Empire Building Filler Thriller

Eight-Minute Empire could be described as wargame. It has armies, their leaders contest for territory, and at the end of the game, the leader who holds the most territory wins the game. It is though not a wargame—certainly not in a traditional sense—but is instead a Eurogame that combines area control and card drafting mechanics with a set collection mechanic. It is a little game with big themes that can be played through in the eight minutes of the title with just two players, but just twenty minutes with the maximum number of five players.

Published by Red Raven Games, inside Eight-Minute Empire’s small, square box can be found one double-sided map board, a four-page rulebook, forty-two cards, and five sets of armies, forty-four coins, and ten Goods Tokens. The map board depicts various continents broken up into regions, connected by safe sea routes. At the centre of the map stands a city—this is the starting point for the game. At the top of the map is a line of numbers—[0], [1], [1], [2], [2], [2], and [3]. These are the costs that a player will have to pay for the cards placed in the corresponding line placed at the top of the board. The cards are marked with an order that the leader will give his armies and with a Good such as a Carrot, Pine Tree, or a Gem. A leader will gain more Victory Points if he has managed to collect these symbols in sets by the end of the game. The five armies—in blue, green, pink, red, and yellow—each consist of fourteen cubes (the armies) and three discs (the cities). The coin tokens are used to purchase cards and the Goods tokens replicated the symbols on the cards and are used as part of the game’s advanced options.

At the start of the game, the cards are shuffled and six laid out at the top of the board face up. Each player receives his armies and some coins. Initially he will use these to bid on who goes first in the game, but their primary use is to purchase cards. He will also place three armies in the starting region. On his turn, he will purchase one of the cards at the top of the board, the cost being determined by its position in the line. Cards towards the left are free or cheap and get progressively more expensive to the right.

Purchasing a card gains a player its Goods symbol and an order that he can give his armies. This order may be to place armies (from his reserve onto the board), move armies (already on the board), move armies by sea (already on the board along a sea route between continents), destroy armies (remove an army from the board), or build cities (in a region where a player has armies). Some cards give a choice of options, others two options, while others give the player the choice of Goods symbol at the end of game to add to the sets he is collecting.

Each player has two aims in the game. The first is to dominate as many regions as possible—a player needs to have the most armies in a region to hold it, though having a city in a region will also contribute towards the number of armies in a region. The second is to collect sets of Goods tokens. At the end of the game, a player will receive a Victory Point for each Region he controls and for each Continent he controls. He will also receive Victory Points for each set of Goods cards he has, the number varying from one Good to another. For example, three Carrots scores a player one Victory Point, five Carrots two Victory Points, seven Carrots three Victory Points, and eight Carrots five Victory Points, whereas one Gem scores a player one Victory Point, two Gems two Victory Points, three Gems three Victory Points, and four Gems five Victory Points. The player with the most Victory Points is the winner.

The Eight-Minute Empire rulebook does feel a little cheap, but it is clearly written. The other components are all of a high quality. It could be argued that the auction at the start for first player delivers little given its potential cost. One way to balance this would be to have an auction at the start of every turn, but the game does not include enough gold for this. If it did, it would also mean that the players might have too much gold with which to purchase their cards. Another issue might the game’s lack of theme. My suggestion would be that the Emperor’s sons’ rivalry threatens to erupt into civil war, so he directs his sons to take their armies and compete for dominance without course to open conflict.

Interestingly, the game’s feel and flow will be influenced by the cards drawn. For example, the lack of Sea movement cards would limit travel to other continents, concentrating the contest for territory to a limited area, whilst lots of them, would enable the players to spread their armies and vie for wider regions. Balance this against the need to collect Goods for sets and limited gold to spend, and a player has some tight choices to make over the course of cards he must choose—varying according to the number of players, more players means fewer cards. Eight-Minute combines tactical play in its armies and area control with strategic decisions in the Goods needed for sets in a pleasing presented and re-playable package. The result is that Eight-Minute Empire is a rather charming little filler.

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Command Arrows

Lords of War is a tactical fantasy battle game published by Black Box Games. The winner of the award for Best Strategic Card Game at UK Games Expo 2013, it pitches two armies into a fierce confrontation that can be played out in roughly thirty minutes. Designed for two players aged twelve and over, the original set consisted of Lords of War: Orcs versus Dwarves. It was quickly joined by Lords of War: Elves versus Lizardmen and then by Lords of War: Templar versus Undead which was funded via Kickstarter.

Each set is described as “Dual Deck Expandable Gaming Cards”, which means that the army decks from each set are interchangeable with those of another and that the cards in each army deck are also interchangeable with those of any other. This means that each army can be modified with cards from another deck and that rather than battles being fought between the armies in one set, they can be played out as 'Templars versus Orcs', 'Elves versus Dwarves', 'Lizardmen versus Undead', and so on. In this review, the Lords of War: Orcs versus Dwarves set will be under the spotlight. Not only because it is the first set in the line, but because a confrontation between Orcs and Dwarves is very traditional when it comes to fantasy battles.

