Why I’m voting Labour

A few people have asked my view of why I’m voting Labour, so here goes my attempt. In many ways my career and financial state would label me as a Tory support, but I’m not.

My family have never really known wealth and until recently we were in poverty. My family had land nicked during the Enclosures Act, they walked between Birmingham to Yorkshire for work during the Great Depression, my grandfather was an orphan from an early age and had to support younger siblings. The modern welfare state almost certainly helped my family escape poverty and compromising the welfare state to reduce taxes on those who earn above average salaries is for me morally wrong. I cannot kick the ladder out from after me.

I’ve lived under 5 prime ministers, Thatcher, Mayor, Blair, Brown and Cameron. As a kid I wasn’t really aware of the full extent of Thatcher’s and Mayor’s rule. Schools were underfunded and probably caused me to fail some of my exams which if they were properly funded at the time wouldn’t have happened.

I wonder what I’d have achived if I hadn’t have had a crap eduction.

Homophobia was rife during my childhood and I believe that the Conservative Party’s attitude on homophobia and Section 28 (which Cameron voted to keep in 2003) is still something I can never forgive them for.

I was too young to vote in 1997 for Blair but I remember how things improved instead of a country falling apart things were being rebuilt. I also saw an improvement in myself completing both my college and got a First in my Software Engineering degree.

But the Labour party under Blair and New Labour was far from perfect for me. I disliked how after September 11th they sacrificed Civil Liberties, started the Iraq war and how they approached Crime by demonising people via ASBOs.

I worried that Private Finance Initiative would be a problem if there was a recession, although given how much investment was needed I doubt there was an alternative. I disliked the amounts of means testing they put in place and the overheads that it caused.

There’s more, but relatively speaking the majority of policies I agreed with. I do mostly agree with the ‘Third Way’ that neither unregulated Capitalism and State Control are good ideas.

At the time the Liberal Democrats portrayed themselves as a left of centre party and I’d never lived my adult life under the Conservatives, so I hadn’t really seen how bad it could be, it caused quite a few heating arguments between me and my dad when I decided to vote for them (Ironically always in seats where they never got in).

The Financial crash in 2008 wasn’t caused by Labour overspending, but due to the lack of regulation of the banks. At the time no party was suggesting for tighter regulation.

Since the Conservatives have taken over, they took on a policy of Austerity aiming to clear the deficit within the parliament, and it failed, badly. They now promise to do so again this time around with 12 billion in cuts that are somehow bigger and undocumented, even though the easiest to achieve cuts have already been made. It’s not viable.

The economy grows when people are confident and the best way to do this is for people to have disposable income, do you remember the last time “Disposable Income” as a phrase was used? When was the last time the lowest paid had “Disposable Income”?

The Greek debt problem is used to scare us to continue Austerity, most other countries have stopped Austerity and have exited recessions. Now I do believe we should reduce our debts, to a more manageable level of maybe 20-40% GDP and we shouldn’t increase the deficit, but trying to push to reduce it quickly is harmful and hurts those with the least most.

Income inequality is rising fast, and will cause more and more social, health and economic problems if it is unchecked. The Conservatives don’t even acknowledge it is a problem.

I could be selfish and want tax cuts, but since that’d cut the lowest paid’s Disposable Income it’d hurt my long term self interests. If it’s a choice between tax cuts and paying more tax, I’d rather burden myself a little more if it helps save the pain from those with the least.

The Conservatives also put me off for another reason. Climate Change. They promised to be “The greenest government ever” and ended their term with “Cut the Green Crap“. Their latest manifesto states that they want to remove subsidies for Onshore Wind Farms and allow them to be vetoed by local communities.

We need to start making real progress on Climate Change and ensure we don’t exceed the 2 degree limit, the Labour Party does intend to make progress on this and aim to make the National Grid carbon free by 2030.

We can either ensure steady but good progress now with some subsidy, or in 20 years time we will need to be heavy handed with economic controls which would be bad for the GDP of the country.

The UK really needs to sort out it’s housing problem, it needs to build many more homes and to do it over a few decades. We shouldn’t be selling of Housing Association houses at below market rate as this just fuels the problem and we can’t afford to build to replace them. I have no problem with selling Housing Association or Council houses at market rate if the money is earmarked to build more.

