions about what you found out.

Detective: A Modern Crime Board Game is an advancement in deduction sorts of games where you have a pretty small deck of cards, 35 per case, that you’re going through, and with that, you probably will see around twenty of them per case. So you are only getting a limited amount of information. With that said, there’s so much more beyond just those 35 cards, there’s the whole Antares database that you’ll be using a lot as well. This will have records of interviews you’ve done with witnesses, larger descriptions of crime scenes, or clues, police reports on people or old cases, ways to tie fingerprints together to determine who was at the crime scene. The Antares database is a website that is set-up by Portal Games that they can add new cases to whenever they want. This means for expansions they can add in new cases, redo the look of the database for the time period, or do whatever they want with it. How extensive the database is, is really cool. And it adds a lot of depth and theme to the game. You also can even google some things on the cards to determine what some real events that are referenced actually were.

Out of the five cases in the base box, we’ve played three so far, and while the first two cases felt fairly similar, the third case felt extremely different. I won’t go into spoilers, but it’s fun to see how they can create different almost puzzles for you to solve in the game. Some of them you might be digging up larger parts of an old story that puts together a grand tale that is tying all the cases together. Or you may be diving back into a cold case to figure out why there was such a rush to get the case closed and to find out if there is more to it. Or you might be in a highly time sensitive situation where you’re racing against the clock to stop some bad event from happening. All of them are possible in the game, and it feels like there is even more room to expand.

I do want to talk some about the thematic immersion in the game. I’ll start out by saying that of the three cases that we’ve done, two of them have taken three hours or just a little bit longer, the last one took just about two and a half hours. So this is a pretty long game for something that just have 35 cards per case. But the game is highly thematic, and you feel like you’re investigating to some extent. You’re looking through everything that’s going on, and you can see the threads come together, you’re taking notes and connecting things that seem like they might be separate because of a clue you find at a third location. And it’s not that the game is handing you those connections, you are having to use deductive reasoning to put two and two together and get the right answer. This game really has so much theme, and in fact, so much theme that you get immersed in discovering the story, not just “who done it” that you lose track of time. Each case doesn’t seem like a three hour chunk of time, because you’re puzzling over everything trying to figure out what is happening.

Finally, let’s talk about replayability. I would likely this to TIME Stories, where maybe, after a period of time, I’d be able to play it again, or if you wanted to see how good a job you could do you could play it again. But this game is not that replayable. You are solving a case, and once you know the solution you need to forget it to really be able to play it again, and I think unless five years have passed or more, I’m probably going to have my memory jogged by starting the case again and be able to take an ideal path. My thoughts, because we’re playing in a group of three, is that I might run the game again for another group, be in charge of the cards, like I am now, so that people can’t accidentally spoil themselves, but just sit back and watch someone else enjoy the experience. With that said, there is a Season 1 implementation of this coming out, there is the LA Crimes expansion for this, and there is a Dig Deeper expansion coming out as well, so there’s going to be added content for it, and for the amount of time that you’re playing each case, and the enjoyment from it, I think the base game is very much worth the value.

Overall, I love this game. I know some people won’t like the fact that is uses a screen, but that adds in a ton for the thematic element. Because even though I don’t love procedural cop shows on TV like CSI or Law & Order, Detective: A Modern Crime Board Game has that feel and when you’re the detective and heavily involved in trying to figure out who committed the crime or even how multiple cases tie together, it is so much fun, and the Antares database adds so much to that feel. This is a great thematic experience, and while the questions at the end can seem random if you chased a few red herrings, the story throughout the cases has been crafted extremely well.

Is this a game that you’ve tried, do you enjoy it? Is it something that seems interesting to you?

Gamer Grade: A
Casual Grade: B
Overall Grade: A-

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iZombie is a show that was created based off of a comic book by the same name and Rob Thomas, the creator of Veronica Mars was the creator of this show as well. You can definitely tell that it has some similar feel to Veronica Mars, but it definitely isn’t the same show. Also, the comic book background of the show comes through in a big way. It makes a ton of sense for the show to has both of those feels to it though as the premise is a pretty odd one, and there is also the case of the week feel.

Liv (Olivia) Moore’s life is amazing and safe. She has a great residency at the local hospital, she has an amazing fiance, and family and friends who care about her. Things are going swimmingly until one of her coworkers invites her to a party on a boat on the lake. It wouldn’t be something that she’d normally do, but Major, her fiance, encourages her to cut loose for a night. That turns out to have been a bad plan when a zombie outbreak happens at the boat party and Liv is turned into a zombie. She dumps her boyfriend, quits her residency, and pushes her family away from her. She finds a job at the morgue so she has a supply of brains. There, she figures out that by eating the brains of someone, she takes on some of their personality and sometimes has visions of things that had happened to that person. She decides to use her new found skills to help solve murders.

You find all of that out in the first ten minutes of the first episode. The show is definitely an odd one, but very well done, and tells mostly compelling stories while being a crime drama. There are a few times where the stories aren’t as great, but for the most part it’s interesting. There’s also the story as to what caused the zombie outbreak to happen on the boat that is wrapped up throughout the season. So it isn’t just a plain old here’s a crime and it’s solves by the end of every week, sometimes you come out of it with more questions than you did going in, all with there being a crime solved by the end of the episode.

What makes this show are the characters, there really aren’t any cardboard cutout characters. Too often with shows you can end up with what I’d like to call “Main Character Syndrome” where the main character is fairly flat and boring and doesn’t really have many issues. The side characters might be interesting, but the main character is a bit of a cardboard cutout. An example of this would be Lost Girl, but in iZombie, and you see this some in Veronica Mars though a bit less so, Liv is an interesting and compelling character who has emotions, who isn’t always right or perfect, and it’s probably a fun role to do, because her personality changes every week. She is a bit overshadowed in the role by the Ravi who is her boss at the morgue, but he’s just so sweet and excited by things, and it’s hard not to like his character, he also gets a lot of the comedic relief moments. While the cases to help progress the story, it’s more the characters, what they care about, and what drives them that keep you invested in the show for more than a few episodes.

Now, I will say that sometimes the procedural cop show feel does get to be a bit annoying. Especially early in the first season there are a few episodes where it’s a bit predictable as to what happens in the case. It feels like the show was trying to find it’s feet, and while it isn’t bad and there is generally enough other interesting things going on, it isn’t until there is more mystery to unravel through multiple episodes that the show really hits it’s stride. I feel like that’s going to be the case with most crime of the week shows, and I’m not sure about the later seasons of iZombie if it comes back to that, but the two that I’ve primarily watched did a solid job of balancing that aspect, better than a lot of the bit crime shows like NCIS and CSI. This is something that is very similar to Veronica Mars and something that Rob Thomas does seem to balance out well, though you’ll notice a dropoff with it in Veronica Mars, but that’s the CW’s fault, not Rob Thomas’s.

This is a generally very enjoyable show, and while there is some violence, some darker stories, and some things that won’t be appropriate for younger children, it doesn’t take away from the viewing experience. Any show where you can empathize with most all of the characters is a good show. I definitely recommend this show, though, because of the sometimes procedural nature, it probably won’t be a hit for everyone. The acting and character development is going to be enough for a lot of people to enjoy it though.

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