Post by Gilvan Blight on Jun 1, 2011 8:27:11 GMT -5
Quickly: Rather good fantasy wargame, very oldschool though.
Summary:
I recently found a really good deal on the Valley Games edition of Titan. I bought this without really knowing much about the game. It ends up I picked up a re-print of a classic fantasy, chit based, war game. Titan was originally published back in 1980 by Gorgonstar Publications. It was later picked up by Avalon hill and had a long run with lots of expansions produced in gaming magazines of the time. This new edition completely updates the look of the game, collects all of the eratta and puts it all in one nice box.
The game is a chit based Wargame where players each take on a role of a Titan and it's army of fantasy creatures. The main goal is to be the last Titan standing. There is also a point based system that can be used for shorter games or figuring out who won if you run out of time. As you can tell from this, this could be a long game.
The game comes with a rather large mounted map board that is divided into near hexagons (the sides aren't equal and I'm not exactly sure the proper name for the shape). Each hex represents an area of land of a certain terrain type. These include plains, tundra, mountains, hills, brush, swamp, marsh and probably one or two I am forgetting. Equally spaced around the board are 6 Tower spaces as well. Between each hex are symbols that dictate how units move on this map board. In addition to the main Map board the game also includes a bunch of battle boards. There is one of these for each type of terrain and they represent a close up of each land space. There are a total of 11 of these (5 two sided and 1 one sided). These are hex based maps that include a variety of terrain on them. Along with the boards are the rules and a ton of chits, counters and dice. The Dice are 6 siders and there are 20 of them. For chits and counters, there are over 600. That's right over 600. Lastly there are two summary sheet cards.
The game starts with each player getting a set army and two leader tokens. One leader is a Titan and the other is an Angel. He then splits his army into two Legions. These are stacked under a Legion marker in the players colour and placed randomly into one of the towers. The player in the highest tower goes first. Each turn players do four things. They organize their forces - splitting any legion into two or more legions with at least two units each. At the start of the game each player has 12 legion markers so can have 12 different forces moving around the main board. Each unit can only have 7 creatures in it so splitting is done regularly.
After organizing units is movement. The "moving player" rolls 1 die and then moves any or all of their legions exactly the amount on the die. Movement is done on the large main board and follows some special rules based on icons denoted on the board. These generally dictate where and which way a unit can move, sometimes forcing movement and other times giving options. Units can move through friendlies but have to stop if they encounter an enemy legion. There are also some special rules for Teleportation from a Tower and eventually Titans get powerful enough to teleport around the board with their legions.
After movement are engagements. Here any units that ended up in the same land have an engagement. Interestingly players have the option to decide the outcome without fighting a battle. The defender can flee (they loose all their troops but the attacker only get's half points), the players can come to some arrangement (at least one side must be wiped out, full points are awarded, but deals can be made, like attacker looses a unit or two), or the players can fight it out.
Battles are done on the battle board that matches the terrain the units are standing in. Here creatures are moved individually, not as a stack. Units are a wide range of fantasy creatures that include Gargoyles, Ogres, Centaurs, Warlocks, etc. There are 24 different units the game. Each has two stats, power and skill and may have special icons if they can fly or make ranged attacks. Creatures can move as many hexes as their skill and attack with as many dice as their power. Their power also represents their health or hit points. When an attack is made the skill of the two units is compared and looked up on a chart to get the die roll needed to make a hit. Damage is one per hit. Combat is fought in turns with the attacker going first. One player moves all units and attacks with them then the other player goes. There are rules for various terrain that affect both movement, attacking and ranged combat. In addition there are special rules where the attacker can summon an Angel unit from the main board and after the 4th turn the defender can muster reinforcements. Every battle is done until one side is completely eliminated (though a side can concede without having to fight out the whole battle). Eliminating a side gives the attacker points. Each unit is worth as many points as it's Power times it's skill. If the attacker hits a milestone of 100 points they also get to add an Angel to their legion. This is done at each 100 points won in battle. If a Titan is killed during a battle then that player is out of the game. The killing player gets points for all of that player's legions still on the main board (at half point value) and also gets the players legion tokens, which will allow them to place more legions on the main board. Lastly, a player's point score also determines the strength of their Titan, for each 100 points the Titan gets +1 power. At 400 points the Titan gains the ability to teleport (on a movement roll of 6).
