Gubs

In Gubs you are rival chieftains, trying to create the greatest and most powerful Gub colony. You will have to be wary as you tread the treacherous path to victory; traps, hazards and awful events lie in wait for your Gub citizens, on top of that your hard-earned Gubs may be lured off to another rival colony if not protected.

Gubs is fun little card game that can be played in about twenty minutes.  In it you are trying to collect the most Gubs before you draw the G, U and B card in any order. Each turn you draw a card and then play as many as you want. These cards could do one of many things but one type you might draw is a Gub card. Gub cards are, in the end, the things that will win you the game, but there is always the question of when to play it. If you put down an unprotected gub, then it will undoubtedly be trapped, lured or killed by the time it comes back to your go. However, the end of the game could come at any time, and maybe it would be better to risk it and hope the finish is just a few draws away.

Now I hear all you inquisitive people shout, "How do you protect your Gubs from all the bad things that can happen to them?" Well, what you need to save your Gubs from the untimely end that a unprotected one has, is barricades. Barricades can be played on top of a Gub and protect it from almost all the cards in the game and will hopefully help that Gub survive.

There are many ways to hinder your friends in this game but the best example of these are hazard cards. These, depending on what they are, let you lure other peoples Gubs to your colony or destroy all the  barricades (which will mean that by the time the poor person you played the card on gets to react, half their Gubs are gone).

The first thing that I would say about this game is that my sister and I were absolutely obsessed with this when we were younger. For a bit at primary school we used to play a game of Gubs a day and as we used to say, "A game of Gubs a day, keeps the doctors away." I think that is the only game that has ever has that kind of affect on us, and I have played quite a few games in my time.

One of the good things about Gubs is that careful planning and tactics do pay off, but luck is still a big part of it. This means that younger children have a chance against their adult counterparts, and will beat them almost as much as the adults win.

This game could easily fit in a small plastic pouch so if you are going on holiday this would be neat and inconspicuous, letting you waste as little space in your bag as possible. However you do need a table to play it on so if you are looking for something to do on the train then this might not be the ideal game for you and I would suggest you to look at Oddball Aeronauts - which I have reviewed here.

Overall I would give this game a 8/10 and absolutely recommend it for children at primary school age.  

Frostgrave setup

Today I have decided to help warm up all those who have tired hearts in the middle of the week by doing a short blog post. Just below are some pictures of a Frostgrave set up that my Dad and I have been working on. Hopefully I will get to play it soon (we have the "Thaw of the Lich Lord" campaign) and I might even put up a review for it in a while. I hope this lightens your Wednesday blues and if you are curious you can get the paper models here.

Little Wizards

In this blog post I will be talking about a roleplaying game called Little Wizards. If you have no clue of what a roleplaying game is, then go here. Otherwise, come right this way.

Little Wizards is a roleplaying game designed especially for kids. In it you play helpful child sorcerers and mages, running around sorting out tr problems the citizens of Coinworld (the setting of all Little Wizard adventures) face.

Little Wizards has an extremely simple system for figuring out if you can do something hard- for example, to see if you can persuade the Brownies to stop terrorising the village with their troublesome

pranks. First you roll two  six sided dice, add the results together and then add the appropriate trait (more on those later). If you beat the target number the Narrator (the GM in other words) sets you then you succeed!

Now, back to those traits, traits represent how good you are at different things, depending your level of skill at that certain trait you might get  up to a plus 2 to add onto your rolls .These skills come in two different forms, one, normal skills which are body (how good at physical things you are), heart (how good at interacting with other people and animals you are) and brains (how clever you are). However, the real excitement comes with the other type of skill… magic powers!

Don't worry, although they have a different name magic powers work in the exact same way as traits. However, unlike traits, where every Little Wizard will have access to the body, brains and heart traits, with magic powers, each player can choose what types of magic they want to be able to do.

What is it like to GM this game?

