The Unboxing

Heroes of Land, Air, and Sea: Order and Chaos

This takes the base game from four players all the way up to six players if you want. It adds in four new races, Goblins, Undead, Lizard Folk, and Lionkin. One of the main reasons that I picked this up was that the base box has pretty standard races. Order and Chaos adds in some more interesting races. Goblins might be pretty standard fantasy, but as at least playable races, the rest are fairly unique.

Heroes of Land, Air, and Sea: Pestilence

The pestilence expansion is smaller, but it is more of the same as well. It only comes with two new races to play, the Merfolk and the Birdfolk, but they are pretty unique. The Birdfolk come with an island that floats above the board. And the Merfolk come with a transparent plastic sheet that you put on the board covering up an island to make it submerged.

The Game

Since the unboxing was shorter than the previous week, I pulled a game off of the shelf to play as well. Deadly Doodles is a roll and write game that I’ve talked about and reviewed before. It has a fast solo mode, so I decided it’d be fun to play through a couple of games of it on stream and talk about how the game is played. I did poorly my first game, but the second time was a decent score.

The Beer

So, finally, but not least importantly, is the beer. This streams beer was a Chocolate Imperial Stout from Arbeiter Brewing out of Minneapolis Minnesota. I talk some about the differences between a stout and a porter or really the lack of differences that truly define it. However, the Chocolate Imperial Stout, at 9.7% ABV, was really enjoyable and had a very bitter taste to it, like a very dark chocolate. I am a big dark chocolate fan, and I like very dark chocolate, so I enjoyed the beer quite well.

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Adventure Land

This is one that has been on my radar for a long time. Tom Vasel of the Dice Tower is a fan of this game, but it’s gone under the radar otherwise. The concept of Adventure Land is just intriguing to me because it sounds simple, but the decisions seem meaningful. On your turn you move one of your adventurers down and to the right, to the right, or down, and you are picking up treasure. But the trick is you can never move one back up or to the left. So how do you balance out the movement of a number of adventurers to maximize your points? I think it’ll be a fun game, and I really do think there is a lot of interesting space to strategy in the game.

Marvel Champions – Quicksilver

The latest release in the Marvel Champions line, and of course I was going to run out and pick it up right away. I’m more waiting for the Scarlet Witch to come out which was supposed to be this month but looks like it’ll be in March now. Still, I’m going to be curious to see how they mimic super speed for Quicksilver. They’ve done a good job of surprising me and making other powers work really well. I’m hoping that he’ll be fun to play as well.

Space Base

Space Base has been on my radar for a while. It’s been described as kind of a Machi Koro killer for a lot of gamers. From what I know about it, the game is more complex, though not by a ton than Machi Koro which was really very introductory. I actually got rid of Machi Koro over a year ago, because for an engine building game, it was going to be the first one I pulled off the shelf. To teach engine building I’d use Splendor or Century Golem Edition. If Space Base does have more going on in it, then I’m hoping it’ll be a nice game that feels similar to Machi Koro but that I can pull out after I’ve taught engine building. I’m not sure which theme is more attractive to players, though, building a town or building a space base.

Deadly Doodles 2

Technically this is an expansion. You need the base game to play it. And I got the base game not too long ago, in fact I believe that was when I picked up The Wasp at my FLGS that I grabbed Deadly Doodles as well. So apparently I grab roll and writes when I get Marvel Champions content as well. This is the one that I sat down and played the day that I got it. This expansion just adds more to the game. So in the base game you are just going in, grabbing treasures and weapons and fighting monsters. It’s very simple, the expansion adds in 6 new map boards. The first map doesn’t really add much to what’s going on, but the other maps add more and more to the game so what was a very simple flip and write (or draw and draw as they called it), not becomes more of a complex game. I like how you can tailor the level of the game to the players of the game just with that. I’ve barely started on the content, but I can see there’ll be a lot more, now the only question is do I fit everything in one box, I’m thinking the answer to that will be yes.

Which of these games seem the most interesting to you? I have you played any of them before?

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The Game

Deadly Doodles is a “Draw and draw” game, aka, a flip and write. In it you are going on seven expeditions into a dungeon, you are trying to find weapons, treasure, and maybe even a dragon. Along the way you’ll find monsters as well who will want to beat you up, but if you have the the right weapon you’ll be able to beat them. Each turn four cards (at least) our flipped over, and they generally form a pathways or parts of a pathway. Each player must add all four of those cards into a single continuous path, how far you delve in that day. Then four more cards are flipped and the process is repeated seven times. Players can either add to a path that they’ve already drawn or come in another entrance, but all the exploration for the day must be one continuous group. At the end of seven rounds you tally up the score, for any treasure you got, it’s worth 2 points each, plus an additional 2 per treasure if you got the dragon. For each weapon you got, you get one point and same for each entrance you didn’t use (or block off). You get four points if you went through the monster corresponding to a weapon but minus two if you went through a monster without it’s weapon. Plus you lose points for traps and cards you couldn’t use.

