Post by Gilvan Blight on Jan 20, 2008 9:23:25 GMT -5
Quickly: beautiful game, cool background, plays like a Computer Game.
[glow=blue,2,300]Summary: [/glow]
Tannhauser is the first in a series of boardgames by French Publisher, Take You On games released in North America by Fantasy Flight. The series of games will all be set in the same U-chronic universe, where it is 1949 and World War 2 is still not over. In addition the concept of the demonic and mystical has been made real. In this first game players take control of a team of heroes (or one or more heroes if playing with more then two players) from either the Alliance or the Reich. The background for this game has an almost Lovecraft feel. The Reich has found one of the four cornerstones holding a great old one at bay in dormancy and with to release it. The Alliance wants to stop them at all cost. The map is two sided and represents to different steps in the story. The first is a large house turned base, the second an underground cavern where the cornerstone is.
Players decide what type of game they want to play. The base game comes with 4 different ways to play. There is story mode, Death match, Capture the Flag and Dominance. Story mode has the players randomly place mission objectives on the board and is ended by completing these objectives and won by victory points. Death match is ended and won by wiping out the entire other team. Capture the Flag is won by capturing 4 of the opponents flags and bringing them back to your own objective points. Dominance is won by holding a set number of key strategic points on a map. Any First Person Shooter players will recognize these game styles and most play as you would expect them to. Story mode is a bit more complicated with two different types of objectives: major and minor. Major objectives require the characters completing them to have 2 specific skills and thus often need more then one character to complete. Minor objectives only require 1 skill to complete. The interesting part is that the winner is determined by victory points and not by who completes their missions first (though completing them does end the game). Victory points are won for completing objectives, opening crates on the map and killing enemy troops. In all modes victory points are awarded. What is unique is that you can spend them as well as gain them. In all game types players can spend victory points to move farther, re-roll initiative checks, heal, and even give a character a temporary skill for completing objectives.
Combat and conflict is handled through dice pools, similar to Shadowrun and the White Wolf system. When attacking you roll a number of dice = to your combat stat. Your target number is the opponents combat stat. If any 'hits' are rolled, the opponent then rolls stamina vs your combat stat, any surceases cancel hits. Any hits that get through damage the character. Each character has either 3 or 4 levels of health (whether they are a Trooper aka generic or a Hero named and unique). As characters take damage their stats change (reminds me a bit of the clix games, without the combat dial, thought that would be better then the in game tracking system).
Probably one of the most notable things about this new system is the Pathfinding System. The boards for the game are filled with a ton of circles representing the spots that your characters can stand. These circles are ringed in various colours, and may or may not have a symbol in them. The colour rings are called paths. These are used to determine what characters can see and interact with each other. These completely eliminate any argument about line of sight, range and who can see who. In addition there will be symbols on some circles that give characters a bonus or minus to a stat. So for example on a circle behind a desk there is a green cross symbol, this means that anyone standing there gets +1 stamina, representing the cover the desk provides. This again eliminates potential arguments, this time over cover difficult ground, etc. There are also circles with 'action' marks. These are randomly filled with crates at the start of the game, during the game characters can open these to find equipment or victory points (depending on the style of game played).
They then customize their heroes by selecting from a set of equipment tokens. Each character can hold only 4 pieces of equipment and these range from physical items to intangibles like Rank or Strength of Will. Players choose equipment from set kits described in the rulebook or they can choose equipment ala cart. The advantage of the packs is each character gets a free specialist equipment when equipped with a standard pack. Once the two 5 character teams are created the game starts.
[glow=green,2,300]The Good:[/glow]Amazing looking game. The board contains two excellently painted top down battlefield views. The miniatures are some of the coolest and most detailed I have seen. Even the pre-painted paint job on them is better then anything I have seen from WotC or Wizkids. Even the dice are unique containing brakes in the numbers so they look like they were stenciled. The best parts of this game though are the pathfinding system and the ability to customize your characters. The equipment selection part of the game is very cool, and based on the amount of free content already online, very scalable and expandable. Being able to select equipment based on your opponents playing style and the type of game being played is very cool. The pathfinding system is rather cool as well. I hate arguments about LOS and looking up rules for shooting around corners and the like, and I don't have to worry about it with this game. I'm a huge fan of the U-chronic background they came up with. It makes me hope they actually keep it up and produce novels or something a bit more then just game background. It's all rather cool, with demoniacally possessed Shock Troopers vs Marines with Alien Flash Guns. Just thought of something while typing the overall section of the review and had to jump back up. I'm always happy to find games with variable number of players, so was very happy to find this one can be played with 2-10 people. With more then two players, players just split up the troops and play team based. With 10 players each would have their own character to customize and control.
