Game Reviews - Bloodborne, The Big Book of Madness

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Played two board games tonight and another new one a few weeks ago.
Bloodborne:
The party is a gang of monster hunters. Our designated final boss was an evil spider with the rule, "Any hunter who dies twice is eliminated from the game." This is a game where it's expected that you'll die a lot. You have 8 hit points and monsters can do greatly varying damage; several weapons for the heroes are designed to make your "allies" lose HP too. In our case we got the high side of "greatly varying" and the entire party died on turn 2. Then a few turns later, I misjudged when to rest and took 4 HP damage at once, eliminating me. Well, that was quick!

The Big Book of Madness:
You're students at what is obviously Hogwarts (down to the scarves and fonts) and have foolishly opened one of those cursed tomes. Now you must build up your powers while fending off the monsters' curses. This is a co-op deck-building game in which you start with a specific character aligned with one of the four elements and a slightly themed deck of various element cards rated 1-3 points. You spend these each turn to buy better element cards, or buy spells, or cast spells, or pump energy into defeating the various monster curses (eg. "put 4 Air tokens on this by X time or Bad Thing Y happens"). The spells are interesting things like "spend 1 Water to put a card into reserve for later" or "spend 3 Earth to cause an earthquake that destroys all Madness cards in anyone's reserve pool". Nice use of theming, and the rules encourage you to specialize. I went with being a Water/Air specialist. Still I felt like there could've been a stronger sense of actually doing things, because "I buy a 3-Water card with these 3 points of Water" or "I spend 2 Air to put 2 tokens on that curse card" feels too abstract.

The Madness system is pretty standard deck-building: you get useless cards that get stuck in your deck. Worse, they actually can't leave your hand by default, and a full hand of them kills you off. There are a bunch of powers for either temporarily discarding them, destroying them (better, but depletes a supply that kills everyone if it runs out) or curing them (returning them to the supply). I thought that was a neat idea with various gameplay effects, like using a spell to reset someone's deck without them gaining Madness for shuffling. Unfortunately, destroying cards is really easy with the basic Fire spell and the way we played, there were a ton of Madness cards in the supply, so there was little point in fancy powers for handling them.

Unfortunately we were also playing this the wrong way; the game's owner is someone who doesn't seem to have a good grasp on the rules of her own games. (Imagine what happened when we tried to play "Pandemic" and she insisted on adding the "In the Lab" expansion that makes the cure-seeking process much more complicated.) So we had the curses/monsters advancing once per complete round instead of once per player turn, ie. 1/4 speed, and it was like "Harry Potter" if the villains didn't start showing up until year 3 or so. Still, I enjoyed the sense of building up magic power and specialties. There probably could've been done more with the sense of learning and fighting, partly because fighting monsters consists entirely of filling up the curse cards with tokens. I'd play again with the proper difficulty rules.

Also: Tiny Epic Western:
From the makers of "Tiny Epic Kingdoms", a cleverly designed, small, cheap game I own. In this one you're buying buildings in a tiny (epic) Western town with a "worker placement" mechanic. Meaning, you have 2-3 wooden dudes you can place in various spots to harvest resources or do some other action, based on which site you put them on. The gimmick is that your workers get into gunfights whenever they have to share a space. On one hand you want to pick sites that nobody else wants, to be sure you don't get your dudes shot and their actions negated... but several rules encourage you to pick fights anyway. For one thing, whoever's won the most recent fight at certain points gets free resources. (In contrast, a supposedly pirate-themed game I once played seemed to have no reason for you to ever fight other players.) Then, you spend resources to get buildings. You can only have one usable on your property at a time (the most recent on you bought), and the buildings are themselves sites that your dudes can visit to do things.

This game is a great example of theming. The resources are Gold, Law and Force. The buildings are all things like saloons and telegraph offices. The "dice" are bullet-shaped. Gratuitous gunfights are encouraged. Most interesting is that there are mini-poker cards placed between the buildings, face-down (once we knew what we were doing) and each player has one. The ranks are 1-5 and you form hands in a fashion similar to Texas Hold'em using the cards next to a location you're interacting with. There's a gambling aspect involved in everything you do, from using your cards to gain resources to investing in particular symbols on the buildings you buy, not knowing in advance which will be the most valuable. Yet it's not totally chaotic like Fluxx because you have some sense of who's winning and there's a fairly clear goal. I'd definitely play this again.
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