Pretty sure that this site has been growing cobwebs since 2019. My bad. 

To be honest, I think my days of regular once-a-week posts are probably behind me, but that's not to say that things have not been active behind the scenes. Various attempts at writing have occurred. At some point I might even post the flash fiction pieces I've been playing with these past couple of years -- just for fun.

The BIG NEWS event, however, is that my dabbling in table top games has snowballed into something really big. So big that I'll be passing most of the reigns over to Variable Outcomes since they can run this full-time business stuff better than I can. Even my books will soon be available through them... us... I don't know the technical terms for my association, I just know that we share the same garage.

So have a gander at some simplifications made over here at NewellBooks, and then take a peak over at Variable Outcomes. Most of the in-person events I attend will probably now be under their company banner, but I am keeping my brand; it's my name and my family crest, so I won't be abandoning it any time soon.

I fully intend to keep writing. What I write and whether or not anything hits publication are completely different questions, and ones that I cannot answer at this time. I do know, however, that I will be focused predominately in the game world for the time being, and impersonating a fictional character through a hand-painted wooden meeple and a small speech bubble. Honestly, I think it's my calling. I am having far too much fun with it, and sadly am not yet being given nearly enough opportunities to unleash this talent. So, please, if you see a chance to leave a comment about the game, do so! Draw my attention and let me make my social media magic!

Here's a taste of the gifts I've left so far. Search through Facebook and Twitter to see the whole interactions.

Even with the new elements introduced in the Kickstarter version of this game, setting up the game table is pretty straight-forward. Select a Potion for the group of players to play with, and then set room for four cards within reach of all players. The four cards will be the "Cauldron", or in other words, the "Cauldron" will be the four number sequence to create the formula for the Potion value. 

Last I played, players put five Ingredient cards into their hand, and then the group determines a play order. First player plays a card from their hand and then may discard and re-draw their hand. Turn order continues until an Action card (or in the new game, an Ability) determines otherwise. Your rulebook will be much more comprehensive than this one:

It's been way too long since I last made a game post, and somehow whenever I think to do it, it's always when we're playing the games I usually post about... I mean, we have about 100 games, you'd think this wouldn't be an issue!

Anyways, my brother dropped by for a visit, and of course he came with a bag of games of his own. We fell in love with Slaughterville, a crowd-funded horror-movie style game. At my brother's recommendation, we are not only now on the lookout for a copy of Slaughterville of our own (everyone is out of stock so we loaded up on the expansion packs in the mean time), but we were told that we would love A Touch of Evil. 

A Touch of Evil is a Flying Frog production, and it's been around for several years. We've often seen it in the game shops, and because we have Conquest of Planet Earth which is another one of their games, we own like 5 separate pieces of advertisement for A Touch of Evil. 

We never really jumped at it because, to be honest, it looks super cheesy. And while Slaughterville has similar graphics within the game, it owns its cheesiness by tongue-and-cheek portrayals of B-movie stereotypes. A Touch of Evil really just looks like they hired a handful of models/actors and played dress up in a costume store for a photoshoot montage moment, which was then photoshopped together as a grade 10 intro to graphic project....

...I know this sounds harsh, and clearly I've made crap covers in my day, but it was a huge factor in us not going near this game 10 years(-ish). 

The game board is a totally different story. It's a beautiful old-timey map design that had both @TheMattCave and I thinking Sleepy Hollow. So it was very fitting that we chose our villain to be the Headless Horseman. 

There were 3 of us playing for the first time, so, as usual, play went a little slow. We each took up an unlikely townsperson, and off we went to investigate, hunt wolves and ghost pirates. I know for a fact that we did not do the Town Elder thing well at all, along with other things. And there was a bit of confusion as we flipped back and forth from Competitive rules to Cooperative. I don't know who decided to play Cooperatively, but that's what we started with, and somehow we started with the tutorial setup and then @TheMattCave kept saying that we should be playing the advanced rules - so I really have no idea what we were doing right and what we were doing wrong...