[glow=yellow,2,300]The Bad:[/glow]Even though the game strives to remove all ambiguity with the path finding system, we still found a few rules to argue over. The biggest one was about the path finding system it self. We found it hard to tell which circles were considered adjacent. In a system that prides itself on having this amazing system to reduce arguments over stuff like that, I just didn't expect to have this particular problem. Now it was easy to fix as there are two official maps you can get from Boardgamegeek and Take You On games that show what connects to where, but I had to go find those on the net. The next quibble was over completing objectives in story mode with more then one player. The rules state something like it would take one character with both skills two turns to complete an objective or two characters could work together to complete the objective in one. Then states that a single character doesn't have to spend the two turns in secession. This led us to believe that for two characters to work together they had to do it all in the same turn. This made things difficult as most of the objective spots can only be reached by one character at a time. We latter found an errata explaining that the wording in the book was to explain that the only way to do an objective in one turn was to have two characters, and that it didn't have to be done that way. The last problem is that the hand to hand rules are written completely wrong in the English Fantasy Flight rules. As it is written hand to hand weapons are useless unless they give some kind of bonus, which is odd since one of the main heroes has a knife. It ends up they messed up the brawler skill which, in the rules, removes the penalty for fighting without a hand to hand weapon, when it should state that it allows characters to fight in hand to hand at all and without a h2h weapon the characters fight at a penalty. Again a search on the net revealed this errata quickly, but still they should have gotten the rules right in the first place.
[glow=red,2,300]The Ugly[/glow]Not enough chits. There is one major problem with the original boxed game. Part of the game is to pick a difficulty level, easy medium or hard before each match. When you choose medium or easy each player can re-spawn his trooper units a set number of times. This is a pretty cool rule, but there is one major problem with it. When a character dies they drop all 'expendable' equipment, guns, ammo, etc. So when one of your troops die they drop their gear. But then you can't re-spawn them as you don't have enough gear as their kit is on the board. So unless you want to get your scanner and printer going or proxy something, you're stuck. I think this is a serious mistake on Take You On games fault. One Fantasy Flight is getting a lot flack for (as they are known for providing an over abundance of tokens and extra bits in their games). There have been rumors of Trooper packs, and extra tokens to be produce, but so far nothing has come of it. Just seems like such a silly thing to mess up.
[glow=purple,2,300]Overall:[/glow]A beautiful game with really cool bits and minis. A rather cool and interesting U-Chronic background. The game itself plays like a PC first person shooter, including story, capture the flag, deathmatch and domination scenarios. Character equipping and the pathfinding system are the new innovations and both are very cool. You will want to check the web for errata and a pathfinding map though, as even though the system was meant to remove rule arguments there are some parts that are unclear. A rather cool game.
[glow=blue,2,300]Summary: [/glow]
Tannhauser is the first in a series of boardgames by French Publisher, Take You On games released in North America by Fantasy Flight. The series of games will all be set in the same U-chronic universe, where it is 1949 and World War 2 is still not over. In addition the concept of the demonic and mystical has been made real. In this first game players take control of a team of heroes (or one or more heroes if playing with more then two players) from either the Alliance or the Reich. The background for this game has an almost Lovecraft feel. The Reich has found one of the four cornerstones holding a great old one at bay in dormancy and with to release it. The Alliance wants to stop them at all cost. The map is two sided and represents to different steps in the story. The first is a large house turned base, the second an underground cavern where the cornerstone is.
Players decide what type of game they want to play. The base game comes with 4 different ways to play. There is story mode, Death match, Capture the Flag and Dominance. Story mode has the players randomly place mission objectives on the board and is ended by completing these objectives and won by victory points. Death match is ended and won by wiping out the entire other team. Capture the Flag is won by capturing 4 of the opponents flags and bringing them back to your own objective points. Dominance is won by holding a set number of key strategic points on a map. Any First Person Shooter players will recognize these game styles and most play as you would expect them to. Story mode is a bit more complicated with two different types of objectives: major and minor. Major objectives require the characters completing them to have 2 specific skills and thus often need more then one character to complete. Minor objectives only require 1 skill to complete. The interesting part is that the winner is determined by victory points and not by who completes their missions first (though completing them does end the game). Victory points are won for completing objectives, opening crates on the map and killing enemy troops. In all modes victory points are awarded. What is unique is that you can spend them as well as gain them. In all game types players can spend victory points to move farther, re-roll initiative checks, heal, and even give a character a temporary skill for completing objectives.
Combat and conflict is handled through dice pools, similar to Shadowrun and the White Wolf system. When attacking you roll a number of dice = to your combat stat. Your target number is the opponents combat stat. If any 'hits' are rolled, the opponent then rolls stamina vs your combat stat, any surceases cancel hits. Any hits that get through damage the character. Each character has either 3 or 4 levels of health (whether they are a Trooper aka generic or a Hero named and unique). As characters take damage their stats change (reminds me a bit of the clix games, without the combat dial, thought that would be better then the in game tracking system).
