Out of the Box Publishing is easily one of my favorite game companies out there. They are, for all intents and purposes, the delightful antithesis of Fantasy Flight Games. FFG strives to make awesome, rich, detailed board games that are not only original, but sweeping and almost epic in scale at time. Also epic in scale are their rulebooks. While FFG games can be incredible, you can’t just sit down, open the box and learn to play. Out of the Box Games on the contrary are designed to be played EXACTLY that way. Rule books are replaced by rule cards and anyone can learn their games cold in under five minutes. You might be familiar with their huge hit APPLES TO APPLES, or my favorite party game in the whole breadth of the universe CINEPLEXITY (which every game loving AICN reader should own and I write about at length here a year ago.)
Well, OotB has a new equally addictive party game out – LETTER ROLL.
Another incredibly simple, but eternally challenging, game LETTER ROLL has a collection of 20-sided dice with a different letter on each side. 7 Dice in all, there are three common letter dice, two uncommon letter dice and two rare letter dice. You begin with one person rolling four dice of their choosing. The person next to them gets to eliminate one of the four after the roll has been made. What you are left with is three letters (for example: E P D). Someone flips the hourglass timer and you are off. Your objective: write down as many words as you can think of that contain all three letters. Using the above example you could write down words like: dope, pedestrian, impede, pedophile, moped, trapped, deprived, depraved, department, spayed, spade and sprayed. Once the time is up, everyone compares their lists. Any word that is duplicated on someone else’s list is eliminated and no one gets points for it. You then receive one point for each word you came up with that no one else did.
The larger your friends vocabulary, the tougher it is. The only real strategy is when you roll (deciding whether to use easy or tougher dice) and in which letter to eliminate. Will you eliminate the letter Z to make your life easier – or keep it to make everyone else’s harder?
My wife and I spent the better part of two hours playing this, squaring off against one another and really enjoyed the hell out of it. It’s a great, fun quick game that lets you get a few matches in in a relatively short amount of time. But it is challenging enough to keep you sharp and focused – when the game is on, it is FREAKING ON. Sometimes you get an easy one like the round above. Other times you get H M and X. Although, it comes out more the former than the latter. You can check out a sample of gameplay here as well as order online or even better, find a local retailer who stocks OotB games.
WARHAMMER 40,000 PLANETSTRIKE
Well, the much awaited new supplement for 40k is finally leaking out to stores and I got to spend a few moments with a copy this weekend. And I’m really, really excited about this. This is a new style of play, akin to Cityfight, in which it is the same rules as before – but the scenarios are modified. If there’s one thing 40k is sorely lacking, it is variety in the scenario department. I’ve had my fingers crossed for quite some time that they would get around to making something, anything, to shake up the monotony of the three missions and three setups from the book. Well, while this isn’t a full on mission book – it will completely change the way you play.
The biggest change is that you know beforehand what role you will be playing: attacker or defender. The attacker has NO COMPULSORY UNITS other than an HQ. That’s it. If you don’t want to take troops, you don’t have to. You can also take up to six elite choices and six fast attack choices. In other words, you can finally duplicate many of the fluff based battles in which Terminator Armies stormed planets or vast swaths of Assault Marines blotted out the sun with their numbers. The force organization chart gives the attacker an unbelievable amount of room to play around with cool configurations. It looks like they can take up to 3 HQs, 6 Elites, 6 Troops, 6 Fast Attack and 3 Heavy Support selections as caps.
The defender on the other hand is identical to the standard force org save the fact they can take 6 Heavy Support choices. But the defender also gets to set up all the terrain and take as many of the new defensive structures as they want/have available – including being able to fire all of the guns on said platform/structure at BS2.
So will you create a cool, wacky, elite army with which to storm and overwhelm your opponent? Or will you create a brilliantly defensible trap for your buddy to walk into and be cut to ribbons? Adding to the fun are a number of stratagems – many 5th edition updates of Cityfight stratagems – that let your armies do bizarre things that duplicate assault or defense strategies and a six mission campaign that lets you duplicate a full planetary invasion. So far, everything I’ve seen REALLY blows my skirt up. I cannot wait to dig in and begin playing this way. I just finished assembling and priming 30 Sterngard and nearly 20 Honor Guard. Something tells me my Fire Angel equivalents of Marneus Calgar and Pedro Kantor are about to lead some pretty sick invasions. And it looks like I’ll finally be able to field a 9 Dreadnought army. Oh hell yes.
More on this as I get some book time and games in.
