Hyperborea: High Per Bore EEEE AHHHH

I couldn't come up with a clever title this time that made any sense.  So I went with a non clever one that made no sense.  If you can't beat 'em, run away, I always say.

I played a lot of Magic this weekend.  Like a lot.  But I did find time to squeeze in one of my board games that I haven't gotten to play yet.
This week's game is Hyperborea.  It's a mix of an exploration and simple field battle type game with a cube pushing euro-type backdrop.  Basically, it amounts to a euro game with ameritrash elements, much like Mage Knight (except Mage Knight is much more intricate and a whole lot better, though much much much longer to play). It's a bag building game, a somewhat new idea where you collect cubes or tokens throughout the game that are pulled out of a bag to allow you to take actions.  I hear Oreleans is a much better implementation of the bag building mechanic, and looking at it and reading the rules I would probably agree if I actually got to play it.

But Hyperborea was on sale, and I now own it, and the box has pretty colors.

Green Arrow and his boardgaming buddies.

 Hyperborea is a pretty heavy game.  Not like game-weight/strategy heavy.  Like the box is heavy.

 

I mean, Terra Mystica is a pretty heavy game (both game weight and box weight); it has so much stuff in that box.  But it doesn't even weigh as much.

My bathroom tile floor is green.  I love it.

So back to the game.  Each player starts off on a home tile of a largely unexplored map.

The home city! With Oompa Loompas!

Each player starts off with 3 dudes on the board, more can be added later.  They also start off with one cube of each color in their bag, plus one more cube of a color of their choosing.  Each cube color represents some time of civilization attribute.  Like green is exploration, blue is science, red is military, I don't remember the rest.  These thematic cube (but still just cubes) get pulled out of the bag on each turn (3 per turn), and you place them on your player board.  Once the spaces next to an action are filled with their corresponding colored cubes, you may activate that action.  

Action board

 Actions include things like adding dudes to the board, moving the dudes, attacking with the dudes, getting straight points (gems), advancing your civilization's attributes (to help you get more cubes), building fortresses (which provide a one turn only defense against enemy fighters), or buying technology cards (which behave just like actions on your action board, but score more points and do more stuff).

A military-based technology

Technology cards comes with gray cubes, which can only be used to activate a few choice technologies but are other-wise worthless.  So you get a sweet tech but you have gray cubes gunking up your cube bag and being worthless.  Guess gray cubes are like pollution or something.  #thematic

So you move around the board, fight enemies, and explore ruins and cities (which give you extra actions or sometimes points, but tie up your dudes until you take enough turns to empty your bag of cubes).
Ruins contain ghosts to kill before you get the goodies.  They look scary.

Ghosts.  Maybe Nazgul.

Ghosts/Nazgul fighting Green Arrow.

Ghost/Nazgul is very protective of his precious.

One of the more interesting things about the game is, of course, the bag building mechanic.  You want lots of cubes so you can do a lot of different stuff, but too many cubes and it's hard to draw the colors you need and it takes longer before your bag is empty and you can reset your dudes who are stuck exploring ruins and visiting cities.  Balance is key.

The game ends when a set number of win conditions are met (1 for short game, 2 for medium game, 3 for long game), those conditions being all of one person's miniatures are on the board, one person has 15 gems, or one person gets to own 5 techs.  Those achievements are also worth 2 points each. At the end of the game, you get points for gems, tech cards, enemies killed, ghosts killed, number of cubes in your bag, and spaces in the world your dudes occupy.

We played a medium length game, which felt way too short still but it was only the first game. I went with a heavy "grab the gems" strategy, keeping my cube count low to explore lots of ruins and cities and reset quickly and to make it easier to keep track of what cubes were left in the bag for planning purposes.

ALL THE GEMS!  And Rob Gronkowski?

I lost by a couple of points to an opponent who had a bag full of cubes that hindered him in terms of being productive during the game but was just enough at the end of the game to put him over me.

Overall, I like the game. It's got some fun mechanisms, looks pretty, plays quickly and just feels different.  2 players is probably a bad number, because there's not enough interaction to spice things up.  The rules are also sketchy in several places which is always a problem.
But the game is cool.  I would play again with more people.