The Components

This is kind of a mixed bag, I like the dry erase boards a lot, and the markers, I think that both are good quality and I’ll talk more about those, but a negative first. The rules are very small, which is a solid thing, but it leaves some questions. Mainly, how you build the dungeon out, I inferred that you build in a single line each time, but it doesn’t explicitly say that. If that weren’t the case it’d be tough to get into a situation where you couldn’t use all of the cards. And just some of the layout of the rules feels a bit backwards where they explain stuff like traps before they really teach you how to play the game.

But the actual board you use is great, it has everything you’d want on there. It gives you a spot to keep track of how many treasures you’ve gone through or how many cards you haven’t used. But even better than that, it keeps track of your weapons and monsters. It pairs them up, so as you cross off a monster or a weapon you mark it in the scoring section and you can easily see if you have a pair or not. This makes in game adjustments really easy as you see what weapons you might need to get or what monsters you should go for.

Game Play

The game play is really simple and really fast, and I don’t mind that. I knocked out five games, including teaching it in an evening and that wasn’t even that much of the evening. For that reason I’ll be pulling it out fairly often, and it works well with solo.

The game play itself, though, has just barely enough going on it. You flip four cards and you fill stuff in, it’s easy for there to be variety in what is done, so in the two games played multiplayer we never had similar looking boards. And the game is fairly easy to optimize what you are doing. However, it is really just barely enough to do in the game. And the game feels like it should last a round or two longer. Playing two player, scores were between 10 and 15, which just doesn’t feel like that much. I don’t think scores need to be that high, but a little bit higher wouldn’t be bad.

I also wish that there was maybe one more thing to do, or even if fighting the monsters felt a little bit different than it does. The monsters and weapons all look the same, they just have a different letter on them, that would have been a simple art change that would have made the game feel a bit more thematic instead of here is a sword I slash the generic monsters. On the other hand, because it doesn’t have more going on, it makes it easy to teach and more accessible.

Final Thoughts

This is a simple game and for a lot of players who maybe like the bigger roll and write or flip and write games like Welcome To and Ganz Schon Clever, this might seem like a little bit too little. But I didn’t mind it because it was so easy to knock out a few games in the evening, and sometimes, after working a lot or just generally being tired, it’s nice to sit down and knock out a lighter game a few times to relax. That’s what Deadly Doodles really is, and besides a little issue with the rule sheet, I think people will like how this game works on the dry erase board.

Overall Grade: B
Casual Grade: B+
Gamer Grade: C

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Wasp – Marvel Champions

After no new hero or villain in December, Wasp finally came out. The second half to go with Ant-Man as they team-up against villains. I’m basically collecting Marvel Champions at this point, and it makes sense, I love all Marvel stuff, generally. But I really do love Marvel Champions a lot. The game play is a ton of fun, and the heroes feel like the hero that you are playing. In particular the flipping between the hero side and the alter-ego side works really well and thematically.

Deadly Doodles

It’s a draw and draw game, and by that, I mean it’s a flip and write game. This game has you going through a dungeon, picking up weapons, fighting monsters, getting treasure and maybe even befriending a dragon. I like this game a lot because it’s very simple. You flip over four cards and that’s your run into the dungeon for the day. You can continue off of one that you’d already started, or you can pick a new spot to go in. If you find weapon A, that means you get a point, you go across monster A (and have Weapon A) you kill the monster and get 4 points. If you don’t have the weapon and you go across the monster, you lose two points. The game is really easy to follow and all the scoring is done at the end and made so that you can track it really easily. But I’ll do a review of it very soon.

Call to Adventure: Stormlight Archive

Call to Adventure was a game that I’d pick up and look at on the shelf all the time. I like the theme of going through and creating your heroes quest and exploits over a few different time periods of their life. Basically you are creating an epic heroes journey. However, the generic fantasy one, while having great artwork didn’t interesting as much as knowing there was a Stormlight Archive version coming out. Stormlight Archive is a four book (currently) series by Brandon Sanderson who is my favorite author. These are massive and epic books with a really cool world in them and so much depth. I’m hoping that I, as a fan of the series, will get to feel a lot of that heroic feeling in the game that you get in the book and the grand epicness.

Those were the three purchases. I will be doing a follow-up to this as I traded in two games as well that I’ll be getting store credit for at some point in time coming up here which will mean another purchase. A shout out to All Systems Go who will buy used games, sells used games, I was temped by Merchants and Marauders as well as Clank! A Deck Building Adventure Game while I was in there, and less so but slightly by the $560 almost all in bundle of Joan of Arc. I hope that all of you have great FLGS that you can go to, trade in games, get used games, or that just have a great game collection.

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