...I'm very finicky when it comes to learning games, and while I make mistakes too, I do much better when I can take charge of the rule book - I'm a bit controlling that way. 

So I'm going to reserve my final evaluation of A Touch of Evil until we play it again. I want to get a better feel for how the game is supposed to go!

Not my first choice for a game, but hubby is a pretty big Star Trek fan so when he heard about Starfleet Captains, he had to have it. We pulled it out for the first time tonight and had a go at it. 

I took up Starfleet while he commanded the Klingons. I have no idea what was really going on on that side, his missions were pretty much all secret, but while he was building outposts, I was resolving missions left, right and centre. By round three, the Klingons only had one way to keep me from winning - they needed to take out the USS Enterprise. 

Well, between the lack of engine power and some deadly water that trapped two of his ships, the Klingons stood no chance. By the time his turn ended, it didn't matter how I used my actions, I had easy access to 4 victory points when I only needed 2. I sailed that Enterprise all the way to victory, carrying extra cargo and an extra point!

While I may not be a huge Star Trek fan, even I felt it was fitting to have the Enterprise take the winning points!

Not a bad two player game. Even though the box says that you can play up to four players, it's in teams of two, and I don't know how I feel about commanding as a team. I'm sure we'll be introducing the game to a friend or two soon enough so maybe I can still be won over in sharing victory. 

What can I say? Even quiet little me can get pretty competitive. 

New games are always welcome in my house, and so we broke open a few!

Miskatonic School for Girls - Holiday Break
The first expansion pack for the beloved tongue-in-cheek Lovecraft game was a Kickstarter investment that finally made it's way home. I am very pleased that the new cards don't change the base game very much so adding them in is quite easy. The big difference is that we get house cards that give us different abilities. I picked Hufflepuff yellow of course, giving me the house Ulthar, while hubby took his beloved Ravenclaw blue of Yuggoth House. 

It was a close game, both of us were within a point or two of complete insanity. I got an Aggressive teacher in my class while standing on my last leg and that was the end of that. There's no real happy ending in this game; you just come out slightly less crazy than everyone else.

Letters from Whitechapel
This is a game that I have been really looking forward to and it did not disappoint. I struck up my role as Jack the Ripper and got caught one space from my hideout on the fifth day, having successfully murdered all of my victims. *this is where I get flagged by internet police, isn't it?* Immediately we played again, having ironed out the rules from the first round. I was caught eight moves into the first night. My husband's way too clever. We switched roles for our third game. I should not be in charge of an entire investigation, I can't keep track of squat, and the Ripper got off scott free. 

You'd think that I'd have more pictures of the game we played 3 times, but no, I was way to into the game. Beautiful game. A new favourite of mine now, provided that I get to be the Ripper ;)

Since I'm on a game roll, I'll post about the two new games we broke open in the last 24 hours. One in the last 24 seconds so my brain is still foggy from all the thinking.

Eldritch Horror
 
I've posted numerous times about my ultimate favourite game of all time: Arkham Horror. Eldritch Horror is Arkham's little brother. All of the same themes but downsized, both in size of the board, number of pieces, and layers of plot. So while it is a little like Arkham dumbed down, it's also a nice 2 hour game and didn't leave my head feeling like it was going to die. I didn't invest myself so much in this one, as normally I become crazy involved with my character and saving the world, but the urgency just wasn't as intense. Still like the game and will definitely be pulling it out more often for my Arkham fix when I really don't want to be playing until 2 in the morning. 

Hubby bought this one a while ago and we just haven't gotten around to playing it. So tonight was the night. We had both tried sitting through the unofficial online tutorial that's posted on youtube, but it was long and boring and explained in the exact way that I HATE having games explained to me... I'm a picky girl...

So we basically spent the first 2 hours of play looking like this...

Lots of Rulebook reading, trying to follow each step at a time. And of course, me being me, "But what's my motivation for doing this? Why do I want to win this bid?" I am not a fun person to learn new games with. But after about 4 hours, halfway through the 2nd stage of the game, we started to really figure things out. 