Probably one of the most notable things about this new system is the Pathfinding System. The boards for the game are filled with a ton of circles representing the spots that your characters can stand. These circles are ringed in various colours, and may or may not have a symbol in them. The colour rings are called paths. These are used to determine what characters can see and interact with each other. These completely eliminate any argument about line of sight, range and who can see who. In addition there will be symbols on some circles that give characters a bonus or minus to a stat. So for example on a circle behind a desk there is a green cross symbol, this means that anyone standing there gets +1 stamina, representing the cover the desk provides. This again eliminates potential arguments, this time over cover difficult ground, etc. There are also circles with 'action' marks. These are randomly filled with crates at the start of the game, during the game characters can open these to find equipment or victory points (depending on the style of game played).
They then customize their heroes by selecting from a set of equipment tokens. Each character can hold only 4 pieces of equipment and these range from physical items to intangibles like Rank or Strength of Will. Players choose equipment from set kits described in the rulebook or they can choose equipment ala cart. The advantage of the packs is each character gets a free specialist equipment when equipped with a standard pack. Once the two 5 character teams are created the game starts.
[glow=green,2,300]The Good:[/glow]Amazing looking game. The board contains two excellently painted top down battlefield views. The miniatures are some of the coolest and most detailed I have seen. Even the pre-painted paint job on them is better then anything I have seen from WotC or Wizkids. Even the dice are unique containing brakes in the numbers so they look like they were stenciled. The best parts of this game though are the pathfinding system and the ability to customize your characters. The equipment selection part of the game is very cool, and based on the amount of free content already online, very scalable and expandable. Being able to select equipment based on your opponents playing style and the type of game being played is very cool. The pathfinding system is rather cool as well. I hate arguments about LOS and looking up rules for shooting around corners and the like, and I don't have to worry about it with this game. I'm a huge fan of the U-chronic background they came up with. It makes me hope they actually keep it up and produce novels or something a bit more then just game background. It's all rather cool, with demoniacally possessed Shock Troopers vs Marines with Alien Flash Guns. Just thought of something while typing the overall section of the review and had to jump back up. I'm always happy to find games with variable number of players, so was very happy to find this one can be played with 2-10 people. With more then two players, players just split up the troops and play team based. With 10 players each would have their own character to customize and control.
[glow=yellow,2,300]The Bad:[/glow]Even though the game strives to remove all ambiguity with the path finding system, we still found a few rules to argue over. The biggest one was about the path finding system it self. We found it hard to tell which circles were considered adjacent. In a system that prides itself on having this amazing system to reduce arguments over stuff like that, I just didn't expect to have this particular problem. Now it was easy to fix as there are two official maps you can get from Boardgamegeek and Take You On games that show what connects to where, but I had to go find those on the net. The next quibble was over completing objectives in story mode with more then one player. The rules state something like it would take one character with both skills two turns to complete an objective or two characters could work together to complete the objective in one. Then states that a single character doesn't have to spend the two turns in secession. This led us to believe that for two characters to work together they had to do it all in the same turn. This made things difficult as most of the objective spots can only be reached by one character at a time. We latter found an errata explaining that the wording in the book was to explain that the only way to do an objective in one turn was to have two characters, and that it didn't have to be done that way. The last problem is that the hand to hand rules are written completely wrong in the English Fantasy Flight rules. As it is written hand to hand weapons are useless unless they give some kind of bonus, which is odd since one of the main heroes has a knife. It ends up they messed up the brawler skill which, in the rules, removes the penalty for fighting without a hand to hand weapon, when it should state that it allows characters to fight in hand to hand at all and without a h2h weapon the characters fight at a penalty. Again a search on the net revealed this errata quickly, but still they should have gotten the rules right in the first place.
[glow=red,2,300]The Ugly[/glow]Not enough chits. There is one major problem with the original boxed game. Part of the game is to pick a difficulty level, easy medium or hard before each match. When you choose medium or easy each player can re-spawn his trooper units a set number of times. This is a pretty cool rule, but there is one major problem with it. When a character dies they drop all 'expendable' equipment, guns, ammo, etc. So when one of your troops die they drop their gear. But then you can't re-spawn them as you don't have enough gear as their kit is on the board. So unless you want to get your scanner and printer going or proxy something, you're stuck. I think this is a serious mistake on Take You On games fault. One Fantasy Flight is getting a lot flack for (as they are known for providing an over abundance of tokens and extra bits in their games). There have been rumors of Trooper packs, and extra tokens to be produce, but so far nothing has come of it. Just seems like such a silly thing to mess up.
[glow=purple,2,300]Overall:[/glow]A beautiful game with really cool bits and minis. A rather cool and interesting U-Chronic background. The game itself plays like a PC first person shooter, including story, capture the flag, deathmatch and domination scenarios. Character equipping and the pathfinding system are the new innovations and both are very cool. You will want to check the web for errata and a pathfinding map though, as even though the system was meant to remove rule arguments there are some parts that are unclear. A rather cool game.