Quirkworthy

Lots of stuff.

Mainly this is bags of zillions of Lego bits, as you’d expect. In fact I found it all slightly daunting. It’s not just zillions of bits – it’s zillions of different and very specific bits. I’m clearly going to have to pay attention to the assembly diagrams. Luckily, they are written for 8-year olds, so they are almost a brick at a time…

Nice and easy. Even the harder parts don’t look very hard, and they hold your hand all the way along.

The rules look quit busy, but are only 4 pages long.

Below are the dramatis personae, plus all the different choppy things you can whack each other with. “Weapons and Gold” – the heart of every good adventure 🙂

And speaking of adventures, if Nathuz isn’t big enough for you they designed all the Heroica boxes to go together to make up this enormous dungeon shown on the poster in the box. Why do I always read that as Fortran?

But I’m rambling. I said I’d tell you what’s in the box. Well, the box contains lots of bits of Lego together with one of their DIY Lego dice. It also has an assembly guide, a poster showing the last steps in assembly plus how to join all the boxed sets together (above) and a little comic strip. Finally there is a rulebook in multiple languages. The box itself is not a traditional rigid card box, but uses a light corrugated card to get a similar rigid effect and feels nice and sturdy.

All told the box is a little over half full. However, I expect it will be useful for storing the half assembled game between sessions. Also, the game is cheap. For the money it felt like a fair amount of stuff and a good price to encourage kids to buy it themselves rather than wait for a birthday to get it.

We played the Gears of War board game again last night, and actually survived this time. The first evening of this we played 2 player, and got obliterated repeatedly. I think we played 4 times and never got to the end. With 4 players it seemed much easier, though we ended up between us having less lives in total than a single one of us had to start with. I had no ammo left for anything, and no order cards either, so it wasn’t exactly a walk in the park.

I’ve not got a copy, so I can’t do a full description. However, initial impressions are perhaps worth noting. It’s getting a lot of good press right now, and it’s well put together and deals with some of the key features of the video game well enough. The miniatures are very high quality and the components nicely done. The rules themselves seem reasonably clear and roll along fine after a few turns. However, this is a co-op board game rather than a video game, so the frenetic pace of the original gives way to a much more considered and “talky” experience. I might see if I can borrow a copy at some stage to see how it works solo. That would be yet another different type of game.

Do I like it? Sort of. Ambivalent and undecided are perhaps the best words to describe how I feel. It is all done competently or better, I was engaged during the game, but somehow it doesn’t quite come up with that magic something for me. Maybe I just need to play it more. I would, however, encourage people to give it a try as cooperative games can be a fun change of pace and pose a different set of challenges from the competitive norm.