Labour aren’t perfect, I’d prefer if there was less involvement of the unions.  I wish they were more ambitious in other areas, but I recognise they have a limited budget with which they can improve things. Labour also has to appeal to both the right and left of the country.

What about the other parties standing in England? My local seat is a marginal Labour-Conservative seat. While I hate the idea of voting tactically I’d prefer a Labour over Conservative government. But generally:

The Liberal Democrats have moved to the right and are far too right wing for me now, and it’s clear that voting for them would prop up a Conservative government. They may have stopped the worst aspects of the Tories, but they have been willing in many of the disastrous policies.

The Greens policies would really screw the deficit and are far more for state control than I’d like, they always ignore the time implementation would take and I could never agree with closing the existing nuclear power plants which would increase the amount of CO2 generated.

UKIP would also ruin the country by leaving the EU (a potential GDP drop of 14%), something I could never agree to. I’m both culturally for the EU, and also economically for the EU.

This election is really important, we either stop the Tories or we enshrine Austerity forever and so for me at this election the Labour Party is the best choice for the long term of the country.

Dissected games: Tales of the Arabian Nights

Cover art of Arabian Nights

Tales of the Arabian Nights is a pretty unique board game it mixes a choose your own adventure tale with a board game.

Based on the One Thousand and One Nights collection of stories it causes the players to have encounters with various creatures and obstacles depending on the encounter card drawn at the end of their turn. The player then chooses how to approach the obstacle (I’ll enter the Palace) and then finds out the consequences of those actions.

To introduce an element of replayability the outcomes depend on the set of skills the player has and the roll of a die that can gives three potential encounters. However after the encounter has started the vast majority of the tales have no further decisions by the player and are at the whim of the story book.

Even with the aspects of replayability mentioned by the second game I played I had already run into the same storyline twice with both the jail and the crystal palace. So unfortunately maybe the replayability isn’t as well executed as I’d have expected.

It is one of those experience games where with the right crowd you can really enjoy it, never has a game with so much crippling been so amusing. However the big problem with it is the lack of informed choice.

The game expects players to decide what to do without knowing the likely outcomes of the action, in a way this fits with my impression of the how the original stories are of a protagonist being at the whim of the world around them. But this can make the game feel weak if your mostly wanting a competitive game, as the player cannot make informed choices.

The lack of informed choices is throughout the game, at the start you need to choose a ratio of your how you intend to win depending how much ‘story’ or ‘destiny’ you feel you should complete before completing the game. It’s hard to judge what you should go for, and I’ve not really played a game where I felt in control of if I would get story or destiny points out of it.

A game at the end of the day is making informed choices and seeing their consequences in a safe environment. With the lack of informed choice does Tales of Arabian Nights actually count as a game? I’m afraid not so sure.

From a narrative structure point of view, the use of the random encounter cards also meant there was no real structure to the game, the encounters at the start of the game are very similar to the encounters at the end of the game. There are quest cards, but once these are completed a new quest occurs and these are from a random deck. There are statuses that the play can gain throughout the game but this impacts your choice of encounters very little.

The end of the game falls flat as to complete the game after achieving the story and destiny all you need to do is walk to Baghdad. At the end of the day I do enjoy the game, but I don’t think it’s quite lives up to the potential that could be made from a board game with a strong story.

But no matter how the implementation comes across, Arabian Nights does ask some interesting questions. Why can’t a board game not just be thematic but also tell a full story and more complicated story? Do people want games that tell stronger stories? Why do games always have to be a dungeon quest or a simulation rather than a game with a story that wants to be told with mechanics that reinforce and allow replayability within it?

What would make a good team game?

Board Gaming is a social experience, and one aspect of this is teamwork. While there are plenty of Cooperative games, dungeon crawls and hidden role games the more simple N-vs-N games are few and far between. In the last year the number of team games I’ve seen widely played can be counted on one hand.

Why are there so few team games?

Why are team games so infrequently seen? They face a few barriers to entry. Getting the required player count for a team game can be challenging. When there is 9 for a game, can you really say we 8 will play this and leave one player out?

