Month: August 2023

Hearthstone: Battlegrounds

Last week, I talked about the first Hearthstone game mode, and I promised more. So here’s part two: Battlegrounds!

Battlegrounds is an 8-player competition where you each pick one of two Heroes (randomly pulled from a broader lineup), start with three Gold, and instead of using your own card collection, you have to buy minions from Bartender Bob. Unless your ability says otherwise, minions cost three Gold apiece, refreshing the selection costs one, and the cost of upgrading your Tavern Tier decreases by one each turn. There are six Tavern Tiers. As you upgrade through them, you unlock higher Tier minions, usually with better abilities. In both traditional and Battlegrounds, you may only have seven minions on your Board at a time; in Battlegrounds, minions sell for one Gold (with exceptions). If you acquire three of the same minion, they combine into a Golden minion with an improved ability, and playing it lets you Discover (pick between three cards) a minion from the Tavern Tier above yours! Each turn, your board of minions will go up against another player’s, attacking mostly at random (except where abilities like Taunt dictate otherwise). If you have minions left after your opponent’s have all been defeated, each surviving minion’s Tavern Tier is added to your own, and the sum is dealt as damage to your opponent. Unlike in traditional Hearthstone, the minions that died last turn also return to your board! This gives you a lot of opportunity to build them up; my favorite minion type for this is Mechs, to which Magnetic minions can bond, allowing you to not only increase their Attack and Health, but also give them additional abilities! Only five of the ten minion types are used in each game, though, so you have to get comfortable with multiple strategies.

Battlegrounds characters start with different amounts of Armor on top of their 30 Health, likely to counterbalance their various abilities, but just like in traditional Hearthstone, when you run out of Health you’re out. If there’s an odd number of players left, the NPC Kel’Thuzad will reanimate someone’s board so that everyone still have a match. The last player standing wins! Battlegrounds takes longer than traditional Heathstone, because while the duration of each turn is set, there is no Fatigue mechanic to limit the length of the game. However, because each turn is a set length, usually much longer than I need to make my decisions, I’ve found Battlegrounds is useful for when I want to work on something in small doses. I can take my turn, get something done, and then take a break while I take my next turn!

This week, they also came out with the Anomalies update, giving each game a special rule like “Only Mechs are in the Tavern” (a favorite of mine) or “Tavern Tier 7 exists. Start with 10 extra Armor.” As you might imagine, these massively impact your strategy, up to and including which Hero you pick!

The cherry on top is Bartender Bob himself. He talks. Sometimes it’s in response to actions or transitions, like “Don’t tell the others – I’m rooting for you” at the start of a combat, and sometimes he’s just making conversation, which is when he’s at his funniest. Some of my favorites include “”Oh, I’ve dealt with the League of Evil. Terrible people. But good tippers!” and “All the best minions come here. I’ve got the spicy pretzel mustard.” There is so much to be said for this game, and still this NPC is genuinely one of my favorite parts.

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Come In! Have A Seat By The Fire

Hearthstone is a virtual collectible card game with several game modes and a warm, comfy tavern theme. If you have your volume on, you’ll find yourself greeted as the main menu appears.

Your first option is traditional Hearthstone. In this, you pick one of the eleven character classes – each with a signature ability – to build a 30-card deck for, then compete one-on-one with another player. The first player starts with three cards in hand, the second starts with four, and they each get one opportunity to reshuffle some back into their deck and draw replacements. This is most often useful when the card costs a high amount of Mana, because players have one Mana on their first turn, two on their second, three on their third, etc. up to ten. Starting with an 8-cost card, then, isn’t immediately useful. The second player also gets The Coin, a free card which grants them one extra Mana Crystal on the turn that it’s played.

The goal of the game is fairly simple: each Hero starts with 30 Health, and through the use of minions, spells, and weapons (all played by spending Mana*), you’re trying to knock the other Hero’s Health to or below 0 before they can do the same to you. You start your turn by drawing a card, and the text on each explains its abilities. There’s also bolded text, which you can hover over for the definition; for example, Windfury means a character may attack twice each turn, and Taunt means enemies must defeat your Taunt minions before they can attack any of your other characters. Each minion has Attack and Health stats. There’s also a time limit, to each turn, but also to the game: once your deck runs out of cards, each time you should draw deals you an increasing amount of Fatigue damage instead.

Alongside all this, there are several maps (randomly chosen from), each of which has interactive features! They give the game that little bit of extra character I adore. Strategy? Yes. Firing a catapult while you wait for your opponent to take their turn? Also yes!

On the subject of waiting, this post turned out extremely long, so I’ve split it into three parts. For my commentary on the next game mode, Battlegrounds, come back next week!

*Except for the rare cards that cost Health instead.

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Don’t Kill Doctor Lucky!