Games That I Hate Teaching

One downside to complicated Euro style games is that it's hard to learn the rules.  I know this turns off a lot of people to them, but it is totally worth it.

Still, some games just take forever to learn, and trying to teach them to other people in a clear way without forgetting anything (man, they really get mad when you forget something) is a really intensive process.

No one hates learning rules more than our good friend Mozzie the bear.  Here is a list he and I have compiled of "Games I Hate to Teach."  He was kind enough to pose for all the pictures:

1. Terra Mystica

Terra Mystica rules come pretty easy to people who had played a lot of heavy euros.  But there is a lot going on, and bringing newer players in can take a while.  I taught this to my gaming friends in probably under 15 minutes, but at a boardgame meetup we went to it took a whole hour to teach to a less euro-centered player.  So not the worst game to teach but definitely a lot of stuff and symbology to go through.

2. The Great Zimbabwe

The Great Zimbabwe is a great game by Splotter Spellen.  They are known for incredibly complex games printed in small print runs that cost about $120 per game.  The Great Zimbabwe is actually one of their simpler ones, I feel. But it is the only one I own and still very complicated.

This game is the definition of fiddly.  Trying to remember what needs to be shipped where and how far it can be shipped and wait do diagonals count and what's a hub and does your hub count as my hub and what are we doing?!

It's actually not bad once you learn the rules, but teaching is tough.  And I couldn't play this right now without reading the manual a few times again.

3. ZhanGuo

Played ZhanGuo not too long ago.  It was really really good.  The rules aren't actually that tough either, but the rulebook is pretty disorganized, which isn't surprising as there does not seem to be a logical streamlined way to glide through teaching this one.  You just got to plug and chug and this rule and that rule and this thing and that thing.  Took an hour to teach it.  Worth it, but still...

4.  Luna

Luna's rules aren't even hard.  But there are something like 14 different actions you can take!  And each one comes with it's own little set of details!  And there's a supposedly handy guide to all the actions, but you have to interpret all that symbology, which isn't clear the first time you play.
Did I mention 14 DIFFERENT ACTIONS!  And some of them are similar and I can remember how the boat action is different from the wave action.  Ever.

5.  Asgard  

Ugggh.  Asgard...  I saw this for $18 on amazon, read somes reviews and thought "Hey this seems pretty heavy and interesting and the theme is pretty cool and it's sooo cheap.  Why not?."  The idea and mechanics are quite interesting, but none of it works as well as I had hoped.  Worst of all, It took forever to set up and forever and a day to teach it. Another poorly organized (and in some cases unclear) rulebook, with lots of little rules to go over. Lots of work to learn a mediocre game.  Not worth it this time.

GenCon Special: Day 2

Our second night hotel stay was in the much more luxurious Hyatt in downtown Indy, rather than the dank caverns of the outer city Super 8.  Our new room was nice, clean and non-itchy.

Even cooler was that our hotel was directly connected to the convention center by a set of tunnels called the skywalk.  Easy access to the Con all day every day without ever having to set foot in the sunlight.  Quite vampire friendly.

Sadly, the hotel didn't have a waterfall.  I like waterfalls.  I stayed at a hotel in Nashville once that had a waterfall.  I liked it.

Friday morning, we played a game of Terra Mystica in the morning, a fairly heavy euro game where players start as different fantasy races trying to build up a network of buildings into cities on a crowded map.  Great game with 4 players and getting better every time I play it.

We also played a couple of games of Eight Minute Empire: Legends, a card drafting and area control game where you use your cards both for endgame points and as action cards to add troops to the board or move troops on the board in an attempt to have the majority of troops in various areas, the main way of scoring points.  It's short and simple and fun.  And the art is beautiful, from the game's designer and artist Ryan Laukat (more on him later).

After a few games, we prepped to head over to the convention center.  We decided that Friday would be our pseudo-cosplay day.  We are not cosplayers.  We did not put almost any time at all into our costumes.  Normally, we wouldn't even consider this.  But we were at a gaming convention, so why the heck not.

Group theme:  Miyazaki film characters!

Cute bunch.