The well known team based games tend to fall into the Wargame genre or the Party game genre, both of which can put some people off.

Do team based games give individuals a sense a satisfaction when winning? The prevalence of cooperative and hidden role games seems to show that this isn’t the case.

Maybe at the end of the day the reason why there aren’t many team games is because there aren’t many team games. Before the surge in cooperative games in 2008 maybe team based games seemed to unlikely to work and were limited to just Party or War games.

What about the Alpha Player problem?

The Alpha Player problem is where one player effectively takes complete control for a team, this is often seen in cooperative games. Does the same apply to team games?

Many cooperative games attempt to alleviate the alpha player problem by restricting communication. Team games already have an built in restriction in that if the players on the other team know what the team will be doing they can counter it. The ‘AI’ in the cooperative game cannot tell what the players have been discussing and cannot adapt it allowing free rein to communication.

I suspect as long as there is sufficient open information the Alpha Player problem is limited in it’s applicability to team based games. If too much is dictated then the other teams can take advantage of the plans. Without the open information the other teams cannot gauge what the team in question would be likely to do and the alpha player problem would emerge.

What would I like in team games?

What do I like in team games? What attributes should a team game I design contain?

No Strict Communication Limits

I dislike communication limits in general, there is an advantage of not broadcasting the teams intentions to much to another team, but this should not be strictly defined in the rulebook.

As previously discussed the Alpha player problem is less likely to impact team games than cooperative as long as there is sufficient public information.

Not Real-time

Space Cadets: Dice Dual is a great example game for this category. So would creating another team based real time game be innovative? A game in another area would be more innovative, and doing a real-time game would not be sensible.

Small Team Size

The more players you add to a team the higher the requirement for a team ‘Captain’ and higher likelihood there is for an Alpha Gamer to emerge.

Making the teams be 2 player can help to ensure there is no specific ‘Captain’ and also make it easier to get the required player count.

3 players could in theory work as well in a Triumvirate style leadership, but getting at least 6 players together is more difficult than 4.

Players abilities in a team should not be the same

I like when players on the teams have different abilities rather than both being exactly the same, this can lead to times when it’s better for one player to take a course of action rather than another and would lead to tactical opportunities that can be exploited.

However care needs to be taken in order to ensure that the balance between the two players on a team is achieved. Neither player should be the sidekick to a more powerful player.

A non-cooperating team should always lose to a smoothly cooperating one

In a team game the best functioning team should always win, rather than two well skilled but independent players taking the victory. The game should also benefit those who play well throughout rather than the last few minutes.

Some actions in the game should require players on a team to perform certain combined actions together

This could be that the players need to be in two set locations, or have two sets of cards that can activate together in order to achieve something. However I feel for a successful team game there should be some actions where the team does something specific together.

By making the actions be played together this does necessitate that the number of players in a team must be fixed. However the number of teams in a game can vary.

Having players be effectively independent during the game except for scoring does not make a team game that I would enjoy.

Expand into new genres

War games and Party games already have fine examples of team games. So I’d like to expand it into games that are not traditionally seen as partnership games.

As my original thoughts for designing a team game came from Dice Tower episode 330 while driving home from work I started to think of how it would work with a Pick Up and Deliver game (similar to Merchant of Venus), after a bit of thought and research I think it would be a very viable game and will continue developing it.

Plans for 2014

Now that Seychelles is sent off, I can start to think what I want to do with 2014.

Should I continue?

Firstly do I want to continue game development? If I knew I had no opportunity for being published would I continue?

Game development for me allows me to use many skillsets at the same time. This combines some parts of Software Engineering such as designing algorithms, mathematical knowledge and allows me to combine those with some of the other sides of me that I like and can rarely find time to use such as graphical layout, psychology, human behaviour, knowledge of history and interest in science fiction.

My day job tends to have me working as part of very large organisations, and while I do find the work interesting and challenging, occasionally I like the satisfaction of developing a project mostly on my own and game development allows me to achieve that (at least for the initial concept stages)

If I knew I had no opportunity to publish games would I stop? The short answer is I’m not sure. I need to work it out over 2014.

