Die Hard, but not any harder

There are a lot of possibilities for a game designer when presented with the challenge of creating a game based on a pre-existing property such as a book, film or TV series. The easiest option (and the one we see the most) is to re-skin an existing game, such as with all the licensed versions of Clue, Risk, and especially Monopoly. This is an easy way to get a tie-in product out there, but it's rarely very satisfying when assessing whether or not the result is a good game. Of course, there are exceptions; Legendary has proven itself to be a very resilient game system, supporting multiple licensed properties such as Marvel Comics, Alien, and James Bond while making each property seem a perfect fit, and I will go to my grave defending The Lone Ranger Shuffle the Deck Card Game as one of the best fits between a licensed property and a pre-existing game system ever.

The design choice that should render much better results is when a game scratch built to fit a particular theme, but while this approach occasionally gives us an amazing game like Firefly, it all to often results in something that is too focused on the nuances of the property it's trying to simulate, to the point that the end result is a game that, while successfully evoking whatever film or TV series it's based on, doesn't actually come together very well as a playable game.

This is definitely the case with Die Hard: the Nakatomi Heist Board Game. According to the designers, the intent of the game was evoke the experience of watching the movie, and it definitely does that. If you're a fan, the game will certainly call to mind most of the film's iconic moments such as John McClane running across broken glass or Hans Gruber plunging to his death.

The game is played out over three acts, with one player acting as McClane and the rest as the thieves (remember, they're only pretending to be terrorists). The McClane player has to use cards and dice rolls to move through Nakatomi Tower completing various objectives starting with finding a gun and a radio, and finishing with pushing Gruber out of the window. The thief players have to work together to slow him down, while at the same time playing cards in the right combination to open the vault and win the game.

In many ways it's similar to Leading Edge's Aliens board game, which asks players to recreate the action from the film, but sets them the challenge of doing better than the characters did in the film (according to the game's victory conditions, they lost). It also allows for several "what if" scenarios outside of what we see in the film.

Die Hard uses cards, dice and playing pieces to provide a framework that lets players re-enact the film, and then asks them to do just that. And this is the problem. While the game mechanics are reasonably entertaining for a lightweight tactical move-and-shoot game, the players are given objectives based on what happens in the movie, and the only way to accomplish them is to do what the characters did in the movie. There's no flexibility to try different strategies, and there are no alternative ways to win. The game forces the players to use their random card draws and dice rolls to recreate the film, which means it plays the same way every time.

With little to no replay value it's not likely that we will play this game very often, but I'm thinking we might lean into the old "is Die Hard a Christmas movie" debate by storing it with our holiday decorations and playing it once a year on Christmas eve...

Rating: 2 (out of 5) More of a simulation than a game, giving players the tools to recreate the movie but no flexibility to do anything beyond that.

• Die Hard: the Nakatomi Heist Board Game official website
• Die Hard: the Nakatomi Heist Board Game on BoardGameGeek

Roll West, young man...

"Roll and write" is an emerging style of game that seeks to reduce production costs by eschewing cards, tiles and tokens in favor of players simply marking changes to the game state on a piece of paper with a pencil or pen. This allows these games to be sold at a much lower price point, which can only be an asset in the increasingly crowded board game market.

Actually, roll and write games have been around for many years, with Yahtzee usually pointed to as the first commercial example. But the genre has exploded in recent years, either as a way for game publishers to increase their visibility in stores by putting out simplified versions of games like Settlers of Catan or Patchwork, but just as often with off-the-wall ideas that might not support a $60 board game.

We picked up Rolled West on a whim, having not played any roll and write games (other than Yahtzee), and also having not played Gold West, the full board game it's based on,. So we should be able to judge the game on its own merits without comparison to its parent game or other games in the same genre.

Each player is given a dry-erase board showing what initially looks like a dizzying array of icons. But once you play a few times it's pretty straightforward. The icons represent banked resources, boom town buildings, shipment routes, and mining contracts and claims. On his or her turn, the acting player rolls 4 dice showing symbols that equate to copper, silver, gold, and wood. The player chooses one of these to represent the terrain for the turn, and the other three are resources that can either be spent or banked for use on a future turn.

