Heartcatchers is a quick to play, two-player bluffing game, in which hearts catch other hearts and collect Secrets. It’s also extremely quick to learn!
The game starts with six face-up heart cards in two rows of three, three cards in each player’s hand, and the rest set aside as a draw pile. On a player’s turn, they may “catch” a stack in front on them – red hearts catch green, green hearts catch blue, and blue hearts catch red – by playing the correct color of heart face-up on top of it, catch an opponent’s stack and swap it for any one of their own, or play a card as a Secret, face-down at the bottom of a stack and perpendicular to those that are face-up. There are also two Uncatchable cards, which can catch any color but cannot be caught! Players draw after playing.
The game continues until all cards have been played, which doesn’t take long, seeing as there are only twenty. Then, scoring! Any face-up cards in a player’s stack are worth one point. Some cards, when played as Secrets, may add or subtract points, or swap the stack with the one directly across from it. We’ve played this game twice so far, and both times we hit a “reverse, reverse!” situation where a stack had two Change-of-Heart cards under it.
And… that’s it! Whoever has the most points wins, and if there’s a tie then the game’s so short you just play it again. Alongside being quick, pretty (look at those sparkles), and simple yet tricky, it’s also a compact game, so it’s easy to find room on your shelves for! Ours are pretty packed, so “this game is small” is a major bonus.
Surprise! I’m not done with Hearthstone yet. If you haven’t read my first two posts on it, you can find those here and here. All caught up? Great! The third play style is Tavern Brawl, which has a new set of rules each week. For instance, “[y]our deck is full of wannabes who cast a random spell at a random target when played.” Some rules, like this one, provide you with a deck, while other times you’ll have to build your own. Depends on the week!
The fourth option on the main menu is “Modes,” which leads you to… four other options. Arena and Duels are both a three-strikes system in which you build a deck and try to win as many games as you can before you’re out; each can be played using Gold or Tavern Tickets, and each wins you more prizes the longer you last. Duels also has a Casual mode, which costs nothing but has no reward. As for the mechanics, Arena features the traditional characters and rules, while Duels has its own characters, with extra abilities and increasing Health and deck size the further in you get. I personally prefer Duels, both because it has that Casual option and because it’s my kind of chaotic. I especially like how the addition of new cards each turn forces my strategy to grow and adapt; it’s ever-changing, which means it’s never boring!
Solo Adventures are Hearthstone’s story mode, where you can play through the characters’ origin stories and learn more about their history with each other. Functionally, it’s a lot like traditional Hearthstone, but against an NPC and with dialogue. Some arcs have you rooting for yourself more than others; March of the Lich King was painful because I didn’t want Arthas to win, knowing full well the villain he was becoming. Others are clearly the hero of the story, regardless of whether they’re in the Book of Heroes. (Rokara is in the Book of Mercenaries. She’s also the most consistently heroic character I’ve played so far.)
The final game mode is Mercenaries, which is by far the most unique. Whereas the others are about picking the right cards, success in Mercenaries is more about what you do with the cards you’ve picked. It works like this: to take on a Bounty, you put together a party of six Mercenaries. Protectors deal double damage to Fighters, who deal double to Casters, who deal double to Protectors, so you might base who you bring on which type your opponent is. However, your opponent is the last in a whole lineup of NPCs you’ll have to fight to reach them, so the ideal party has a little bit of everything. Pick wisely, because once you start the Bounty, you’re locked into those six cards. Success is instead contingent on picking, 1) the right three to have in play for any given combat, and 2) the right abilities from each of them to maximize effect. Each ability has a speed, with the lower numbers going first, and you can see what your opponents have picked before choosing moves yourself. Be exceedingly careful with the Health of your characters, though, because if a Mercenary dies, they’re out for the rest of the Bounty! And if everybody dies, big surprise, you’ve lost. There are a few major perks to this game mode, too. First is that, like in Duels, you’ll get a new upgrade after each fight, which lasts for the duration of the Bounty. The second is that, unlike Duels – or any other Hearthstone mode – each combat grants your Mercenaries XP, which unlocks new permanent abilities! You’ll also receive Merc-specific Coins, which can be used to upgrade those abilities.
The closest that traditional Hearthstone gets to this is the Reward Track – by playing games and completing daily or weekly quests, you progress along a track that earns you Gold, cards, Tavern Tickets, and Card Packs, which can be opened for five cards apiece. Battlegrounds also has its own track, where you can earn Hero skins and emotes.
And that’s Hearthstone! I definitely didn’t cover everything, but we’d be here for a very long time if I did. Hearthstone is near and dear to me, so I hope I’ve managed to impart at least the impression of everything, in case any piece of it interests you, too. See you in the Tavern!
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.
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.
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!
Don’t worry, Dizios shouldn’t actually make you dizzy. It’s effectively the spiral tie-dye version of dominoes! Because of the spiral, each corner of the square tile has a color, allowing up to two colors per side. Like in dominoes, the tile has to match whatever it’s adjacent to!
Each time you play a tile, you score points based on the dot value of the tiles next to it. For example, if you nestled your tile between two three-dot tiles, you’d score six points! As usual, you can’t move tiles around once they’ve been played. The game ends once you’ve played the whole deck (or as much of it as you can, before no tiles can legally be placed anymore), and the player with the most points wins. And even if you lose, you made something pretty! The aesthetic is one of my favorite parts about Dizios, honestly. It looks fun!
Manga Manga functions similarly to Crazy Ates or Uno, but with manga-style art and a few unique twists.