After just one play, I'm not even going to pretend that I'm ready to start explaining this game. Not a favourite of mine, but Matt's really into it, but I wouldn't be against playing it again. With a little more confidence in our game play, it would be a pretty fun night with the right kind of people. A successful game night is all about pairing the right game with the right group. 

As promised, some footage of the board game Ghost Stories!

So after Matt and I pieced together the proper rules for the game, we finally won a round and then jumped straight into "Hell". "Hell" being the highest level of difficulty, though I must say, if you don't find "Hell" to be challenging enough, play the way we were! 
No, we did not win on this level, but at least we lost knowing that we weren't playing like beginners. 

Since I haven't really done this game justice in explaining it, here's a brief overview:

In Ghost Stories, each player takes on the role of a Taoist Monk with a specific super power. You work collaboratively together to defeat the ghosts who have been unleashed by the evil Woo Fang, who threatens to rise again in one (or possibly 3) incarnations. 

The board is made up purely of tile pieces. The outside frame is for players, thus they come in 4 different colours to specify which Monk you are. All tiles are two sided, so regardless of which Monk you pick to play, you have two different powers to choose from. So if you're selecting Monks randomly at the start, you need to pay close attention to which side of the player board you've picked. No two Monks have the same power, but when you play with fewer than 4 people, you may get to "borrow" some help from the non-playing monk, or the Neutral Board. In this game, I played Blue Monk and Matt played Yellow Monk.  

Here's the view from my board, at the end of the game when we lost. But you can see the Blue board and how it looks different from the inner tiles. The tiles in the centre of the board are individual parts of a village, and thus called "Village Tiles". Each Village Tile has a special power to help you fight off of the ghosts and defend the village. Your Monk player tokens (the bright blue and yellow ones that have fallen over in defeat) always play inside of the village, while the ghosts (the scary looking cards) attack from the outside on your player board. Blue ghosts on the Blue Board, Green on Green, etc. As you can see here, I have 2 Black Ghosts on my board, one is a haunter (with the ghost figurine walking towards the village), and the other is one of the incarnations of Woo Fang (you can tell by his stylish top hat in the top left corner of his card). 

So how the game works is in two phases, Yin & Yang. Yin is the evil phase. So if I am player 1, I have to look at the ghosts on my board to see if any of them will do anything evil before I can do anything good. At the start of you game you won't have any ghosts so you'll have nothing to worry about. Different ghosts can do different things, so if you want to know if they're going to hurt you, look at the symbols on the bottom of the card:

The center symbol tells you what the ghost does on every active turn. So this Black ghost has a haunter figurine that moves towards the village each turn. You can see here that he has moved off of the card and onto my board. The Blue ghost beside him has nothing in the bottom center so he's not one I need to worry about right now.

Now in this picture, my Blue board is completely full of ghosts, which means that I won't be bringing more ghosts into play this turn, but if I had an open space, such as what Red and Green have, then I would have no choice but to draw a ghost card from the ghost deck. Each ghost has a different colour - Red, Yellow, Blue, Green, or Black - so you have to match the ghost colour to the board of the same colour if it's possible. That's why I have a Blue Ghost on my board. But, if you cannot place a ghost on the right colour, either because it's Black and has no corresponding board, or, like in my case, the board is already full with 3 ghosts, then it has to go on the board of the active player. Thus I ended up with a Black Ghost and Woo Fang on my plate. At the start of your game, your board will look pretty empty, but it will build up quickly!

Now when you place a newly arrived ghost, you need to look at that bottom bar of the card to see if it does anything evil when it enters into play. This nasty ghost with the Haunter took away one of my life points just for being brought into the world - you can tell by the symbol in the left-hand corner. For easy reference, just read as you would normally, Left=start, Middle=middle, Right=end. The Right hand symbol refers to what happens when you kill the ghost. This nasty Black ghost will give you a reward, while that not-so-nasty Blue Ghost will try to curse you when you kill it. 

