Another batch of in-game animations from Capy’s OK K.O.! Let’s Play Heroes. Thanks for all the love & support you’ve shown the game. Here’s some links to grab it if you already haven’t!
Art from 2017 that I’m proud of! Also accomplished a lot of writing and launched Blackwater with @godzillabreath ! I think I got more bold with colors, but want to keep pushing and pushing it more. Thank you all for following and supporting. It’s always kept me going. I hope 2018 will be another great art year.
Hi ho! Hi ho! It’s off to work we go! Because we’ve got quartz to mine, and we’re dwarfs, and this is what we do! Just make sure you come back with the most precious jewels – and don’t get stuck with worthless and dangerous obsidian!
How It Plays
Quartz is a push-your-luck game about dwarves mining gems and sabotaging each other.
Over the course of 5 rounds, you and the other players will dive into the depths of the mine, hoping to find valuable gems instead of worthless and troublesome Obsidian.
Line up and roll out!
Each round, players take turns with the option of drawing a gem from the bag, playing an action card, or leaving the mine.
If you’ve played any sort of push-your-luck game before, you’ll recognize the core structure. If you pull a gem from the bag, you might get one of the valuable gems, ranging from the common Quartz (worth $1) to the valuable and rare [orange one](worth $8). You might also draw Obsidian, which is worthless. Also, if you have two Obsidian in your mine cart, your cart breaks and you lose all your gems and are kicked out of the mine.
If you choose to leave the mine before that happens, you keep your gems and are awarded with an action card and some extra money. The more players that leave, the higher the bonus. If you’re second-to-last, however, you don’t get a bonus at all. Instead the last player in the mine gets the best bonus, although the round immediately ends.
Then there are the action cards. You can play Blue action cards on your turn instead of drawing a single gem. Some cards let you draw extra gems, or let you get rid of an Obsidian by passing it to someone else, or steal gems from another player, or protect your own gems. Some action cards are purple, which are reaction cards. These cards can be played immediately, out-of-turn, in response to specific action cards as a counter. For example, you might pass off an Obsidian to yet another player, or protect your gems from being stolen.
Why work hard when you can steal and sabotage?
If you ever have 2 Obsidian, your cart breaks, and you get no monetary reward. You do, however, receive a Mining for Dummies token, which you can spend later to immediately remove an Obsidian from your cart.
After all players’ carts have broken, or the second-to-last player chooses to leave the mine, the round ends. Players then sell their gems. Each gem has a printed value, but you can earn bonus cash by collecting sets of gems. 3 or 4 of a kind lets you double the value of a different gem, and getting 5 or 6 different kinds of gems grants a flat bonus. You can only claim one of these bonuses.
You can also save up to 2 gems from round to round, perhaps in hopes to get a better set in a future round.
At the end of the game, you tally up your points. You also get to “sell” any remaining cards in your hand. Whoever has the most points, wins.
It’s all about the money, money, money, we just want your money, money, money
Hi ho, hi ho, it’s off to work we go
Quartz is certainly a game that shines, at least on the surface. Handfuls of colorful crystals, nice thick cardboard, a leather pouch. Alas, the actual gameplay is, shall we say, lackluster.
The two genres of push your luck and take that each bring their own form of tension to a game, but mixing them together, at least in this case, results in mush.
The tension of push-your-luck comes from a balance of risk/reward that you share with the other players. You want to surge ahead, so you take a risk and draw another gem, but you’re nervous because the next gem could end it all. Thus, every time you reach your hand into the bag, there’s some level of excitement.
The precious… It calls to us.
But then someone plays an action card and gives you a second obsidian and there’s nothing you can do about it. The tension of risk is wiped out, because it wasn’t your own risk that brought you down. It was just someone having an action card and deciding to use it against you. Or maybe you had the right purple card in your hand to defend yourself, so someone else gets stuck with that obsidian.
Take that is the rich concept that all your hard-laid plans might get unlaid at any moment when someone decides to make you the target of their aggression. Maybe you have a way to counter it, maybe you don’t. But it could all go off the rails if someone notices how well you’re doing, and you’ve got to strike a balance between using the full extent of your power and keeping to the sidelines.
Only, in Quartz, how do you lay down plans where the primary mechanism is drawing something from a bag and hoping it’s valuable? You can’t, so the take-that becomes meaningless. There are no plans to thwart. No way to play low key, or save your cool moves for just the right moment. You either draw something good from the bag, or you don’t.