Publisher or Kickstarter?

When I get a game I’m happy to publish would I go through the more traditional route or go through the publisher route?

I feel confident that I could make a successful Kickstarter and get a product to customers hands, but my worry is the lack of peer review that would go along with it. Going through a publisher is tempting as I feel it could allow many more peoples perspective and can ensure that the end product is a better overall quality.

My other slight worry about Kickstarter is the ability to get a game out to many more people, not just the backers, often I’ve seen a Kickstarter game that has significant supply issues after Kickstarter and can take half a year or more for it to be available as a second printing and into the more standard retail chain. I would like to avoid that immensely (I’ve been after a single Kickstarter game for months without success).

Next steps

So onto specific game ideas, for the first few months I want to focus on games with higher levels of player interaction than Traditional Euro games tend to have. Rather than develop based on theme or mechanics I’d like to approach a game from the point of view of experience. So my aim for the end of January is to take the following two concepts and see what ideas I can come up with.

• Team based – Two or more players interacting as a team against one or more other teams.
• Deception – Where one or more players is acting against the majority.

Seychelles: Development Retrospective

Just before Christmas I posted Seychelles off to enter into the UK Games Expo competition. This was the first time I’ve taken a game this far through development.

To look retrospectively at the game itself will need a bit of distance from the game, something I won’t be able to do for a few months. But there have been several things I’ve learnt during the process more about the process and myself, which I can take into game development during 2014.

Big Games take significantly more development than small games

As with Software Engineering, the larger the game the more of a combinatorial problem you have to test. Seychelles ended up being a bigger game than I had anticipated.

I think as I develop new projects over the next year I will aim towards smaller games. I do generally tend to like games that have a shorter run time, with 2 hours being the limit.

Playtest more often, and earlier

I’ve been a little hampered with trying to arrange playtesting sessions during development. Trying to get a game to a normal game session is a bit hard, people are wary to play an untried game when they can play a game that is fully developed.

At times I’m a bit of a perfectionist, however by playtesting earlier I could’ve spotted several problems which I left till later in the development cycle than I should have done. Relating this to a Software Development perspective is similar to Cathedral vs Bazaar idea of Releasing Often and Early.

Unfortunately Leeds/West Yorkshire does not seem to have an organised game development community. I want to investigate how to improve this next year, and may investigate setting up playtest events here.

Lots of ideas are roads to nowhere, kill them quickly

The final Seychelles was not the first idea I had for the competition. The first one was more an exploration kind of game, and I could never add a sense of tactics to it nor player interaction.

The second one was mostly a card based game, but I could never overcome the random elements to make it a successful game.

I need to get better at spotting dead ends, and when to try and preserve or abandon hope that a solution can be found, this is really experience and can only be found by development.

Sometimes work on other projects

Sometimes during development I felt like I needed to take a step back from Seychelles and work on a different project, unfortunately with the deadline for the competition didn’t allow me to step back too far.

In future I would like to be able to do so, taking maybe weeks off from a game while I work on something else and then I can look at a problem with a new set of eyes. I’m never going to lack for ideas for a game and I can probably work on multiple games at the same time.

This will probably mean not entering competition, unless I’ve already got a compatible idea already in mind.

Top nine games for 2013

Games I’ve played in 2013

This list is a bit longer than I expected, as I only really started playing hobby games again last year. It’s in alphabetical order (ones in bold are games I/Helena own) and comes out at 53 games, I’ve probably missed some, it’s probably only of interest to myself.

• 7 Wonders
• Agricola
• Alhambra
• Alien Frontier
• Atlantis
• Battlestar Galactica
• Bonanza
• Carcassone
• Cards against Humanity
• Castle Panic
• Coup
• Crunch
• Cthulhu Dice
• Disgrace and Favour
• Dixit
• Dobble
• Doctor Who: Card Game
• Dominion
• Elder Sign
• Eminent Domain
• Flashpoint
• Fluxx (Various versions)
  
• Forbidden Desert
• Forbidden Island
• Formula D
• For Sale
• Galaxy Trucker
• Great fire of London
• Gloom
• Gubs
• King of Tokyo
• Last Night on Earth
• Lords of Waterdeep
• Love Letter
• Munchkin
• Pandemic
• Puerto Rico
• Power Grid
• Race For The Galaxy
• Resistance (both versions)
  