The first is that play is simultaneous, making gameplay faster and substantially more chaotic. You do, however, have to wait until someone else has played a card before you can play again. The second twist is that, unlike in the other games where you can match by color or number, there’s only one criterion to match by. Each Combatant has its own color and symbol… and the color and symbol of which to play next. Rainbow Dragons act as the wild card, playable at any time and allowing whoever played it to pick the next Combatant.
Players race to empty their entire hand, and the first to succeed draws a face-down Victory Disk. If the Dragon on the disk is “glowing” it’s worth two points, while regular Dragon Spheres are worth one. In a game with three or more players, the person with the most cards left in hand would draw a Consolation Disk, providing some advantage they could redeem it for later. We were playing with two players though, where there are no Consolation Disks, you can play immediately after yourself (lest it become a turn-based game), and players may draw new cards to increase their options. No matter how many players you have, the game lasts for nine rounds, after which the player with the most points wins!
I got a little distracted deciding who each Combatant reminds me of, because I’m a dork like that. For instance, I think the purple character resembles Hunter from The Owl House!
The Beginning is effectively a simplified, faster version of Evolution. Instead of players each carrying out one turn phase, then moving on to the next, and so on, The Beginning has players run through every step before play passes to the next person. It’s a little bit less competitive that way, in that the food you’re working with is in the Watering Hole because you put it there, and if you run out, it’s purely because your species have too high a population to sustain. Other players may leave more or less excess on their turn, but they aren’t taking a pass at what’s available on yours.
The quantity of food you’re working with isn’t as variable, either, nor is the amount of cards in your hand. The number of each added per turn is now static. While you can still discard cards to create a new species, you get one for free every turn, and predation no longer requires that the Carnivore be larger than its prey. It simply needs the appropriate Traits to bypass any defensive Traits its prey may have. Body size isn’t a factor at all! However, both games handle extinction, end-of-game criteria, and scoring (mostly) the same. Collect lots of food to win, and if you tie, order pizza and play again!
I said in my 2015 post that I loved Evolution, and I still do. That’s why I like Evolution: The Beginning so much. It lets me play one of my long-standing favorites even when I don’t want to think enough for the original!
Herd Mentality: the rare time you don’t want to be original. In this game of questions, the goal is to have the same answer as the other players!
Each round starts with a question. Some are multiple choice, while others are completely open-ended, such as “What’s the best pizza topping?” and “Name a famous redhead.” All players secretly write down their answer before conferring. Like I said before, the goal is to overlap – the answer with the highest consensus scores each of those players cows! (Not real cows, unfortunately. We don’t play for steaks.)
If all but one player manage to match with someone, the odd one out is cursed with the Pink Cow, which makes their herd worthless until the curse passes on to someone else. Whoever is curse-free and collects eight cows wins!
I was introduced to Herd Mentality by some friends from the UK, which adds another challenge: the cultural divide of having players from two continents. Popular fast food chains, for instance. It’s one of those games where you learn a lot of neat, random little facts about your fellow players and their interests!
Planet is all about arranging continents to maximize your objective’s Natural Habitat while hosting as much animal life as possible. There are twelve turns, each with a corresponding pile of face-down Continent tiles and face-up Animal cards. In those twelve turns, players fully develop their Planets, and compete to claim species!
To start, each player gets an empty Planet core and a random Natural Habitat card, which will determine their objective. Each has its own scale for points, depending on how much of that habitat exists on the Continent tiles. Of the five Habitats, oceans are most prevalent, while glaciers are rarest, so the thresholds are higher for someone with an ocean objective to win points. Each turn, that round’s five Continent tiles will be spread face-up on the board, and starting with the First Player, everyone will take one tile and add it to their Planet. To facilitate the 3D aspect of assembling a world, Planet cores are, effectively, blank magnetic d12s, which I think is awesome! The First Player token does pass at the end of the round, so everyone gets an even amount of first picks.
For the first two rounds, there are no Animal cards to compete for. From round three onward, however, after Continents are placed, players compare that Animal’s criteria to see who wins the card. There are a few categories of criteria, and some terminology to explain it: an Area is a single triangle of Habitat, of which each tile has five, while a Region is a contiguous collection of Areas of the same Habitat. In the picture above, for instance, there are two visible ocean Regions, each a single Area in size. For some Animals, this is ideal – they develop on the Planet with the most distinct Regions of a Habitat, regardless of their size. Other animals are drawn to the biggest Region of one kind, which must either be adjacent to or in no way adjacent to another specific Habitat. The Octopus belongs to the largest ocean Region touching mountains, while the Shark requires the largest ocean Region that doesn’t touch mountains. Having both in the same game was interesting.
That’s the other thing about Animals: whereas setup uses all fifty Continent tiles, there are only twenty of the forty-five Animal cards in play, so from game to game your objectives will vary a lot!
When the twelfth turn is over, each player counts how many Areas of their objective Habitat they’ve acquired, and receives the corresponding number of points. Then, they score the Animals! Each animal from the same Natural Habitat as their objective is worth one point, while each animal from another Habitat is worth two. As such, the game becomes a balancing act between collecting your Habitat, and diversifying enough to win the other Animals!
I immediately liked this game. I love the 3D aspect, the spatial puzzle, the challenge of juggling multiple objectives, the animals… we only really had one complaint, which is that the objective cards should have text or symbols (like each Area has, if you look closely at the tiles) so players don’t have to rely so much on color to know what their target Habitat is. We may have mistaken the ocean’s blue for glaciers, the first time, not having seen the white glacier card before. And nobody in our house is colorblind. Aside from that, though, it’s fantastic! I look forward to playing it again.