I want him dead, but more importantly I want to be the one to do it! Aaand that right there is the premise of the game Kill Doctor Lucky. Everyone is in Doctor Lucky’s Estate and, with the exception of Doctor Lucky, everyone wants to kill him, and so will foil anyone else’s attempts to do him in first.

Because it’s from Cheapass Games, the board doesn’t come with character tokens, so you’ll have to provide your own. In the pictures below, the centipede is Doctor Lucky. (Also, this is a three-player minimum game, so please ignore the fact that we only played with two.)

Everyone except Doctor Lucky starts in the Drawing Room, labeled with a 0. The Doctor’s starting position is determined randomly by cards. Gameplay is fairly simple – players may either move one space and, if the room they land in has a name, draw a card, or they may use Move and Room cards to move more than that, move Doctor Lucky, and/or attempt a murder. To try to kill Doctor Lucky, you must be alone with him in a room where nobody else has line of sight. Line of sight is determined by drawing a straight line between the doorways so, for instance, anyone in the Winter Garden can see into the Green House, Piazza, and Carriage House, and the latter three can also see into the Hedge Maze, but because of the way the doors are aligned, the Winter Garden does not have line of sight into the Hedge Maze.

If you successfully isolate Doctor Lucky, you may attempt to kill him. Either you’re using your hands for a value of one, or you can play a weapon for its murder value instead! Some weapons are worth more points in corresponding places. Like the Shoe Horn in the photo below, which would normally have been worth two points, but because the attempt took place in the Lancaster Room, it was worth seven!

At this point, the other players go around in order and choose whether or not to play Failure cards. For an attempt to fail, the collective Failure value must equal or exceed the value of the weapon! With the appropriate amount of players, this also incites a bit of gambling on whether you think the other players can foil it without you having to expend cards. I’ve seen games end quickly because of that gambit.

Provided Doctor Lucky isn’t dead and the game isn’t over, your turn ends with Doctor Lucky moving into the next numbered room along his path. Usually play passes clockwise. However, if Doctor Lucky’s movement brings him into a room with a player in it, play immediately skips to that person’s turn. Depending on where the Doctor starts and what everyone else is doing, it is entirely possible for one player to have taken three turns before another takes their first.

Dorkstock runs a life-size Kill Doctor Lucky at GameholeCon, and – having been suckered into being Doctor Lucky before – my personal interpretation is that the Doctor is so oblivious to everyone trying to kill them because they’re busy reading. I too may not notice a cannon going off near my head if I had my nose buried in a book!

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Time to Face The Reckoners!

Actually, time to be the Reckoners! The Reckoners board game is based off the Brandon Sanderson series of the same name, following a group of rebels (the Reckoners) as they challenge superpowered megalomaniacs like the Epic Steelheart. Appropriately, it’s a cooperative game, featuring a team of 1-6 players coordinating to defeat Steelheart before he wipes out the population.

That’s more complicated than it sounds, naturally. Steelheart has a lot of lackeys hanging about the city making life difficult, and whenever you defeat one, another takes their place. You have to defeat them, though, as left unchecked these Epics will devastate both the population and your efforts at defeating their boss.

The short version is this: players each have a character ability and dice, and each turn everyone rolls up to three times to determine their actions for the round. These include wiping out Enforcement (which accelerate the rate at which Epics grow more destructive), containing Epic abilities (the ways that they’re destructive), researching Epics’ weaknesses (to lower their health or, if they have a prime invincibility, to render them mortal), attacking Epics, and acquiring Plan Tokens or money. Plan Tokens act as wild dice, and dice in general are also used to move between parts of the city and take down barricades. The Reckoners will take their actions, cash in the rewards for any Epics they’ve killed, and purchase nifty gadgets to make their jobs easier. The Epics, in turn, will repopulate the vacant City Districts and activate their abilities, including Steelheart’s, who then moves to a random location. This is especially inconvenient, as you have to be in the same City District as an Epic to affect them. Steelheart also has a prime invincibility, so you have to research his weakness before you can deal him any damage.

The first time we played this, it wound up being a slow and calculated damage race between Steelheart’s health and the remaining population, won only barely. The second and third times, the damage part proved to be our strength. It helped that we played with Megan, whose character ability is turning one containment die into three attacks, and helped even more when we got her an Equipment Card that turned one anti-Enforcement die into three containments. In the picture below, she had the potential to do twenty-seven damage in one turn, or more if she used her Plan Tokens. Yeah… Steelheart didn’t stand a chance.

If you can’t tell by the fact that I’ve played it repeatedly, I adore this game. I loved the books, and to see them adapted so well into a board game I can play with my fellow fans is perpetually exciting! It’s heavy in both strategy and luck, and no matter what difficulty you play it at, a plan well-executed is always something to celebrate.

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