Mustering is the last step of a player turn. Here any unit that moves can try to recruit new units. This is done in a very unique way. Each terrain type has a series of native creatures (Most have 3). To recruit a creature you need to either have that creature in your legion already or have a set of a lower level creature. For example if I have a Centaur in my legion and I am in the Plains, I can recruit another Centaur. If I have 2 Centaur though, I can recruit a lion. If I have three lions I can get a Ranger. Note: I'm going off the top of my head, and these creatures may not actually match what you get in the plains. Higher 'level' creatures tend to have higher power and skill and often have ranged attacks or can fly.
Play continues like this in a clockwise fashion until only one Titan is standing. There are also variants that either set a point goal or a time limit on the game. In this case the player who hits the target first or has the most points (including all units in play) is the winner.
That's pretty much it. It's not the easiest game to summarize and I'm sure I missed a small rule or two. Though it seems complicated everyone I played with last night picked it up very quickly.
The Good:
Valley Games sure knows how to package a box. The box comes with the lid about half way off and shrink wrapped. The reason for this is to fit all 13 of the cardboard counter sheets. Once you punch out all of the chits the box closes normally. In addition to this the game came with a plastic tray that holds all 600+ counters. This sits on the bottom of the box over top of pictures showing you what to place where. I will admit you can't really see what's in each spot so well once it's full but it's so much better then having everything loose in the box or picking up some Plano boxes. Along with this everything is really great looking. The art is fantastic. The counters aren't the thin cardboard of the past but are nice and thick and glossy. No corner cutting needed here. Compared to the previous versions of this game, heck compared to pretty much every wargame I own, this is amazing looking.
I really dug the game play in this. I'm not a big wargammer and even less of a chit based wargammer but I really enjoyed this. I don't know if it was the fantasy elements, the small battlefields that made for quick battles or the simplicity of the power vs skill system but I really enjoyed playing through combats in this game. The somewhat bizarre forced movement system was also rather interesting, though I could see someone complaining that it removes some tactics from the game. The real gem here though is the unique mustering system. It felt somewhat like playing Heroes of Might and Magic where you would need one type of unit to be able to recruit another. It also reminded me a bit of a tech tree from one of the Civilization games. I actually found this one of the more fun aspects of the game, trying to figure out where to move my legions in order to recruit the best troops. This seems to be a major part of the strategy of the game.
The Bad:
There is a pretty high random factor in this game. This starts right at the beginning where you roll randomly to see what tower you start in. In our game three of us were right next to each other while the 4th player was out on their own. Each turn movement is randomly generated on a D6, this combined with the odd forced movement nature of the board often throws you into the other players (or forces you not to move at all). Lastly combat is all D6 based with a to hit system pretty much identical to the War hammer games. When skills are equal you need a 4 to hit. When attacker is 1 higher you need a 3, when it's less then half you need 6s, etc. In our game we only have 4 battles, it just happened that each one featured a Titan, this made for a quick game.
A quick game is obviously not the norm. Our game went for about 2.5 hours, and that included rules explanation and set up. From what I can tell from everything online and even in the rulebook this could be a long one. There are lots of indications of this, from the four different variants for playing a quick game to the suggestion to concede in combat if you don't think you can win to speed up play. In addition the main board is numbered so you can log down where everything is to resume a game later (a cool feature but one that scares me in regards to needed to do so at some time). The playtime is listed as half an hour to 4 hours. That's quite the range.
The Ugly
My biggest complaint about this game is something that you just don't see anymore. This is an old game written originally in the 80s and one part of the game feels like it. The fact that a player can be eliminated quickly and then has nothing to do for the rest of the night. This is especially nasty if the game goes as long as it could. On our 4th turn after maybe 20 minutes of play one of our 4 players was eliminated. If Titan was the plan for the day, he would have had a rather boring day. In addition to the potential to be knocked out with nothing to do, this game has a lot of downtime between turns. Since each battle is fought between two players on a separate battle board, this means that the remaining players just get to watch with nothing to do until the battle is over. Again this feels very oldschool and isn't something I'm used to from more modern games. We've pretty much decided that it's worth bringing a second game to play either between turns for the players who are eliminated to play once out of Titan.
Overall:
I had no clue what I was getting when I picked this up. At first reading the rules I was daunted. I'm not a wargamer and this sounded like a massively complex and long game compared to my usual Eurogame or a Fantasy Flight big box game. I judged it wrong though. The rules are pretty quick to pick up and the game itself is a lot of fun. The variety of units and the mustering rules make moving on the main map fun and individual battles are quick and engaging. It doesn't hurt that the game is great looking. My only real complaint is with some of the randomness, the downtime between turns and the fact that once you loose your Titan you are out of the game with nothing to do but watch. I'm very happy with this purchase and already trying to set up an afternoon of Titan sometime in the near future.