When you start your turn and your board is full like mine is here, you die a little inside - literally. You typically start with 3 life tokens (4 on the initiate level), and if your board is overrun with ghosts, they hurt you by taking away one of your life tokens. It's extra motivation to do some village clean-up before your ghosts get out of hand. If you run out of life tokens, your poor Monk dies - but he's not out of the game yet, he might be resurrected if your other Monk friends happen to like you - or desperately need you back. 

But let's say that it's your first round. There's nothing on your board so nothing nasty happens. That's step 1. Then you draw. It's a Red Ghost, so you put it on any of Red Board's empty card spaces. Maybe it doesn't have an icon in the left corner, so that means that this ghost isn't going to hurt you - yet. That's step 2 and the end of your Yin phase! Now you can do something good!

Your yang phase is where the strategy comes in. As the active player, you can decide what is the best action to take. You get one movement option, you have to go to a tile that is already touching your current tile, so diagonal movement is allowed. If you're in the center, like Blue is here, you can pretty much go anywhere. If you're off center, like Yellow, then you know that you cannot get near the Red Board in this turn, at least not without some magical assistance. You do not have to move, but you must do your movement phase 1st so you can't decide to move after your other action. The 2nd part of your turn is to decide if you are getting help or fighting. Remember I told you that each village tile has a special power, well if you're getting help, you can use the tile you're standing on to use that helpful magic that it has. I know this picture isn't easy to see, but the icons on those tiles will walk you through the possibilities. The tile that Yellow is on will push a row of Haunters back onto their cards and off of the board. The tile that Blue is on usually contains Buddha figurines. You can see that it no longer does because we've asked this village for help twice now so the Buddhas are on the board, protecting our empty card spaces from evil. Blue Monk can only ask for help from this location, unless he moves to a new tile 1st. Yellow also can only ask for help, but if a ghost occupied the player board directly in front of the Monk, he could choose to fight instead. 

Imagine that I was not dead in the above image. If I were the active player, I could choose to fight this ghost. Do you see the top left-hand corner? Those two coloured circles tell me how tough this ghost is. This ghost needs 2 Black tokens to be defeated. We have 3 dice in play. Each of those dice have all of the ghost colours plus White as a wild card. I will roll all 3 dice and hope for at least 2 Black or White results. To better my odds, I can collect Dow Tokens throughout the game to supplement my dice roll results. If I equal the colour and number of toughness on this ghost, I kill him and get the reward. If I fail, he lives to haunt another day. 

When you have finished your turn, the play continues clockwise. The player beside you has his Yin & Yang phase, which means that by the time your turn comes around again, you could have a whole new set of ghosts to deal with. 

If you are playing with fewer than 4 and have a neutral board in play, you do not skip this Monk's turn. The Board remains active for step 1 of the Yin phase, any ghosts on it get to do their evil trick for the turn, but you DO NOT pull another ghost card for this board (this is how we managed to make the game so much more complicated than it needed to be). The Monk of a neutral board is not actually present, so that's where his turn ends, he can't run to villagers or fight ghosts, he just houses them. 

How to Win: By defeating all of the incarnations of Woo Fang and living to tell about it.

How to Lose: 1) By having no Monks left alive, which means that every Monk has somehow lost all of their life tokens. 2) By having 3 village tiles get haunted (this is why you don't want those Haunter figurines to reach the village). 

There are so many other details to this game, and this is very much a simplified rundown of how to play, so if you want any clarification, feel free to ask and I can go into more detail. This ended up being far more detailed than I was intending to make this blog post, as I'm sure you can tell by how I try to reuse the same 4 pictures. We might have to think about making some "How to Play" videos for our games in the near future. I do enjoy teaching game play. 

