Citadel of Blood is an enjoyable and immersive solitaire dungeon crawler from the 1980s with some of the elements of a wargame. The exploration is completely random---you are drawing chits from a cup to build the map---and poor draws will dramatically alter the length of play: I once drew 40 chits (read: took forty turns) before getting the mirror and stairwell required to leave the first floor.*
The rooms in this citadel are far more varied than I'd expected for a game like this. Furniture, art, fountains, chests, monsters, and many other things are encountered, and each of these has 6 or more possibilities (many more in the case of the monsters), so there are upwards of 60 things the party might come across every move.
The battles are better handled than in something like Barbarian Prince: The player's party/combatants are arranged in ranks as are the enemies, which sets the groundwork for a less abstracted battle than is usually found in fantasy boardgames. Special abilities also detail things nicely, and the two ways to opt out of a battle---through negotiation and (failing that) monster bribery---are great touches.
There are a lot of charts to look up and the chits are tiny, so the imagery lives in your mind far more than on the table, but Citadel of Blood does what it sets out to do, and does so with a fun personality.
(*The 30 minute play time listed as typical on Boardgamegeek is wildly inaccurate unless you do terribly or are amazingly lucky. Even if you've internalized all of the charts--and this is a 1980s chit game, so that's unlikely--getting drawn into 5 or 6 bigger combat situations will take up that time.)
CATAN (2017) Reviews
Rating 5
An okay dice/luck dependent Euro game. I might have enjoyed this more if I had played it before Agricola and Scythe, rather than after those two more interesting resource-based games. The board looks nice and I can see its function as a gateway game.
B-17 Queen of the Skies (2017) Review
B-17 Queen of the Skies is a clever and innovative simulation machine, but not much of a game. The fact that the guide to the game refers to it early on as a "game"---yep, with quotations marks---seems to confirm this opinion.
So as an educational simulation, this is a success--I learned about the oxygen supplies, heating, and varied guns on a B-17--but as a game that a person plays, this thing isn't very compelling.
Largely, the player rolls dice, looks up the results on one of more than 50 charts, and writes down or moves chits accordingly. Almost no decisions are made other than by dice destiny, unless the player for some reason decides not shoot at the bad guys or to abort the mission.
I do admire the use of the three boards (map of the region, an internal map of the plane, and an external view of the immediate surroundings of the plane), and I did feel some tension when I finally dropped the payload in my missions, but with some more control over things, some room to actually "play", this innovative simulation could've been a great game.
I don't doubt that a person's emotional investment in the team goes up with successive missions, but Thunderbolt Apache Leader and Ambush! give me that with games that offer lots of tough decisions and compelling chrome.
Blood Rage (2017) Review
Excellent miniatures and terrific art are the frosting on this game, which is a battle for glory. The unpredictable card element of a fantasy board game like Talisman is made more interesting here with a more immediate focus, multiple characters per player (leaders, warriors, sea ships, and monsters), more of a reliance upon strategy, and a board that evolves throughout the three different phases of play. Add to this the GREAT mechanic of self-sacrifice possibly working in a player's favor--and thus, a player's goals shifting mid-game or being hidden from others at first--and the resultant game has a lot of possibilities. This is not an analysis paralysis monster like Mage Knight (my favorite solitaire game alongside Thunderbolt Apache Leader and Perdition's Mouth), but there are often tough choices and gambles to be made.
A couple things are counterintuitive--I'd rather that warriors could not "March" to non-adjacent lands and the term "Invade" is not well chosen for landing new pieces on the board ("Invade" sounds like an action that would occur after a "March")--but these are minor quibbles.
Overall Blood Rage is a really enjoyable game that has some of the immersive qualities of far heavier games while being fast moving, unpredictable, and a very good balance of luck and strategy. (One aside: In every instance that I can recall, the re-pillaging card massively warped the game in the card user's favor. I won't say that this card fully breaks the game--I can think of some theoretical ways around it--but it affects things more than any other card I've seen, by far, and I wish it weren't in mix.)
My favorite board game is Cave Evil while my girlfriend adores Pandemic, and Blood Rage is game that we both have a great time playing together. It is immediate, goal-driven fun and an engaging fantasy with lots of choices and great visuals.
Perdition's Mouth: Abyssal Rift (2016) Review
In a matter of only one week and four great games, Perdition's Mouth: Abyssal Rift has displaced Mage Knight as my favorite solitaire adventure game and ranks higher than every fantasy themed game I've played to date, excepting only the necrotic Cave Evil.
Several things distinguish Perdition's Mouth Abyssal Rift from other fantasy board games that I've played. First, the art is terrific and unique: This game is not soft and upbeat heroic fantasy, but horror fantasy, and the grim dungeons and horrid creatures all enrich the theme. Wounds that your characters sustain are card specified things like pulped hands and nausea, rather than simply "hit points". Creatures are arachnid and crustacean hybrids with demonic attributes and the cultists that serve the underworld blow poisoned darts or flee to ring the alarm, depending upon their character. The feel is great, dark, and oppressive: This game is hard.
The mechanic of single or multiple action selection on a wheel is a cool variation on action cards, and as in a game like Gunslinger, the players are sometimes unable to do the most desirable action at a critical point. Good planning helps, but if the enemy is given the opportunity to make three or four moves in a single turn, your plans may soon be useless. Perdition's Mouth has the puzzle component that makes Mage Knight such a brain burner, but there is more action on the board in PM, which keeps the theme more to the fore, especially since combat is far better detailed (the abstracted combat is my least favorite thing about Mage Knight). At times, Perdition's Mouth reminds me of narrative wargames like Ambush! or (the good parts of) Raid on St. Nazaire. But the treasures, miniatures, personalities of the creatures, and special abilities all make it strong fantasy.
My criticisms are small. The rulebook is very confusing up top, but gets better by page 5, though still could be clearer, especially with more illustrations of gameplay and the various combinations that exist. Also, at times I'm not sure how much intelligence to give the enemy. When they have two equidistant paths to their target (the weakest hero), should I give them the intelligence not to get in each other's way or an even a higher level intelligence in terms of anticipating my plans in subsequent turns? The answer is probably "don't overthink this too much, just move them in order", but almost always I err on making my enemies too smart rather than too simple. So yeah...I spend a little more time gaming the enemy than I'd like, but that's a pretty minor quibble.
Bottom Line:
I highly recommend this game to people who like fantasy games or wargames or both, especially gamers who relish puzzling dilemmas during the fray. The combat is cool, the art is terrific, the components (boards and miniatures) are at the highest level (this is the heaviest/thickest board I've ever felt), and peril exists from the very first turn until you get out of that deadly dungeon. This isn't rehashed orcs, dragons, and knights fantasy, but a unique, moody, and harrowing dungeon crawl that is immersive, challenging, tense, and fun.