ATOE Episode 14 All Hallows Eve Showdown

Blood Rage:

I broke out my Kickstarter of Blood Rage with my group this past weekend. We played a full four player game with all the extra monsters but none of the other expansions.

The game mechanics are amazingly straight forward and are readily printed on the clan cards, which is great. The card play and combat are simple as well. If you have a clan upgrade, you pay for it in Rage (the currency of the game) and add it to one of the three clan upgrade slots. If it is a monster, you pay, and add it to one of the two monster slots. When a monster is played you can then add them to the board to take a territory.

Everyone understood the game after one good round of actions, which at first concerned me a tad. Was it too simple? I am a fan of Eric Lang's games so I as not too worried. After a round or two I realized that while the rules are streamlined the game play has more than enough depth to keep any gamer satisfied.

The game runs over three rounds (called ages) and starts with a card draft. I like that mechanic and your choices carry massive weight for the round so you need to choose carefully. During the draft of cards you will start with eight, pick one to add to your hand for the round and pass them to the next player. This will continue with the age 1 cards until each player has six in their hand.

The card types come in the form of attack cards, upgrades, and quests. I won't go into detail but you need to be careful not to fill your hand with too many of one type. If you do you will limit what you can do.

The next step are the player actions. Each player will take one action by spending rage to do a number of things from place units on the map to adding an upgrade to the clan board or moving from one territory to the other.

Meanwhile, Ragnarok is coming and these provinces will be destroyed in a later part of the game round...well, at least one of them will each age.

The point of placing units in the form of your clan figures and monsters you collect is to pillage the territory, which gets you glory as well as a special boon that will upgrade your basic clan abilities.

Having the monsters in the game adds a ton of theme and flavor. The cool abilities they have do not upset the game balance overly much and can be overcome though the monsters are very powerful in some cases. All of them have a good place in the game.

The pace of the game is pretty fast. it slows a bit when the card drafting takes place and it is such a critical part of your strategy but once the actions start happening everything flows quickly.

I would not call this a gateway game but the rules are so straightforward you could introduce it to new players without much issue.

For veteran gamers, it is a solid and fun strategy title with area control, card drafting, battles, and a great action spend mechanic.

Whenever I am teaching a game I tend to lose. I did not win this one either but it was a lot of fun to play and everyone agreed it would be something we would be playing again.

The minis are so outstanding the deserve to be painted but I do not have the time to do this justice. Painted, they would add even more to the Viking theme and fantastic art.

This is definitely a keeper for my collection.

Above and Below:

Today when I arrived at the meet up spot for gaming (Silver Grill Cafe in Austin Tx) I ran into one the group reading through a game I had just gotten on Kickstarter myself.

This is the game Above and Below. A.....well, hard to say what type of game it is. It has elements of worker placement and lots of resources from rope, to pots, to fruit and paper. That part reminds me slightly of the game Euphoria. Then, it also has the "below" part where you adventure through the endless caves below the ground in this world. It unfolds with stories as you send your people of to adventure. That part reminded on of Agents of SMERSH, or Tales of the Arabian Nights, complete with an adventure story book.

This is a game by Ryan Laukat who also designed The Ancient World and Empires of the Void, to name a couple. You know it is one of his games by the signature art style ( He is both game designer and the artist) that while different in each game is still distinctly his.

Anyway, we played a test few rounds then invited a third to play a full game. It is fun! While I liked The Ancient World there were elements of that game (Ryan's last game) that weren't as smooth as other games he has done.

Above and Below manages to blend two very different types of games into a game that works well at both. The way the adventuring is managed is part of your decisions with what to do with the folks in your growing village. You can build, harvest, labor, recruit, and adventure and it all just works.

Getting your head around all the different ways you can score is a bit of a challenge but you totally get it after one play.

We played two games with three players, the third player was different for each game and everyone enjoyed it. I can see that adding a fourth player would not add any appreciable time to the game and might make the trading between players more prevalent.

I would not call this a gateway game. it is a bit deep as it does require to manage resources and worker placement. The decisions are critical and like most of these games you never feel like you have quite enough of what you need.

I think this might be my favorite Ryan Laukat game and if there is any one thing I might say as a negative there always seemed to be a big score gap between the first place winner and the rest. Though, it was not totally obvious until we totaled up scores at the end.

I came in second both times. grrrr. but was nearly twenty points away from the first place winner each time. I was scoring in the high 40's while the first place each time was near 70-80 pts.

Like the game Euphoria, that this one reminds me of a little, it appears to be one of those games I am not going to win ( I never win at Euphoria for some reason) but is fun enough to lose.

Check it out! This is not an official review but just my thoughts. Having only played two full games I don't believe I could fully review it but my thoughts might help you as to whether this is a good game for you.

A Touch of Evil:

My play through series of A Touch of Evil is going strong.  Check it out. The story is getting fun.

Who should like this game:
So, A touch of Evil is a story telling board game with tons of cards, lots of dice chucking, and entirely based on luck.
It is known as a "roll and move" game where you roll for your character's movement and then take the action or actions at the location you choose to move to. It is far more flexible then say, Monopoly but is the main mechanic for getting from place to place in the game.

This game is about enjoying the moment and telling a story. Some times it goes your way and other times it does not. Some of he greater moments come in when it does not go your way.

If you want to have some fun creating a story this game will be something you enjoy. If you are a hardcore euro, war, or strategic gamer this may not be the game for you. I enjoy both!

I hope you enjoy this play through series and the events that create the story for our four characters, The Scarlet Shadow, Eliza, the Witch Hunter, Lucy Handbrook, the Lord's daughter, and Doctor Edwards as they try to thwart and ancient Unspeakable Horror!