A short review of a short game: Blitzkrieg!

Blitzkrieg! World War Two in 20 Minutes is a great little two-player board game. The short play time, bright colors, clear graphic design, small table footprint, and minimal text make it a solid choice to play at a pub or coffee shop, or even over a lunch break at work.

Each player starts with a bag full of tokens representing air, ground and sea forces, with a separate pile of tokens next to the board for more powerful units and technological advancements that can be gained during the game. The board is divided up into the different theatres of war, each with spaces to place tokens, and a scoring track that moves back and forth based on which player has placed the highest value units in that theatre. Some spaces give bonuses when a token is placed, such as drawing extra tiles or gaining the aforementioned advanced units and tech.

Players start by drawing three tiles, which are placed behind a screen so the other player can't see them. They then take turns placing tiles on the board and drawing new ones, the idea being to score points by filling up rows of tiles in the different theatres. Most of the strategy is in deciding when and where to place your tiles -- you might need to take advantage of a certain space's bonus, but filling up a row gives points to the player who is furthest along on that theatre's scoring track, so you don't want to leave good openings for your opponent. It's very chess-like; you constantly feel like you are making sacrifices in one area in order to gain ground in another.

The current edition of the game includes a variant that assumes an alternate reality where Germany and Japan won the war and are now fighting over the United States. It uses a new board (cleverly printed on the back side of the main board) with the theatres of war replaced by major U. S. cities. Rather than just being a re-skin of the main game, this one plays a little differently. The game starts with four cities available to place tiles in, and as each city's tile row fills up, the player who finished it gets to pick the next active city from nearby options. The German player gets the same set of tiles from the main game, but the Japanese have their own set, which includes a secret weapon in the form of a certain larger-than-life reptile...

Rating: 4 (out of 5) Blitzkrieg! is a well-designed game that really shows what you can do with minimal components and clear, simple design.

• Blitzkrieg: World War Two in 20 Minutes official website
• Blitzkrieg: World War Two in 20 Minutes on BoardGameGeek

Cthulhu Wars: world conquest, Lovecraft style

Cthulhu Wars is the brain child of veteran game designer Sandy Petersen (creator of Call of Cthulhu), and it really shows off his lifetime of experience with games in general, and the Cthulhu Mythos in particular. It did over two million dollars on Kickstarter, largely due, I'm sure, to the game's incredible array of miniatures. However, credit is also due to the incredibly smooth and well thought out game design, a fact that was made very clear in the months Petersen spent demoing the game all over the country, in advance of the Kickstarter campaign launch.


One of the biggest problems with area control games like Cthulhu Wars is that once you start losing, it can be difficult to recover. Couple that with the fact that area control games tend to be elimination games that only end when one player knocks everyone else out of the game, and you often have a game where the early leader will run roughshod over the other players, who wind up just wishing the game were over.

Sandy Petersen must have been aware of this problem, because a lot of the game play in Cthulhu Wars addresses it, and for the most part eliminates it. All the players are in the game until the bitter end, and there is a built in time limit to keep the game from going on for too long.

Rather than playing as intrepid investigators on the verge of madness, as with most Lovecraft-inspired games such as Arkham Horror, players of Cthulhu Wars get to be the bad guys. Each player takes command of an ancient, god-like horror such as Hastur, Nyarlathotep, or even Great Cthulhu himself, along with an army of monsters and cultists. Cultists open gates which allow your monsters, and eventually your ancient one, to enter play, and the monsters guard your territory and attack the other players.

Each turn, players earn power based on the number of cultists and gates they have in play, and spend it to move their pieces around the board, summon new monsters and cultists, launch attacks, and eventually bring their ancient ones into play. One nice bit of balance here is that you always earn at least half as much power as the strongest player, so you can't really fall too far behind, even if you get completely wiped off the board.

 Players start the game with a stack of six spell book tokens specific to the ancient one they are playing, each with a unique ability. They have to earn these by accomplishing certain goals, also specific to their ancient one, such as occupying a certain amount of territory, bringing a certain number of creatures into play, or destroying so many enemy units in battle. A player can't win the game unless they've earned all six of their spellbooks. I particularly like this aspect of the game, as it gives each player a plan for what they need to do over the course of the game, and the different requirements and abilities serve to make the player factions even more different from each other.