Each set consists of two armies—represented by two thirty-six card decks, plus a rules sheet and a Battlemat. The latter is marked with a seven-by-six grid of spaces upon which the game’s cards will be placed and is done in a slightly mottled, golden brown. (The colour varies from set to set, so for example, the Battlemat in Lords of War: Elves versus Lizardmen is green, representing the swamps or forests that they fight over rather than the mountains or rough terrain of Lords of War: Orcs versus Dwarves). The rules sheet is large and double-sided, but is only done in black and white. It is easy to read and does a decent job of explain the rules. What stands out about Lords of War: Orcs versus Dwarves—and any of the three sets to date—are the cards that form each army and are the heart of the game.

All of the cards are done in full colour by artist Steve Cox, each one depicting a single warrior or unit in a style reminiscent of Games Workshop’s Warhammer Fantasy Battles. Which is no bad thing since it gives the game a certain familiarity. Besides its illustration, every card has a name; a number of Attack Aarrows that determine the direction in which the unit can attack—forward, back, to the sides, and diagonally out of the corners; and a Defence Value. Each Attack Arrow also has an Attack Value attached to it. The more Attack Arrows a unit has, the greater its flexibility on the battlefield, both in attacking enemy units and pinning them in place.

Every card also has a Class—Infantry, Cavalry, Spear, Ranged, and Berserker. Infantry units are generally balanced in terms of their Attack Arrows, Attack Values, and Defence Values; Cavalry units tend to have broad Attack Values, but low Defence Values; Spearmen have low Attack Values, but high Defence Values; Ranged units can attack enemy units at a distance; and Berserkers have limited Attack Arrows and high Attack Values, but low Defence Values. Every unit also has a Rank from Recruit and Regular up to Command and General. Six of the cards in a deck are Command units and one of these is the army’s general—unlike the standard units, they are all named. 

Throughout the game, each player will have a hand of six cards. At the start of the game, this hand will consist of five cards from his shuffled deck and his army’s General. Once each player has placed a unit in one of the Battlemat’s starting positions, the game begins. A turn consists of three phases.

In the Deployment phase, a player places a unit on the Battlemat orthogonally or diagonally adjacent to an enemy unit so that one of its Attack Arrows points at the enemy unit. A support unit like a Ranged or Spear unit can also be placed adjacent to any friendly unit so that its Attack Arrows do not engage it or it is not engaged by friendly Attack Arrows. This means particularly with Ranged units that they can be placed behind friendly units away from the front lines and enemy units that would attack them directly.

During the Elimination Phase, every unit on the Battlemat attacks—including those of both armies! Thus, if the combined Attack Values of the units attacking an enemy unit via their Attack Arrows exceed the enemy’s Defence Value, it is eliminated. This has to be done unit by unit until every unit on the Battlemat has been checked to see that it has not been eliminated. The result of this is that a player has to consider both how his unit can attack and how his unit might be attacked. 

The third and final phase is the Reinforcement Phase. During this, a player can either refresh his hand back up to six or have one retreat from the Battlemat into his hand. The latter unit must not have been placed or fought that turn, or be engaged by an enemy unit’s Attack Arrows. It is possible to pin an enemy unit to prevent it being removed from the Battlemat during the Reinforcement Phase.

The battle proceeds until one army can defeat four of its opponent’s Command units or any twenty of its units. Then it will have won the battle.

The key to Lords of War is positioning the units so that they make the best use of their Attack Arrows and avoid being subject to attack in return. Placement is all important to controlling the battlefield and as a game progresses, it becomes more and more difficult to find the weak spots in an opponent’s defences. The choice of army will also influence a player’s actions—with the Lords of War: Orcs versus Dwarves, each side has its own strengths. The Dwarves have better Defence Values, whilst the Orcs have better Attack Values.  

As good as Lords of War looks and as simple as the rules are, what it lacks is flavour. There is some that comes through in the cards, but there is none in the rules. For that the purchaser needs to visit the publisher’s website for the background to the game, where he will also find rules for multiplayer battles and more advanced rules. Whilst simplicity of the design does make Lords of War easy to play, the lack of flavour does leave the game lacking substance. Another issue is that there is a certain artifice to the game in that it does not feel as if you are fighting a battle except in an abstract way. This is fine in a game like Chess, but in Lords of War it feels as if you should be fighting each other for something rather than a simple stand-up confrontation because the art on the cards suggests so. Hopefully, the Terrain & Weather Expansion Pack will go some way to alleviate this issue and provide the game a bit more substance as well as variety.

Lords of War: Orcs versus Dwarves is a pleasingly simple combat card game that offers tactical challenges and thoughtful play without overwhelming the participants. The design is attractive and easily expandable and should also serve as solid introduction to wargaming fantasy battles too.