Summary:
I recently found a really good deal on the Valley Games edition of Titan. I bought this without really knowing much about the game. It ends up I picked up a re-print of a classic fantasy, chit based, war game. Titan was originally published back in 1980 by Gorgonstar Publications. It was later picked up by Avalon hill and had a long run with lots of expansions produced in gaming magazines of the time. This new edition completely updates the look of the game, collects all of the eratta and puts it all in one nice box.
The game is a chit based Wargame where players each take on a role of a Titan and it's army of fantasy creatures. The main goal is to be the last Titan standing. There is also a point based system that can be used for shorter games or figuring out who won if you run out of time. As you can tell from this, this could be a long game.
The game comes with a rather large mounted map board that is divided into near hexagons (the sides aren't equal and I'm not exactly sure the proper name for the shape). Each hex represents an area of land of a certain terrain type. These include plains, tundra, mountains, hills, brush, swamp, marsh and probably one or two I am forgetting. Equally spaced around the board are 6 Tower spaces as well. Between each hex are symbols that dictate how units move on this map board. In addition to the main Map board the game also includes a bunch of battle boards. There is one of these for each type of terrain and they represent a close up of each land space. There are a total of 11 of these (5 two sided and 1 one sided). These are hex based maps that include a variety of terrain on them. Along with the boards are the rules and a ton of chits, counters and dice. The Dice are 6 siders and there are 20 of them. For chits and counters, there are over 600. That's right over 600. Lastly there are two summary sheet cards.
The game starts with each player getting a set army and two leader tokens. One leader is a Titan and the other is an Angel. He then splits his army into two Legions. These are stacked under a Legion marker in the players colour and placed randomly into one of the towers. The player in the highest tower goes first. Each turn players do four things. They organize their forces - splitting any legion into two or more legions with at least two units each. At the start of the game each player has 12 legion markers so can have 12 different forces moving around the main board. Each unit can only have 7 creatures in it so splitting is done regularly.
After organizing units is movement. The "moving player" rolls 1 die and then moves any or all of their legions exactly the amount on the die. Movement is done on the large main board and follows some special rules based on icons denoted on the board. These generally dictate where and which way a unit can move, sometimes forcing movement and other times giving options. Units can move through friendlies but have to stop if they encounter an enemy legion. There are also some special rules for Teleportation from a Tower and eventually Titans get powerful enough to teleport around the board with their legions.
After movement are engagements. Here any units that ended up in the same land have an engagement. Interestingly players have the option to decide the outcome without fighting a battle. The defender can flee (they loose all their troops but the attacker only get's half points), the players can come to some arrangement (at least one side must be wiped out, full points are awarded, but deals can be made, like attacker looses a unit or two), or the players can fight it out.
Battles are done on the battle board that matches the terrain the units are standing in. Here creatures are moved individually, not as a stack. Units are a wide range of fantasy creatures that include Gargoyles, Ogres, Centaurs, Warlocks, etc. There are 24 different units the game. Each has two stats, power and skill and may have special icons if they can fly or make ranged attacks. Creatures can move as many hexes as their skill and attack with as many dice as their power. Their power also represents their health or hit points. When an attack is made the skill of the two units is compared and looked up on a chart to get the die roll needed to make a hit. Damage is one per hit. Combat is fought in turns with the attacker going first. One player moves all units and attacks with them then the other player goes. There are rules for various terrain that affect both movement, attacking and ranged combat. In addition there are special rules where the attacker can summon an Angel unit from the main board and after the 4th turn the defender can muster reinforcements. Every battle is done until one side is completely eliminated (though a side can concede without having to fight out the whole battle). Eliminating a side gives the attacker points. Each unit is worth as many points as it's Power times it's skill. If the attacker hits a milestone of 100 points they also get to add an Angel to their legion. This is done at each 100 points won in battle. If a Titan is killed during a battle then that player is out of the game. The killing player gets points for all of that player's legions still on the main board (at half point value) and also gets the players legion tokens, which will allow them to place more legions on the main board. Lastly, a player's point score also determines the strength of their Titan, for each 100 points the Titan gets +1 power. At 400 points the Titan gains the ability to teleport (on a movement roll of 6).