• Robot Rally
• Settlers of Catan
• Show Manager
• Smashup
• Stakbots
• Thing
• The Boss
• Thurn and Taxis
• Ticket To Ride
• Terra Mystica
• Urbania
• We didn’t play test this at all
• Werewolves (I own a copy in the form of Do you worship Cthulhu)
• Zombie Dice

My Top Nine of 2013

My top nine between September 2012 – September 2013. I’m intending to do these before Essen each year, but this year with getting married I didn’t quite finish the list of.

I’ve tried for quite a while to work out what my tenth game was, but couldn’t figure out what I liked best.

1. Bonanza

I love Bonanza, it’s simple and quite light in a way. It also allows you to play the people rather than the game. I can’t think of a better bean trading game.

I’ve played maybe 10-20 games of this and it hasn’t gotten old yet.

2. Werewolves

Werewolves is always a good social game, it as with other ‘bluffing/social engineering’ games on the list allow me to play the people not the rules, especially the variant we tend to play at Leeds Werewolves.

It scales better than Resistance, and the player elimination provides with information vital to the game, the player elimination (apart from the first round elimination) isn’t too bad, as watching the game is usually quite funny.

3. Dixit

Dixit is a fun party styled game which allows me to be a little bit imaginative without needing to be a full blown story teller. It’s quite a light game, the only real difficulty explaining the rules is explaining the scoring system.

It’s one of those few games where I’m nearly always up for a game of it no matter the mood.

4. Agricola

A confession, I’ve only played Agricola once. However, I should have a copy shortly. If I’ve only played it once why do I love it so. It’s a grand Eurogame with a plot I can identify with, I can make up back stories to the characters and discuss the merits of keeping pigs in the house as pets.

If it wasn’t for it’s duration I’d have liked to played it more than once by now.

5. Power Grid

I love Power Grid, in terms of a auction game it’s the best one I’ve found yet. It’d probably be ranked higher from me if it wasn’t for the duration of the game, which means I’ve only been able to play it 4 or so times.

6. Ticket to Ride

Ticket to ride is my competitive gateway game when I’m wanting to introduce people to hobby games. It still has depth even if it is quite a light game, I also tend to win at lot at it.

7. Pandemic

Pandemic is my cooperative gateway game. It always is interesting and stressful (in a good way) in the way the game goes down to the last two or three turns.

It’s probably one of the first games I played in the hobby field and at the time it was “Wow Cooperative” but I’ve not played it very much recently as I’ve probably been burnt out on it a little too much. It suffers slightly from alpha player problem of other people playing other peoples turns. It might go up in ratings next year as it’ll be left on the shelf for a bit.

I’m annoyed at the redesigned version, after I managed to find a copy of the expansion when it was difficult to find.

8. The Resistance: Avalon

I like both forms of Resistance, but I think Avalon Resistance is the better game for the addition of Merlin and other roles which the original Resistance lacked. Again it allows me to play the people rather than the rules.

It has advantages to Werewolves in that it doesn’t need a god and it removes player elimination. Depending on the group it can be hard to try and find out information. It also slightly suffers from analysing the maths rather than the people

9. Galaxy Trucker

Galaxy trucker is an enjoyable light game for me, the dexterity elements of the first half of the game are enjoyable and then seeing everything fall apart is quite amusing. The second part of the game is a bit weaker as there isn’t really too much depth to it.

August Leeds Meeples

At the Sunday Meeples in August I was slightly hungover so couldn’t play very complex games until I’d woken up a bit.

The Resistance: Avalon

I own the base Resistance, and enjoy playing it (I also enjoy werewolves). This was the first time we’d played Avalon. I’d got the Merlin card and so knew 3 Agents of Mordred, but didn’t know who had Mordred. On the first round with 3 characters there was a failure, and I knew that within the 3 was Mordred. I had to spend most the game trying to work out which of the 3 of them was Mordred. I’d have convinced the group that two of the agents were spies by them standing up for each other a bit obviously, but couldn’t stop the Evil side winning.