I'm a totoro.  Cuz totoro so adorable.
I didn't go all out for my costume.  I wanted something comfortable and casual that still conveyed the essence of totoro.
I had the awesome hat custom made by Yako on Etsy.  She was quite friendly and did great work very quickly.  She fit it to my head size and made in blue at my request, cuz I love the blue totoro the best.  I may never have an occasion to wear the hat again, but I love it.

Our first event of the day was Artemis, a spaceship bridge simulation.  Basically, each member of your team has a different role as a starship crew member, like driving, navigating, communicating with other ships, monitoring power consumption in the ship or operating weapons.  There is also a captain who makes all the hard decisions and coordinates the whole ordeal.  No other crewmates can see info from the others, so everyone has to communicate with each other for things to run smoothly.

For our first short cruise, I manned the weapons.  Basically, the captain told me what weapon to load and when to fire.  I wasn't too excited for it.  Though if he had left me to my own devices, I probably would have just shot nukes at people at point blank range.
That's how I play first person shooters:  charge into the fray, take a couple of guys down with me, respawn.  I think I'm playing these games wrong.

Our second adventure had me navigating and researching enemy spaceships.  Nobody told me about the researching part.  People were all "what do you know about this ship?"  and I'm all like "nothing." And then people got angry before the captain came over and told me I had to scan stuff...lame.

My third shot was at driving the ship.  I crashed it into a space station.

Lastly, we had only a few minute left for our timeslot, so the guys in charge cranked out an impossibly hard scenario, with floods of enemy ships trying to kill us.  I played the engineer, trying to direct ship power where it was needed, repair broken ship sections, and keep all the systems cooled. With us getting hit constantly, it was a micromanaging nightmare.
We need more power to weapons so we can actually shoot them?  Oh, okay then, I guess we can do that, but imma take all the juice away from the thrusters so we can't move anymore.  Also, everything is overheating.  Also, all of my repair dudes are dead, nothing is getting fixed anymore.
This...was actually a lot of fun.

Overall, this wasn't my favorite event.  I probably wouldn't do it again, but it was worth the experience.

Aboard the spaceship with the Miyazaki Crew!  And another guy!

 We bounced from our space adventure to our next even: SUPER ROBO RALLY!!  This deserves full capitalization, because it was impossibly fun.
Basically each player has a giant robot made of LEGOs.  That enough is awesome.  My robot was Wall-E.

Wall-E is such a sad looking LEGO-bot.

The goal of the game is to get to the "flag" spaces on the board in a certain order.  Before a turn, everyone inputs a series of moves that they choose from a randomly generated set of possibilities. These get inputted by all players via a cell phone that communicates with the main computer off to the side.

Then the fun starts.  The moves begin to resolve, in some order determined by a priority randomly assigned to your move bank.  But maybe you don't get to go where you want, because another player moved in your way first.

And after all moves have resolve, the conveyer belts trigger and you move some more.  Watch:

Just wonderful when you end up on a belt by accident and then go completely the wrong way.

Also, if you walk off the board or fall in a hole, you die.  Don't die.  Though at one point, I was so far away from where I wanted to be I jumped off the edge of the board on purpose so I would respawn in a more reasonable place closer to the center of the board.

Spin-Bot is dead.

Anyway,  SUPER ROBO RALLY was great fun, maybe my second favorite part of the whole Con...

Rawrrrrr!!! Sock monster!

Since this was vacation, we wanted to treat ourselves to one great meal.  So we had advance reservations for St. Elmo's Steakhouse in downtown Indy.  They have world famous shrimp cocktails, they say.  And boy, were they delicious.  We also go our steaks with sides for very reasonable prices. Great meal overall and fantastic shrimp cocktails.  Nice.

Back at our hotel that night, we played City of Iron, a weird mashup of an economic game, area majority, deck-building, I don't know, read the description somewhere else.  It's fun though.  And the art is fantastic.  Why?  Because it's Ryan Laukat again.  And we still aren't through with this guy...

We made our last trip over the convention for the day for a kind of "games in development playtesting" event.  And we requested to the new Eight Minute Empires expansion from, guess who...Ryan Laukat.  He was a super nice guy, it turns out.  He signed a City of Iron box and player board.  His signature is pretty.

Went back to the hotel.  Called it a night.  Solid day.

Twonky bot.  Looks kinda like a Panda-bot.  Adorable.