Since the pushing-your-luck is separated by player and unfolds turn by turn, I’ve often seen players hardly get a chance to even think about pushing their luck. The most effective way to play the “pass off an Obsidian” card seems to be sending it to someone who already has one – that way no one can send it back to you later. So the players who have an Obsidian are more likely to get hit, and hit right away.
No one’s jewels are safe!
So, there’s a huge amount of luck in this game. It’s probably about 99% luck, and lacks the risk that makes push-your-luck games fun. If you don’t get the best cards for your situation, or if you don’t draw the valuable gems, you just don’t win. And often you don’t get to play.
Oh, there were a few moments when the game had some shine. Those moments were usually when players had run out of useful action cards, so the push-your-luck thing was in full force. When it gets down to 2 players, it can be difficult to leave – after all, if you leave first you don’t get any bonus cards or cash, and the other player does.
Then again, the whole thing with the second-to-last player ending the round is a mixed bag. Sure, it makes it a much more interesting choice for that player, but once again it negates the push-your-luck for the last player. If you fall behind in an early round, it can be very difficult to catch up by pushing your luck to the limit; the rule favors the player who is already in the lead or who has the nicest collection of gems that round, since it prevents the other player from getting any more. There is a variant, admittedly, that allows the last player to keep going up to 4 more turns, but why is there a limit at all? Why is that a variant?
I like that action cards get sold at the end for points. It means the players who get frustrated with the hand they drew never seeming to be useful, getting a nice reward at the end. But the game also rewards players who succeed (by luck, mostly) with extra cards. The most valuable cards provide an immediate income boost worth more than the card itself, and players who are targeted with action cards are forced to use their purple cards to protect themselves. If you get knocked out of a round because your cart breaks, you also don’t get to take an extra card, so that’s a double whammy.
Another useful mechanism is the “mining for dummies” token you get when your cart breaks. It gives you a slightly better chance of succeeding in the next round by letting you discard an Obsidian at any moment. This way you’re less likely (although not guaranteed) to get the bad boot round after round. It’s sort of a crutch, because the rest of the game doesn’t balance itself out.
I guess if your cart breaks you have time to study up for the next day
It all kind of adds up to this sort of meaningless experience. I found I could completely check out of the game, play cards automatically at the obvious best time, and pretty much have the same result as if I tried to stay engaged and think about the best thing to do. So much is out of your control. The end result of the game usually involves one player, maybe two, having a ton of money while the others have fallen far, far behind.
I do have to add one caveat to this review. My family really seemed to enjoy playing. I was actually surprised, given how aggressive many of the cards are, but they were all having fun. Perhaps they just didn’t notice the lack of decisions or the heavy-weight influence of pure luck that made most of their choices meaningless in the long run. Perhaps the game offers just enough of a reward – the satisfaction of a single good round, the pleasure of stacking up all your coins at the end, the occasional tension of two players actually pushing their luck, and even the colorful, shiny gems – to be fun for those who don’t mind just kicking back.
As for me, there’s one game that’s almost directly comparable to this that I would choose first every time: Dicey Goblins. There you have the same experience of drawing fancy components from a bag as you delve deeper into a cave, but Dicey Goblins provides a lot more bang for your buck, a lot more excitement and tension, in a cleaner, simpler package.
iSlaytheDragon would like to thank Passport Games Studios for providing a review copy of Quartz.
As if there weren’t enough Lovecraft-inspired board games out there, right?
I was actually completely uninterested in this game for that reason. I’ve played Eldritch Horror, Arkham Horror, Elder Sign, Mansions of Madness, and a few other games and expansions with content torn from the mad world of Cthulhu, so what could this possibly add to the genre?
Well, it turns out, there is room for one more. See, Mountains of Madness is far more silly than the name and graphic design lets on.
The game does take inspiration from the book on which it is based, including quotes and snippets from the text throughout the rulebook and on various game components. Players are a team of scientists on an expedition to recover valuable artifacts and relics, but upon arriving at the Mountain realize that something is terribly wrong and they must escape as soon as humanly possible.
To do this in game, players will move their airplane one tile at a time up towards the mountain peak, facing challenges along the way.