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Once in No-Man's Land

Call of Cthulhu has visited the Great War before, most notably with the scenario, No-Man’s Land, as has Trail of Cthulhu
 with the recent Flying Coffins and the scenario, "Not So Quiet" from the anthology Out of Time. Yet neither has approached this period in as interactive a fashion as in Call of Cthulhu: The Wasted Land. This is a computer RPG which uses Call of Cthulhu for its mechanics under license from Chaosium, Inc.and is available for several platforms, including Android, iOS, and Windows, so can be run on your computer, your smartphone, or your tablet. The latter though, is the game’s natural home. That said, The Wasted Land has taken a while to get to the Android platform and be debugged, which has delayed my getting to write this review.

Anyway, as much as Call of Cthulhu: The Wasted Land employs the mechanics of Call of Cthulhu, it is not a true RPG. Not in the sense of a pen and paper RPG such as Call of Cthulhu, nor in the sense of a computer RPG. Rather it is a skirmish combat game, one that is Action Point driven and turn-based, much in the same mode as the classic computer games, Laser Squad and X-Com. The game has the player control up to six characters, and on each turn, the player will expend each character’s Action Points to move that character and have him attack his opponents – with an option for taking time to aim at his opponents – as well as to heal and even psychoanalyse his allies!

The setting is the Western Front in 1915. As related in his diaries, a British squad under Captain Hill must defend against a German attack that grows stranger and stranger. Not just ordinary German soldiers, but cult fanatics and zombies too! Fortunately, Professor Brightmeer, a Miskatonic University scholar on attachment to British Military Intelligence is on hand to inform Captain Hill and his men that a German occultist has turned to more outré means to bring about victory for the Kaiser! So begins the desperate search for the means to stop this dastardly villain, which will take the squad out of the trenches and into No-Man’s Land, before going underground over the course of eleven missions. Along the way they will avoid things as ordinary as poison gas and barbed wire, and things as otherworldly as spiders from Leng and giant walking tentacle plants.

Most of the eleven missions involve holding off the Hun, either to defend a location or to get to a location. This has the characters dodging from cover to cover, searching for strongpoints where they can heal, researching documents, and more. For the most part, the missions are very linear, often with one safe path through the mission zone. Even when the characters have to enter patches of poison gas, they can be equipped with gas masks.

In between missions, characters are taken through two upgrade steps. The first sees their stats and skills improved. It is here that the mechanics of Call of Cthulhu are at their most obvious, though in a slimmed down fashion that focuses on those numbers necessary for combat. Skills, rated on a percentile skill, are arms and equipment, along with the First Aid Skill to heal the sick and the Psychoanalysis Skill to heal the mentally disturbed. Stats are rated on a 3 to 18 scale, and are improved to one of two ends. The first is to increase the number of Action Points that a character has in combat, whilst the second is to increase a character’s Sanity and thus his ability to withstand mental shocks.

A Sample Character: Captain Hill

The second upgrade step deals with equipment. Here a character can upgrade from his trusty Lee-Enfield rifle to a Hotchkiss M1914 heavy machine gun or a Winchester Model 1912 pump-action shotgun. There is a small armoury of weapons available, both guns and melee weapons, as well as gasmasks, armour, and even homing pigeons which will deliver requests for artillery support. Medical kits are also available as are books derived from the works of Freud that will help restore a character’s Sanity, whilst it is possible in later missions for characters to learn spells, although casting these greatly deplete the Sanity of the caster.

The mechanics of Call of Cthulhu also show within a mission. First in the use of the skills, though you see no percentile dice being rolled, and second, in the Sanity mechanic. Sanity is lost when attacking and being attacked by forces of the Mythos, and when too much is lost, a character can be paralysed with fear, sent catatonic, or even sent manic! The latter is incredibly taxing on the body, the sufferer usually ending up dead, but whilst manic, a character becomes a force of nature, able to charge the enemy and deal out damage aplenty.

The redoubtable Sid Brown alerts Captain Hill as to the imminent danger!

Whilst game play is simple, it is actually quite challenging in places, the final mission overly so, and it might take a restart or two to really get into the game. It does not help that game play is hampered by slightly clunky controls that sometimes will have you stabbing a stubby finger at the screen of your tablet in frustration. Another often annoying factor is that the missions tend to be very linear in nature – “Go there!”, “Do that!”, “Now exit over there!” – such that there is not a great deal of variety in terms of play. This is exacerbated by the fact that a lot the spells do not become available until last quarter of the game, limiting the option of creating variations upon the gun toting characters that dominate game play.

Inspired by the events of Lovecraft’s Herbert West: Reanimator, the game’s treatment of the Mythos is more pulp than purist as it mixes a number of Mythos entities together and its game play is all combat. Where The Wasted Land shines is in its detail and its atmosphere. Although a little anachronistic in places (easily portable machine guns in 1915?), all of the characters are well defined, and the battlefields feel suitably ‘gone to hell,’ literally a wasted land. The animation is good too – there is something quite unnerving to see a Dark Young lumbering towards your squad as they attempt to blast it to bits before their sanity is blown too. Overall, Call of Cthulhu: The Wasted Land is an engaging electronic treatment of Lovecraftian horror worthy of your time and a sequel.

By the way, perhaps Red Wasp Design and Modiphius Press should get together. A World War II Lovecraftian horror game for your tablet would make a great sequel.

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