Well, I have been lucky enough to have a chance to GM some adventures in Little Wizards and so for the first time I can tell you what its like to be on the other side of the table, controlling all the eccentric characters of Coinworld and the things that go bump in the night.

This being my first experience of GMing a game a was definitely relieved that there was a ton of

helpful hints spread through the book for narrators and even a whole chapter on how to GM a game of Little Wizards. These really helped my entry into the murky waters of the world of GMing but, I wish their had been a bit more advice on what to do when your players went totally of the plot, because they did that - a lot. Also, I wish their had been some advice for making your own tales because although they give you three adventures ready made, you could easily go through these very quickly. In defence of Little Wizards though they do include loads of story hooks and lots of background description for Coinworld, but it would've been quite nice if they could of provide a little more help on adventure creation.

Apart from those few small problems, I really enjoyed GMing this game and I think that I am glad that it was the first game system I ever ran. The adventures that did come with the box were well written and fun, but also made sure that there was a wide variety of challenges so that every single player stayed engaged

My general thoughts

Overall I think that this game is a perfect way to introduce your children into gaming: the setting is imaginative and fun, the rules are simple and adventures are engaging. What I also love about the game is the character creation system, in it, once you have chosen what you want to be good at, all you have to do is roll some dice and look at a table and the rest of your characters backstory, fears and likes will be filled in for you with minimum effort. This leaves more time for playing and less time for trying for wrangle children into making up a character. I would definitely recommend this game to parents wanting something to get for there kids and I would also recommend it to other children looking for there first way into the world of GMing.

Harry Potter Trivial Pursuit

So, as you all, know, the Newt Scamander film is coming out today! Yay! So, to celebrate this I am publishing a special Harry Potter Trivial Pursuit review.

In Harry Potter Trivial Pursuit the premise is simple, you have to try and collect the most cards until, A you run out of cards, B you get bored or C if you are following the rules, someone collects six cards.
To do this, you select a card and hand to someone else on the table. Then you roll a dice with different colours on and the person you gave the card to reads the corresponding question. If you answer the question correctly you get to keep the card, if you don't then the card goes to the bottom of the pack.

If you are a Harry Potter fan (a.k.a my Mum and Sister) then you will enjoy this game the questions are not stupidly easy and you have to have a decent knowledge of Harry Potter. However, the questions are all on the films so people who are really into the books might find themselves getting annoyed at the questions. If you are a Harry Potter fan and you don't know what to do with your time then this game would be perfect for you. If you want to buy it you can get it here.

Call of Cthulhu and Pulp Cthulhu

In this blog post I will be talking about a roleplaying gaming called Call of Cthulhu and its off-spring, Pulp Cthulhu. If you don't know what a roleplaying game is go to here. But, if you know about the wonderful world of role playing games, read on.

In Call of Cthulhu you are an investigator, living in the world of H.P. Lovecraft's books. Throughout the time you play in this world, you will have to face many horrors, which will slowly and surely drive you mad. Unlike many RPG's (Role Playing Games) you are not guaranteed to survive an adventure and your character will eventually turn mad, or die…

One of the biggest advantages of Call of Cthulhu is the games system is relatively simple. If you want to do something, you have to roll two percentile dice (which gives you the numbers 1-100) and check if the total is under your corresponding skill. If you roll under your skill you succeed!

The adventures set you as investigators, following clues and interrogating people until you realise that
the world is not as safe as you thought, and your childhood nightmares live next door.  The horror world of H.P. Lovecraft is brought further into the game by the use of a sanity score. When you see something horrible (and let me tell you, you will), you have to make a check as described above. If you succeed, well then you'll probably be ok - depending on how scary the situation is - but if you fail then you will lose sanity points (or at least a lot more than you counterparts who succeeded). If you have no sanity points you become insane, and you effectively loose control of your character!