Players spend combinations of resources on the aforementioned buildings, routes, contracts and claim, with an eye towards maximizing their points at the end of the game. There are a lot of options, so clever players will quickly identify a particular strategy, such as staking claims and building mining camps, developing shipping routes, or saving up resources to buy expensive but lucrative contracts, and then staying with that strategy over the course of the game's six turns. Trying to do a little of everything, or changing strategies mid-game, can be disastrous, as the points tend to rack up the farther along you go on a single track, such as staking claims in the woods or developing a shipping line for silver ore.

Boom town buildings confer bonus points based on the other things you've developed in the game, which can be tricky since you don't want to invest in a particular building before you've figured out what your strategy is. At the same time, as soon as one player buys a building it is no longer available to the other players (the corresponding icon is crossed off on their board), so you don't want to wait too long either.

Players also have the option to bank one resource each turn for future use. Banking resources is really the only way to save up for high value contracts that generally require four or five resources but are worth a lot of points at the end of the game, Additionally, in between each of a player's turns they can bank one of the resources rolled by another player. This doesn't prevent the other player from using it, it just allows you to use it also. This is one of the more interesting decision points in the game, since it can only be done once between each turn -- you're always running the risk of banking a resource, only to have someone else roll a more useful one before your turn comes around again.

As you can see, there is a lot going on here, especially for a game that consists of four dice and what amounts to a 4x6 card for each player. My only complaint about the game is that the iconography on the player cards can be a bit difficult to remember, causing frequent referral to the rules to answer "what does this mean again?" questions. It might have been better to make the player boards larger and include gameplay reminders and tips.

Rating: 4 (out of 5) It's got a huge amount of depth for such a simple game, and yet it can still be played in 30 minutes or so.

• Rolled West on BoardGameGeek
• Weirdly, there is no mention of this game on the publisher's website

Star Wars Destiny: may the dice be with you

When Fantasy Flight Games first released Star Wars: Destiny in 2016, I wasn't particularly interested. It appeared to be a collectible dice game similar to Marvel Dice Masters, which I had stopped playing and sold the year before. I thought Dice Masters was a fun game, but the customizable aspect (building a "deck" based on powerful or interesting dice combinations) was failing to hold my interest, while at the same time making the game difficult to play right out of the box.

However, after seeing The Rise of Skywalker in December and really enjoying it, I found myself wanting to play a game with content from the most recent Star Wars trilogy, which neither of our go-to Star Wars games (Rebellion and Outer Rim) has. Combine that with a bargain priced two-player into set and I was willing to give Star Wars: Destiny another look.

As it turns out, Destiny is a fun, simple game that isn't really anything like Dice Masters. It uses a combination of cards and dice for a straightforward dueling game that manages to remind me of everything I like about collectible card games, while doing away with some of the pitfalls of the format.

Where Dice Masters was a dice game that emulated the structure of a dueling CCG, Destiny is a card game that also uses dice. As such, deck construction is a lot more interesting, while at the same time being simpler than the complex CCGs of old thanks to a lower card count (30 cards per deck rather than the usual 50 or 60 cards) and the fact that your primary cards start the game in play, so the rest of the deck consists of support cards built around two or three main characters.

The goal of the game is to eliminate all of your opponent's characters by inflicting damage on them, while at the same time keeping your own characters safe. Roughly one third of your deck's cards will add dice to the pool started by your main characters; dice are rolled at the start of each turn and used mainly to make attacks and generate resources that are used to pay for additional card plays. The rest of the cards in your deck are played for various game effects, which balances the game between card plays and dice rolling.

A few weeks after we started playing, the publisher announced that the game would be ending, which we're not seeing as the bad news you might think it is. Really, it eliminates one of the primary down sides to collectible games: the expense of buying random expansion packs and keeping up with a steady flow of new product. Since the game is "over," we've been able to get product at very low prices, allowing us to build up a decent collection of cards and dice quickly, which keeps the collecting and deck-building aspect of the game enjoyable.

Rating: 3 (out of 5) This will be a good game to pull out when we're in the mood for Star Wars without wanting to dive in to a more complicated game like Rebellion or X-Wing.