DUNGEONS & DRAGONS EBERRON PLAYER’S GUIDE
For Eberron fans, the wait is finally over. Your time to be thrust headlong into a 4th Edition Eberron campaign is now. Structured almost identically to the Forgotten Realms Players Guide, the primary difference is the LIFE IN EBERRON chapter right up front. This is an 18 page primer with everything a player character needs to know to dive into the world. Thus far the only complaint I know of is that the info here and some info in next month’s Campaign Guide (for DMs eyes only) don’t jibe. This is intentional – a differential split between what the characters “know” and what is really going on behind the scenes. Right now the only concern I’ve heard is people worried that some folks might not understand that and complain about “editorial inconsistency”. We’ll see what that all comes to next month.
But on to the meat and potatoes. How are the races? The classes? Well, the races are interesting to say the least. Here we have the three non-PHB series Eberron races left: The Changeling, The Warforged and the Kalashtar. Each of them will be popular with min/maxers looking to create a character with optimal stats. Changelings are perfect Sorcerer/rogues (+2 Dex or Int and +2 Cha), Warforged great Fighter/barbarians (+2 Str and +2 Con) and Kalashtar great Paladin/Clerics (+2 Wis, +2 Cha). Unfortunately, their racial powers lack a little something to be desired. While none of them are bad, they aren’t nearly as sexy as those of the Genasi, Half-orc, Eladrin, Dragonborn or Elf.
The Warforged has the only dependable one that someone might choose them for – an encounter power that grants 3 + ½ lvl temporary hit points and an immediate saving throw against ongoing damage all as a minor action. If bloodied they also get 3 + ½ lvl HP healed. Solid, but not huge. The Changeling has two powers, an at-will that gives a +5 bonus to bluff checks as you change your appearance, and a VERY rogue friendly one that allows you to make a bluff check against a target to gain combat advantage against them until the end of your next turn. This is great, but ONLY for Rogue builds who appear to be slowly gaining enough abilities that they should almost always have combat advantage shortly. Kalashtar end up with the short end of the stick, getting an ability that lets you bolster every ally in a 5 square burst with a +4 to their Will defense. This could be awesome in a Psionic campaign – but as we won’t see Psionics until next summer, this has a very limited use right now. Like I said – none of these are terrible. But it’s no Eleven Accuracy, Fey Step or Dragon Breath.
The Artificer is an interesting mixed bag as well. I love the concept and whole chunks of the execution. There’s just one thing about him that grates on me – and that is a marked departure from one of the core concepts of the 4e model – less bookkeeping. The Artificer is all about bookkeeping. Every At-will power and most encounter and dailies leave lingering effects – but not simply dazed, stunned or weakened. +2 power bonuses to an allies next attack roll against a target. –CON penalty to the enemies next damage roll. +1 Power bonus to hit and bonus equal to your CON bonus to damage rolls to each adjacent ally until the end of your next turn. And those are just from the At-will powers. This IS NOT a class that beginners can play, at all. It is a class for someone who is locked into the game at every moment, always aware of who has what bonus, what penalty and what ends when. One of the things I love about 4e is that it has limited bookkeeping. Spells don’t last variable amounts of time anymore, effects all carry over to the end of the next turn rather than sometimes the end and sometimes the beginning. This seems like a design step in the wrong direction…
That said, everything else about the Artificer rocks. They are a cool, fluffy beast that is also a magic item machine. They get Ritual Caster along with Brew Potion, Enchant Item, Disenchant Item and Make Whole as part of their build. And they don’t need components to Disenchant. There’s also an Artificer feat that allows them to make magic items at their Level + INT modifier (which is most likely their highest stat.) Their powers are all very fluffy – with the Artificer infusing his weapons with magic or summoning clockwork creations and the like. And for those who like the idea of the crazed magical inventor, this will be a lot of fun to play…if you don’t mind all the bookkeeping.
There are scads of new alchemical items, a few new magic items with the Artificer in mind. The only other big addition is the Dragonmark feats – which gives a slight, feat level ability as well as gives the character access to (and the ability to cast) a few rituals, all dependant on which mark you have.
Unlike the original Eberron, there are no differing mechanics that make it in any way incompatible or over/underbalanced with the core rules. So this is something non-Eberron gamers might want to keep on their shelves. The book is good, but it is by no means essential. Eberron players should dig it, as will anyone that wants to play a campaign built around a magical society or Steampunk Fantasy. If you’ve never played Eberron, it’s worth a look if you enjoy FINAL FANTASY 7/8 combinations of magic and technology, complete with airships, technological constructs and a magical train system. But those who didn’t like it the first time around probably won’t find anything but a few cool new feats or items to make the book worth owning.
If anything can be said about this book, it is that it continues a very cool trend of highly useful, lean campaign PHB sourcebooks that get the job done without wasting any time or space. Bring on Dark Sun, Al-Qadim and Oriental Adventures.
Eberron Player’s Guide releases tonight at Midnight.