The game play is deceptively and refreshingly straightforward, and I find that when we play we rarely need to refer to the rule book for anything more that a quick refresher, which is unusual for a game of this scale and complexity. The game round is divided up in such a way that you're never waiting long for it to be your turn to do something, which is also nice and definitely feeds into the idea that every player is there for the entire game, with very little down time.

Rating: 5 (out of 5) A very immersive game with a lot of strategic depth, and smooth, intuitive rules. The only real down side is its high cost ($200 retail for the base 4-player game). The miniatures alone are worth it though.

• Cthulhu Wars official website
• Cthulhu Wars on BoardGameGeek

Check out my OnTableTop.com project blog about painting the Sleeper faction miniaures for this game.

Giant monsters don't come cheap

The makers of Godzilla Raids Again (1955), the very first of many sequels to the original Godzilla (1954), figured out that what a giant monster really needs is another giant monster to fight with. Nearly every Godzilla film since, right up to the most recent American version from earlier this year, has embraced this truth, and introduced countless giant antagonists for the big lizard to fight with. The real thrill of a giant monster movie is in the sheer scale of it all, seeing unlikely behemoths beat the tar out of each other and lay waste to whatever city was unfortunate enough to be their battlefield.

The makers of Monsterpocalypse, a collectible miniatures game first released in 2008, understood this, and the thing that makes Monsterpocalypse such a great game is the importance it places on the environment the game takes place in. Sure, almost every tabletop miniatures game has rules governing terrain to a greater or lesser degree, but the thing that sold me on Monsterpocalypse the first time I played it was the fact that destroying buildings was part of the game, and there were all manner of options for throwing your opponent's giant monster into structures that would then catch fire or explode in a cloud of radiation.

The thing that very nearly un-sold me on it, and kept me from keeping up with the game's later expansions, was the utterly absurd way in which it was released.

In my review of Marvel Dice Masters I defend the idea of collectible games, explaining that the thrill of chasing rare cards or figures is part of the fun. But I also point out that rising costs are what has drained all the fun out it, and Monsterpocalypse was a perfect example of that. The game's randomly packed starter sets and booster packs were very expensive, and it could easily cost $100 or more just to get enough pieces for two players to play with even the smallest bit of figure variety. The way it was distributed and priced, it was clear that the main target market was dedicated players who would buy in bulk from online discounters.

Was it too expensive? We didn't think so at the time, although I don't want to think too much about how much we spent on the game. I remember our first few games being utterly thrilling, with a sense of fast pace and excitement that you don't often see in a turn-based tabletop game, and this still held true when we got our figures out of storage recently to set the game up and play.

However, Monsterpocalypse falls down in a few important areas, mainly a result of it being designed for and marketed to competitive tournament gamers. One of the things that soured us on playing the game at our local game store was that the publisher released a strategy guide which included fairly detailed instructions on how to play each of the game's factions, what figure combinations to use, and so on. This meant that most the tournament players tended to play the same figures in the same way, which cut down substantially on the variety of challenges that is usually one of the main reasons to play in tournaments in the first place.

Another limitation, no doubt informed by the game's emphasis on tournament play, is that it is strictly a two-player game. There is nothing specific in the game's rules that would prevent it from working as a multiplayer game, but all of the different map boards allow starting areas for two players only, and each starter set only contains enough of the game's proprietary dice and counters for one player, so extra sets of dice (or extra starter sets) would need to be purchased for each player.

Monsterpocalypse is a blast to play, which makes it all the more unfortunate that it has so many barriers to playing it, barriers that are almost entirely a result of the very specific and exclusive community the publisher wanted to build around the game.

Rating: 3 (out of 5) The game itself is terrific, but the publisher's decision to market it to a very specific audience creates a few too many limitations, and stops Monsterpocalypse from being a truly great game.

• Monsterpocalypse official website
• Monsterpocalypse on BoardGameGeek.com

Date played: May 26, 2014