The challenges are simple: players must play cards of four types – tools, cargo, weapons, and books – in specified ranges. So, a challenge might require 8-10 books, or 13 weapons, or “12 or 14” tools. Your cards range from 2 to 6 (although “Arcane Equipment” valued at 10 can be added eventually), and you’ve got to communicate with the other players so that you play the right cards in collaboration – not too high, not too low. You only have 30 seconds each turn to talk about what cards you have, figure out what to play, and then play it.
The real catch, though, comes in the Madness, and this is what makes the game fun. Each player starts with a low-level madness that directs their behavior during the 30-second timer. Perhaps one player must sing everything he says, and another can only talk to a player she is touching.
Madness, making people uncomfortable
Over the course of the game your madness will increase, requiring more silly actions and more frustrating communication barriers. Maybe you can’t say numbers, or can only talk to someone making direct eye contact.
It’s all kind of goofy, ridiculous, and also quite challenging, and if you can get into the spirit of things it is hilarious (albeit stressful) fun.
Spirit Island is a cooperative game that answers the question, what if the island in Settlers of Catan was already inhabited… by spiritual beings, who aren’t too pleased with the new arrivals.
(No direct association with Catan exists in this game).
You and the other players are tasked with scaring off the incursions of hopeful human settlers. They’ll do their best to explore the land, build villages, upgrade those villages into cities, and basically ruin your beautiful island.
But you’re not without wits, and a few unnatural skills. You’ll harness resources from the land to gain energy and perform certain actions to help you destroy cities and terrify the populous. Each player represents a different nature spirit with related abilities. Water, for example, builds up an overwhelming flood that slowly spreads across the land to wipe out the settlers, while lightning flashes here and there, blasting things to bits faster than you can say “hey there lightning spirit, don’t blast me to bits!”
Lightning’s gotta light
The ultimate goal have enough settlers terrified so they won’t come back, before they build up too much and are intrenched, sucking away your life force, and there’s a lot of them… so get to it.
Being a fan of all things Burgerman, I was delighted to see my friend Bas Berkhout working on a mini documentary on Jon. It JUST went live. It’s personal and oh-so-timely. Watch above!
In the time since the original, wildly popular Yoga Joes debuted, these enlisted men have been practicing their poses and moved into higher level classes. Yoga Joes are now ready to display their Advanced Yoga Joe poses, seeking inner peace while balancing in lotus headstand, firefly, scorpion, and more.
Details
Set includes 6 Joes in firefly, advanced side plank, scorpion, peacock, king pigeon - mermaid arm variation, and lotus headstand - spherical helmet variation
Available in green
Each Joe measures about 3" tall at full height
Shipped Weight: 1.25 pounds
Made from rigid, high quality & non-toxic, PET plastic
About Dan Abramson
Dan Abramson, founder of Brogamats, has created numerous popular yoga products for men. Brogamats was founded on the belief that yoga practitioners defy simple categorization, and include people of all walks of life, all genders, all Lululemon budgets, and all levels of earthy pretentiousness.
i know beginner artists are annoyed at the word ‘practice’ being thrown at them by every other artist but i honestly think some of you need to understand the harsh truth. practice is really the only way to improve your art. there are no shortcuts, no tips, no nothing that can turn you into that artist you wanna be. i’m still learning but i knew that frustration well a few months ago. but i had to learn the hard way that i wasn’t going anywhere if i didn’t work.
you 👏will👏not👏get👏better👏with👏out👏practice👏 !!!!
you will not magically turn into a ‘good’ artist overnight. start working. look up references. study anatomy. practice poses and expressions. PRACTISE
Ah, New Angeles. The greatest city in the world – or at least, the largest. Ripe with opportunity to make billions, if you’ve got the wits, foresight, and a few million to start out with.
But be warned; the city balances on a fragile edge. Unrest among the masses, the spread of disease, and a nearly overloaded power grid threatens to topple the balance of power. Only the corporations can keep things from upending, thus unleashing the flood of government oversight and regulation. You might not be allies, but you’ll still have to work together. Better for all of you to stay in control, as long as you can beat your rival.
New Angeles is a game of uneasy cooperation, negotiation, and possibly betrayal. The goal for each player is to beat their secret rival (dealt randomly at the start of the game), while preventing the Threat level from reaching 25. If that happens, everyone loses… except for possibly one player. If someone is the Federalist, they win when Threat reaches 25 as long as they have at least 25 Capital in the bank. Ultimately, more than one player can win, but at least one player will lose.