(We missed the bit in the rules about the assassin)

I enjoy both versions of The Resistance, but I think the theme to Avalon is slightly better. The additional role cards adds more interest and gets closer to Werewolves, but without the player elimination or god requirement.

Battlestar Galatica

This was a second play of BSG, unfortunately the person who brought the game it was his first time playing, and I was the only person in the game who knew, sort of, how it worked.

So we had to use the rules…. Which are useless… And the index to the rules… is useless… (It doesn’t say where Battlestar is in the book).

I’m starting to become apprehensive when playing a Fantasy Flight Game, as my experience shows that the rulebooks tend to be problematic.

It was enjoyable, I still think it’s an 1 hour 30 minute game spread over 3 hours, but it’s enjoyable. We didn’t get a Cylon until halfway through at which point we’d spotted the Cylon rather quickly.

Ugg-tect

I didn’t play Ugg-tect, but did watch, it seemed quite a fun game and had a good social aspect. The staff on the pub looked a bit odd with people bashing each others heads in.

I worry the game wouldn’t have longevity, it might be a good party game, but I don’t think I’d look to a copy.

Seychelles Playtest: Valuation is a difficult thing

On Tuesday I finally playtested revision 4 of Seychelles as a 4 player game. The results were worse than expected, and show that the game has significant work to do before being a complete game.

Some of the feedback from the playtest are useful beyond Seychelles itself, and are worth sharing. They have a common theme around valuation of an items worth.

A player must be able to evaluate the value of an item and come to the decision of which item is best

Players need a way to determine value of an action, without it they cannot make decisions, and fall into analysis paralysis. The playtest had moments where the players had stalled and could not decide what to do.

I had attempted to counteract this with splitting the properties into those that a player might want to buy and those that they have no need to. But within the set of properties that were sensible to purchase there was no clear distinction in value between them leading players to get stuck trying to make a decision and slowing the pace of the game.

Options within a game need different relative values, some can be almost the same but this should be at the maximum 2 or 3 to avoid slowing the game down.

Players value private information more than public information

Seychelles has some cards public and some cards private, the private cards had longer term goals while the public cards were shorter term goals. Both the new players considered the private cards higher priority than the public ones, even with the public ones being better in the short term.

If the public cards are values more than the private cards, there must be a way to ensure that the player to realises this.

Never give a player nothing to do

There were also a few cases where the players had no sensible moves open to them. This meant that they didn’t do anything. It feels wrong doing nothing without a benefit.

Other problems

• We only played one year. I was aiming for the game to last 1 hour, unfortunately one year took 30 minutes which would be far longer than anticipated.
• There doesn’t seem to be an engine to the game.
• Money flow is a problem, there were times when players ran out of money, which meant that they had nothing to do.
• Auctions with small denominations of currency lead players to become predictable.

First Game Impressions: Battlestar Galatica

Battlestar Galatica is a semi-cooperative bluffing/deduction game based on the reimagined TV series of the same name. One set of players are the humans, and the other players are cylons. Humans aim to survive and the cylons aim to kill all the humans.

The game BSG has been on my radar for a little while, I often play games like Werewolves and The Resistance, each with their own merits and flaws. A person brought BSG to Leeds Meeples on Sunday, and I wanted to see how it played, especially with Flip the Table saying it’s a fine example of a licensed game

Five of us played the base scenario with parts of Pegasus expansion thrown in, this got a little confusing at times, and I think for the first play just the base game would’ve been better.

The components were good as usual with Final Flight Games, but due to the mixing and matching of sets there were two sorts of basestar one being cardboard the other being plastic.

I think the game does match the theme of the TV series, and creates a tense atmosphere, but if you’ve never watched BSG some of the plot points of the series will be spoilt either by the contents of the game or the other players discussing things.

Every player picks a character from the series (my role was Baltair, which was fun to roleplay). We also had both Adamas, Starbuck, Colonel Saul Tigh and Tom Zarek. It felt light a nice mix of characters with some being leadership based, others fighter based.

As Baltair I was president and drew two Human/Cylon cards, it turned out I was human after all. People then started incriminating that I was a Cylon as I had a higher probability of being one.