Anyways, Ghost Stories, one of our favourites because it's an intense little Arkham Horror (our family staple) that doesn't go on for 4 hours (about 2 if you're close to winning, even shorter if you die early). But if your family staple is Monopoly, you may want to do a playtest run with people who are familiar with the game before launching into it head on. The rule book is not as intuitive as I think they meant it to be. 

I'll try to post about our other games, and maybe do some video, or at least more helpful picture taking, of the games we play. Should have some fun stuff come out for Table Top Day. No idea what we'll be playing but we should go through several different ones. I'll keep you all posted!

True to my last post, "I Must Enjoy Making Things More Complicated", Matt and I have finally undone my habit of making one of our favourite games ridiculously impossible! I think I introduced this game before - 

- and now that I've paused to review the very few games I've listed in my blog, it seems that I haven't... So the game that I have never before blogged about, Ghost Stories, has been near impossible for us to win, even on initiate level. Now, it wasn't always this way. A number of years ago, Matt and I replayed Ghost Stories until it was a science, even on nightmare and hell level. Then the number of years went by in which we did not play, leading us to buying our own version just a couple of years ago, remembering how much we loved it, buying all of the expansions, and then not playing. We've tried pulling it back out sporadically over this past year, but it's been driving us nuts because we know that we're good at this game. Yet, every time we play, we get overrun and dead. Finally broke down in frustration today and watched a tutorial. Clearly how I interpret the rules - which, you must understand, are set up like an IKEA manual only more cryptic and less helpful. Like "insert shield symbol here" with no explanation about what that means, but we are supposed to understand that that means you cannot roll the dice to kill that ghost. Shield means "block the dice". Granted, we figured that one out pretty quickly, and it's a very minor thing, but still, instructions assume that all symbols are to be universally understood. Even the written instructions are very scarce, and they only include the self-evident parts of turn sequence, and, once again, being very general about what they actually mean. Such as, neutral boards play only the Yin phase, not the Yang. So looking at all of the components of the Yin phase, we've been doing all of them for the Yin phase of the neutral board... rather than JUST part 1. So now we are not overrun within the first round and can actually move around the board. 

I know this makes no sense, and if I had realized that I didn't actually blog about this game before, I would have totally been taking pictures as we played, but I do intend on putting up more game posts, simply because I intend on us playing more games. In short, this is a pointless rant, but I already ranted to my husband and the only other person who would understand my frustration - and hate me for teaching the game wrong - is in England... and Julianne, but I don't have your number so we aren't at the spontaneous Ashley rants stage yet.... you have been warned that this may occur in the near future...

So more games WITH PICTURES to come. In the meantime, I will continue to post misspelled tweets that make only partial sense....

So the year of big scary change should be slowing down now. The wedding's done, honeymoon over, and the new house is looking better and better every day. It's been a struggle just to maintain my book club reading (I had a month and a half and still only started reading a week before the hangout). But I'm feeling back on track now. I've even pulled out Knightsbridge to dabble away at - NaNoWriMo is on it's way and I can't have two works on the go this year!

And as things get back to normal, we christened the new MattCave with a good ol' game of Arkham Horror. It was the most chill game we'd ever had. The elder wasn't even close to waking up and we somehow started with really good event cards so we weren't on the verge of death while ill-equipped. Luck of the draw. All five players had sealed at least one gate of their own - yes, sealed, not just closed. We were probably helped by a strange mix of a tough Nightgaunt and some great weather. Our Mythos card made sealing gates cost only 3 clue tokens, then a Nightgaunt kicked the ass of two of our guys so they got sucked through a gate, different gates since there were two of equal distance away. No one was devoured, and even after we had officially won, G. was feeling antsy at not having fought anything, at least not fought and won (silly Nightgaunt), and so we let him have one last turn to kill the ghost. It nearly drove him to insanity, but she's dead. 

I'm not at all disappointed about the quiet Arkham streets we had. For having two newbies playing, I think it was a good intro, though we warned them that it has happened that one of our characters has been devoured within ten minutes of playing. We started at about 8:00pm, had it all wrapped up by 11:00pm. A night well spent!