Mustering is the last step of a player turn. Here any unit that moves can try to recruit new units. This is done in a very unique way. Each terrain type has a series of native creatures (Most have 3). To recruit a creature you need to either have that creature in your legion already or have a set of a lower level creature. For example if I have a Centaur in my legion and I am in the Plains, I can recruit another Centaur. If I have 2 Centaur though, I can recruit a lion. If I have three lions I can get a Ranger. Note: I'm going off the top of my head, and these creatures may not actually match what you get in the plains. Higher 'level' creatures tend to have higher power and skill and often have ranged attacks or can fly.
Play continues like this in a clockwise fashion until only one Titan is standing. There are also variants that either set a point goal or a time limit on the game. In this case the player who hits the target first or has the most points (including all units in play) is the winner.
That's pretty much it. It's not the easiest game to summarize and I'm sure I missed a small rule or two. Though it seems complicated everyone I played with last night picked it up very quickly.
The Good:
Valley Games sure knows how to package a box. The box comes with the lid about half way off and shrink wrapped. The reason for this is to fit all 13 of the cardboard counter sheets. Once you punch out all of the chits the box closes normally. In addition to this the game came with a plastic tray that holds all 600+ counters. This sits on the bottom of the box over top of pictures showing you what to place where. I will admit you can't really see what's in each spot so well once it's full but it's so much better then having everything loose in the box or picking up some Plano boxes. Along with this everything is really great looking. The art is fantastic. The counters aren't the thin cardboard of the past but are nice and thick and glossy. No corner cutting needed here. Compared to the previous versions of this game, heck compared to pretty much every wargame I own, this is amazing looking.
I really dug the game play in this. I'm not a big wargammer and even less of a chit based wargammer but I really enjoyed this. I don't know if it was the fantasy elements, the small battlefields that made for quick battles or the simplicity of the power vs skill system but I really enjoyed playing through combats in this game. The somewhat bizarre forced movement system was also rather interesting, though I could see someone complaining that it removes some tactics from the game. The real gem here though is the unique mustering system. It felt somewhat like playing Heroes of Might and Magic where you would need one type of unit to be able to recruit another. It also reminded me a bit of a tech tree from one of the Civilization games. I actually found this one of the more fun aspects of the game, trying to figure out where to move my legions in order to recruit the best troops. This seems to be a major part of the strategy of the game.
The Bad:
There is a pretty high random factor in this game. This starts right at the beginning where you roll randomly to see what tower you start in. In our game three of us were right next to each other while the 4th player was out on their own. Each turn movement is randomly generated on a D6, this combined with the odd forced movement nature of the board often throws you into the other players (or forces you not to move at all). Lastly combat is all D6 based with a to hit system pretty much identical to the War hammer games. When skills are equal you need a 4 to hit. When attacker is 1 higher you need a 3, when it's less then half you need 6s, etc. In our game we only have 4 battles, it just happened that each one featured a Titan, this made for a quick game.
A quick game is obviously not the norm. Our game went for about 2.5 hours, and that included rules explanation and set up. From what I can tell from everything online and even in the rulebook this could be a long one. There are lots of indications of this, from the four different variants for playing a quick game to the suggestion to concede in combat if you don't think you can win to speed up play. In addition the main board is numbered so you can log down where everything is to resume a game later (a cool feature but one that scares me in regards to needed to do so at some time). The playtime is listed as half an hour to 4 hours. That's quite the range.
The Ugly
My biggest complaint about this game is something that you just don't see anymore. This is an old game written originally in the 80s and one part of the game feels like it. The fact that a player can be eliminated quickly and then has nothing to do for the rest of the night. This is especially nasty if the game goes as long as it could. On our 4th turn after maybe 20 minutes of play one of our 4 players was eliminated. If Titan was the plan for the day, he would have had a rather boring day. In addition to the potential to be knocked out with nothing to do, this game has a lot of downtime between turns. Since each battle is fought between two players on a separate battle board, this means that the remaining players just get to watch with nothing to do until the battle is over. Again this feels very oldschool and isn't something I'm used to from more modern games. We've pretty much decided that it's worth bringing a second game to play either between turns for the players who are eliminated to play once out of Titan.
Overall:
I had no clue what I was getting when I picked this up. At first reading the rules I was daunted. I'm not a wargamer and this sounded like a massively complex and long game compared to my usual Eurogame or a Fantasy Flight big box game. I judged it wrong though. The rules are pretty quick to pick up and the game itself is a lot of fun. The variety of units and the mustering rules make moving on the main map fun and individual battles are quick and engaging. It doesn't hurt that the game is great looking. My only real complaint is with some of the randomness, the downtime between turns and the fact that once you loose your Titan you are out of the game with nothing to do but watch. I'm very happy with this purchase and already trying to set up an afternoon of Titan sometime in the near future.