At the start of a players turn, they get to pick up skill cards as said on their role card, these get used either when drawing a crisis card at the end of the turn or as part of their action. This is where the deception part of the game is mostly focused.

The crisis cards have a certain number of points that must be met for a vote to pass, the crisis cards limits the skills that can be used such as engineering, leadership, science, tactics etc with ones not listed acting as negative cards. Each player can put in as many as they want, and two additional cards are added from the ‘destiny’ pack.

As a mechanic it works quite well as a deception mechanism, the Cylons can add a few cards to disrupt things without being too obvious they’re messing things up. Of course there is always a risk that the destiny pack will place in two negative cards and the Cylon places in a negative card, leading the list of suspects to be narrowed.

Halfway through the game another cylon card was handed to each player and I wasn’t a Cylon again. At this point in the game we had 3 basestars around us, and 3 mechanical cylons had boarded our ship.

We’d destroyed one of them and two cylons were two turned away from boarding the ship. It was Tom Zarek’s turn, and he decided it was a good time to call an election. (To be fair, he couldn’t actually do anything about the cylons advancing, but it was a pretty suspicious move.)

Tom Zarek had narrowly won his rigged election, and the next player was me, if we didn’t get the cylons in this turn we’d lost the game the problem being that to get rid of a cylon you needed to roll a 5 or above. I had the cards to command someone else, or I could do it myself but only roll once. I suspected at this point Tom Zarek as a cylon and had a fairly confident  assumption that Commander Adama was a cylon. So I felt that the best move was to trust another player to do the shooting for me… Who then turned around and said “I don’t want to cause I’m a cylon”, they had been turned two turns earlier. It also turned out Commander Adama was a cylon.

It was an enjoyable game, if a bit long. I also think it relied a bit too much upon the dice rather than being more focused on the deception aspects. Statistically once we’d had the cylons in the dock we had a low chance of winning.

I don’t think thematically that having everyone vote on if you should pull the trigger would work, but maybe a system whereby the players can manipulate what the successful dice rolls were could have worked.

The game feels slightly too complex for itself, I felt it could have been significantly simplified while keeping the core ideas and mechanics intact. But it may have been a hard balance between making the theme strong verses too much complexity.

The duration of about 3-4 hours is a bit long for my tastes, which limits how often I could play it. I don’t really think a deception style game should last for more than an hour or hour and a half tops. As you could have to play for 15 or so hours before being able to play a cylon.
I’m not sure if the various expansions would really add to the game, I suppose it depends on how much of a fan of the TV series you are. As a TV tie in product it does feel a very good product (especially when compared with the 1980’s tie-in)

It’s an interesting addition to the various deception games I’ve played, which in general appeal to me, but I think a tighter version would appeal to me more.

UPDATE: It turns out the rule we were playing under for the Cylons in the dock are not the correct rules, they advance only when a heavy raider symbol is on the cards. However the rulebook for the base game of BSG is confusingly written and the index provided is not helpful.

First Game Impressions: Gubs

Gubs is a card based game, the object of which is to get more Gubs than other players. You get gubs by stealing them off other players or drawing and playing them from a deck.

You can protect your Gubs from being stolen by adding one of three protection cards such as a mushroom. There are then a few special cards which allow you to remove the projection.

The artwork is nice, but the ability for strategy is quite weak, the first game we played without any strategy, the second game nobody played Gubs until they also had protection. This left the game quite flat with people drawing cards and doing no actions.

As each player can take as many actions as they like, it is hard to see when a player has finished their turn, and the ability to not take an action can cause players to stack their deck.

There are a few cards in the deck which are overly powerful compared with other cards, and leads it to be very much the luck of the draw. It is also very much a ‘take that’ kind of game, which I generally dislike.

The one nice mechanic I saw in it is three cards are placed (G U and B) in each third of the deck. The game continues until the third letter card is drawn. However the order of the deck can be changed during the game, and so you cannot predict where the letter cards are. I probably wouldn’t use that mechanic myself, but it was something new.

All in all, might be a good game for a rainy kids game, but not the sort of game I’d like to play myself.