I really enjoy the investigative aspect of Call of Cthulhu and it is extremely rewarding as you piece together the clues to figure out, for example, what unearthly cult has been kidnapping and sacrificing tourists. It makes a nice change from the more combat orientated systems that we usually play and it
also has some of the finest single-sessions adventures around. This means that if you don't have the time or effort to play a long-running campaign then this is the game to go to.

However, this game is definitely not good for children in some cases. My sister and I have been scared and frightened quite a few occasions because even if the Game Master does all they can to make it enjoyable for children, some of the adventures are just inherently scary. The fact that your character is going to die and go insane sooner or later is not going to go down well with many children under the age of twelve. However, this is partly solved by Pulp Cthulhu.

In Pulp Cthulhu, you have some luck, literally, to help your rolls succeed. For example, if you are rolling really badly and you are about to die, you can spend all your luck points and survive to fight another day. In less sticky situations you can spend some luck points just to lower your roll, and succeed when you otherwise might have failed. But you won't want to spend all of your luck points, because you may have to roll a luck test, which means rolling under the number of luck points you

have left.

Also the mood of the game is different, there is more emphasise on fighting although it retains its investigative theme. In addition, you are probably not going to go insane as each time you finish an adventure you get a bunch of sanity points back.

Pulp Cthulhu is a lot better for kids, due to the slight change in feel and also how you can escape death with luck points. Overall, I think that I prefer Pulp Cthulhu because it lets slightly more dramatic and cool scenes to unfold by letting people use luck points to do special things. I would however recommend both of these roleplaying games and I really enjoy playing both of them.

All Wound Up - Escape from the Cemetery

In All Wound Up, you are dead. Being dead, can be quite boring sometimes, so you and your friends think that it would be a great idea to have a race. First one to the gates is the winner.
Ready.
Set.
Go!

All Wound Up is a game like no other I know. In it you control windup Zombies as they race each other to the gate at the end of the grave yard. But first you have to find out what your Zombies will get up to. To do this, you have to go through two phases, the drafting phase and the bidding phase.

In the drafting phase you are given a hand of ten cards which each correspond to a different action, for example 'wind one' lets you wind the handle of your figure once. To start the drafting phase you hand five of your ten cards to the person on your left and receive five from the player on your right. Then you pass four to the player on your left on receive four from the player on your right and so on until you pass only one card, selecting the cards you want to keep at each pass. Once you have done that the round is over. This lets you refine your hand so that you have the best possible chance for the next phases, the bidding phase.

In the bidding phase you have to bid with your cards to get the opportunity to complete the actions on them. To do this, when it is your turn, you call out a type of card that you have and play all of them: after that everyone else plays all of the cards of that type from their hand too. The person who has the most cards of that type wins and does whatever action is on the card to their Zombie (unless it is the 'turn opponent' card, a card designed solely to destroy your friends marvellously laid plans).

We were lucky enough to pick our copy of All Wound Up second hand, but unfortunately one of our zombies was a bit worn out. Not that this stopped the fun as it is easy enough to find new wind up figures. We played with these wind up pumpkins on the picture to the left which tended to bounce in a curved path, adding to the hilarity.

One problem we did encounter was that the rule book is basically intangible. I had to resort to asking my Dad to read it, and even he struggled to make sense of it. This meant that for some rules we had to guess and go with what felt like the right ruling. As well as that, in contrast to its light and fluffy theme, it is actually quite complicated. The drafting and bidding seem to get in the way of what the game actually wants to be, a fun family friendly game about racing with wind up toys.

But even with all of the problems with the rules, there are still some incredible moments in the game, as your friend goes careering off the side of the board or your windup toy ends up facing the completely wrong way and you haven't even made it past the first tile. Overall I would give this game a four out of ten.

Continuing with this scary theme, next week I will be back reviewing Call of Cthulhu and its counter part, Pulp Cthulhu.
P.S I have known discovered the wonderful world of technology with Blogger. I have now added a subscribe feature to my blog! You never know, next I might even look at putting some of my blogs on BoardGameGeek.