It’s a big city but there’s not enough room for everyone!
The city is divided into 12 districts; each district has the potential to produce some goods, but might also get marked with Protests, Riots, Outages, Disease, and Developments. A district can also end up occupied by Human First revolutionists, Organized Crime, or Private Security, any of which affect activity in that district.
The game is divided into 9 rounds. Players have two rounds to meet a set of demands – specific goods in the supply that must reach a certain amount – followed by a third “Demand” round in which the supply is scored and some personal goals can be met for points. After this cycle happens 3 times the game ends, unless it ends much sooner.
Each action round lasts between 3 and 5 turns. Each turn an action card is played, but here’s the rub: in order to play an action card, you have to get people to vote for it. It works like this:
The current player makes an “Offer” by playing an action card from their hand in the Main Offer slot. Each other player has one chance to make a Counter Offer, playing a card from their own hand. There can only be one counter offer, but a player can cover up an existing counter offer by discarding additional cards from their hand.
After the offers are set, everyone gets to vote, again using the cards from their hand. Everyone except the two players who made the offers, of course. It’s a simple tally, and a tie is broken in favor of the main offer. The player whose offer gets voted for the most gets to resolve their action card.
I’ll make you an offer you can refuse and then bribe you to take it up anyway!
There’s another catch: the player that wins the vote also gets to claim an Asset card, which grants a powerful, usually permanent ability.
Action cards cover pretty much every angle you can think of in the game world. They remove disease, move androids, get rid of Human First and OrgCrime units, place PriSec units, add developments, and let people draw cards.
At the end of an action round, there’s a quick production phase. Only districts with Android tokens produce their resources, and producing increases Unrest. Riots and Outages prevent any production. Orgcrime siphons some of the resources away. Human First makes Unrest go up much faster.
Finally, an event card is drawn which adds a bit of trouble to a few districts, a new round begins.
As I mentioned, the game is lost if Threat reaches 25. Primarily, Threat increases when an action card affects a district with disease, but it can also go up based on certain events, or if demand isn’t met in a demand round.
After the ninth round and final demand phase, the game ends, players reveal their rivalry cards, and you find out which players win.
Don’t. Trust. Anyone.
The New New Angeles
“Everyone gives me two capital, or we all lose this game right now.”
That was Bryan. You see, we’d slipped up. There were two offers on the table, but it was pretty obvious which to vote for. The other one ended the game immediately thanks to Threat. Fortunately, the good offer was the main one, so it would win automatically. No one needed to waste any cards.
Only we’d forgotten about Bryan, the last player to vote. He’d fallen behind, far behind, so he had nothing to lose. He wasn’t going to win anyway. Might as well take everyone down with him. Even I, who was the federalist, didn’t have the credits to win with the Threat hitting the limit. We didn’t end up giving him 2 credits each, but we did give up a lot. Bryan was back in the game, and there still was a game to get back into.
This is one of my favorite and most memorable moments of New Angeles. There’s almost a real-life philosophical message in that moment, about power and opportunity and burning your own house down to collect the insurance money.
“Insurance money”
New Angeles is possibly the ultimate game of cooperative distrust. It’s a massively streamlined Battlestar Galactica, or a heightened version of Dead of Winter where you actually can’t trust anyone.
Keep that in mind as you decide whether or not this game is for you. There’s definitely going to be a lot of aggressive maneuvering, backstabbing, paranoia, and mistrust. It’s not personal, it’s business – but it can feel pretty personal.
I think there are two key reasons this works so well here. The first is that right off the bat you have a target. Your personal victory condition, rather than some arbitrary collection of Stuff To Accrue, is to beat someone else. That immediately puts you at odds with that player, even when you’re not the betrayer. You also don’t know who’s painted a target on your back.
We demand to be taken seriously!
That’s before you even get to the Federalist, which isn’t necessarily even going to be in the game.
The second element is that to reach your agenda and score your points, you have to convince people to vote for you. Sometimes that means bribing people. Sometimes that means playing the best card for the overall situation rather than the best thing for yourself. Sometimes that means taking advantage of a situation to coerce people into doing what you need them to, as Bryan did.
These two things create this incredible push-pull dichotomy that generates unbelievable tension, which is exactly what you want to have in this sort of game. It forms a dynamic that makes the game interesting, and it also allows a whole slice of rules to be cut out. You don’t need a section on the Federalist getting revealed, or a bunch of clear rules on what needs to be kept secret, because those motivations are created by the plot of the game. Everyone keeps their agenda close to the vest, because it’s better that way even if they aren’t the federalist.
These guys are here to make trouble. So you give them some trouble.
Then you look at the city itself. Much like Battlestar Galactica, there are a whole lot of problems and not a whole lot of time to fix them. Yet, while the BSG game (which i love, by the way) is big and complex and at some points cumbersome, the city of New Angeles has a very clean ruleset. It basically comes down to keeping the districts you need functioning, and trying to keep disease low. But the mechanical challenge is that there are too many districts to manage, too many resources to produce, and too many corners to cover.
Once again, that serves the paranoia. You can propose almost any action, and chances are it’s needed somewhere in the city. So what if my corporation earns a bunch of money by removing disease? It’s what the city needs, right? And sure, those Human First units are a problem. And the outage in district 8 will need looking at. But we can take care of those next turn, right?
It’s up to the player to convince everyone that their agenda is the most important.
We demand to be taken very seriously!
So now, you’ve got this trifecta of brilliant tension. The game first sets players against each other with directly competitive goals, then drags them together by forcing them to work together to do anything at all, then provides too many things to accomplish in too little time. It’s entirely possible to succeed, and to keep the Federalist down. Then again, you might have someone who tries to prevent everyone else from winning just because he can’t win himself. You only know that you can trust yourself.
Then we layer on the icing. Aside from neat miniatures, the Asset cards you earn add some excitement and keep the game fresh. You don’t use the entire Asset deck in one game, which means you can’t rely on any particular ability popping up. The different abilities that come into play can shift the dynamic of the game, opening new strategies and closing others. These cards provide a whole variety of ways to manipulate the game in your favor, or at least earn something for your troubles.
And yes, it is possible for a player or two to not get any of these assets for a while, but this doesn’t prevent them from actively engaging in the game. Usually this self-balances in the long run; people notice someone having too much power, so they’re more willing to give Assets to the player(s) who have less. Assets can even be passed around as part of a deal, so stock up some votes and use ’em as leverage!
Prisec will save us!
It also helps that, despite competitive agendas, the game allows simultaneous victories. It doesn’t force you to beat everyone, and therefore, cooperation is possible. You have enough information to make reasonable deals with players, to earn money, to get things done that you think need to get done. You earn money for certain things whether or not you’re the player to make them happen. You can convince and argue and bribe no matter if it’s your turn or not. That means you’re always involved in the game, and you always have a chance for victory.
This is definitely a highly social game. It’s difficult to plan things in the long run for yourself, and you’re going to have to make deals with other players in order to succeed. Well, let me back that up a bit – you’re going to need to make long term plans with the other players to keep Threat down and meet Demand, but for your personal victory you’ll need to be on your toes, taking advantage of every opportunity the moment it presents itself.
The game supports 4-6 players, which is possibly the biggest rub, as I know many of us often get stuck with 3 player gaming groups or even smaller. Well, there’s no way around it; you need the 4, and truthfully you should have at least 5 to get the most out of the game. 4 is probably better with all experienced players rather than relative newbies, but it helps with the negotiation and voting to have more people involved. It also helps to have all the corporations and their special abilities in play.
The unique player abilities help ensure that people are motivated to tackle all the cities problems.
Amongst all the paranoia, the backroom dealing, the suspicion, New Angeles presents a wonderful world of competing interests finding ways to work together. It takes about 3 hours to play – maybe a little more with less experienced players, maybe 2-3hrs once people know what they’re doing. There’s little downtime, since everyone is involved in every turn, and invested in every little thing that happens. You get a beautifully designed board with a nice Android-y vibe, plenty of colorful tokens and plastic minis. If you enjoy these sorts of highly paranoid, highly interactive games of negotiation, bribery, and distrust, you have to play this game. It succeeds in a brilliant dynamic of mistrust and cooperation that keeps things tense and interesting through the whole game.
iSlaytheDragon would like to thank Asmodee North America and Fantasy Flight Games for providing a review copy of New Angeles.
(@goatwow)
If you haven't seen Alien. Covenant yet, don't bother. Watch this Honest Trailer instead - it's far, far better.
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