• Star Wars: Destiny official website
• Star Wars: Destiny on BoardGameGeek

Come back to Arrakis: the classic Dune board game gets a new lease on life

The long-awaited reprint of the Avalon Hill Dune board game finally hit store shelves back in November, and honestly it's everything I had hoped it would be: the same game, but with updated graphic design and streamlined, easier-to-understand rules that don't read like a calculus textbook. It's a huge improvement on what was already a great game.

The changes to the actual game play are minimal enough that my review of the original game should still serve as a good description. What remains to be seen is whether or not a 40 year old game design can hold its own in the current (and much more mainstream) board game market. To be fair, new publisher Gale Force 9 have given it every chance, with nice, crisp graphics, a plethora of "how to play" videos on YouTube, a relatively low price point, and wide availability at mainstream retailers such as Barnes & Noble.

The improved production value and availability should help, but the game's biggest problem remains: it was designed for six players, and while it can play with fewer, the shifting alliances are what makes it interesting, and this aspect doesn't come off nearly as well with fewer players. And even with board gaming's popularity at an all time high, it can still be challenging to get six players together who want to spend 3-4 hours playing a game based on a 50 year old book, even if it was a science fiction masterpiece.

Rating: 4 (out of 5) A great game made even better, but the main barrier to playing it regularly remains.

• Dune official website
• Dune on BoardGameGeek

No Mr. Bond, I expect you to deck-build. Legendary: a James Bond Deck Building Game

Legendary: A James Bond Deck Building Game is more proof of how robust the Legendary game system is. Originally designed as a Marvel superhero game, Legendary has gone on to embrace franchises as diverse as Alien, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and even Big Trouble in Little China. Each new version has added something new to the game's simple deck building mechanics. For the most part these additions have integrated with the core game pretty seamlessly, while at the same time making each version of Legendary seem unique to its particular franchise. With its outlandish villains and often preposterous gadgets, the James Bond franchise isn't that far off from superhero adventure anyway, so it's definitely a good fit, requiring minimal changes to the game's structure.

New to the game the concept of Missions, a new card type that goes into the villain deck. While normal villains have to be defeated by playing cards with Attack value, missions work a little differently, offering alternative ways to defeat them such as using recruit points. Each mission set also includes an "inevitable mission" that starts the game on the bottom of the villain deck, acting as a timer to determine when the game ends and giving the last few turns a bit more excitement and drama.

The James Bond edition also brings a few new keywords and accompanying game mechanics to the game. Chase cards move more quickly through the play area, giving players less time to defeat them, and Squeeze, a keyword created specifically for Famke Janssen's absurdly over-the-top character from Goldeneye, reduces the number of cards available to recruit. Several cards taken from Casino Royale require the player to create a sort of poker hand using their cards' various symbols and values

The game play sticks to the core Legendary structure rather than the Encounters variant used by the majority of the non-Marvel versions, but it does group the encounter cards by film, with cards from Goldfinger, The Man With the Golden Gun, GoldenEye, and Casino Royale. This allows players to play out the events from these four films, but it also means that a ton of content from the other 20 films in the series (including Timothy Dalton's version of the title character, my personal favorite) is entirely missing. Hopefully expansions are coming.

This edition avoids the inconsistent artwork that is the Legendary series' only shortcoming by using stills from the movies, something they seem to be moving towards with their games licensed from film and TV properties. This makes for a better looking game, but also makes it a bit more jarring if you plan to try combining this set with any of the other Legendary games (which should otherwise be possible, at least theoretically).

Rating: 4 (out of 5) A solid entry in the Legendary series that stands on its own if you're just looking for a good James Bond game.

• Legendary: a James Bond Deck Building Game official website
• Legendary: a James Bond Deck Building Game on BoardGameGeek

Paladins of the West Kingdom: complexity escalation

New Zealand designer/publisher Shem Phillips has made a career out of creating a series of worker placement games that manage to be both familiar and different. With each game he comes up with a new take on the genre, whether it's Raiders of the North Sea's focus on using a combination of empty and occupied spaces, or Architects of the West Kingdom's lack of a traditional round structure. However, clever as he is, his games are beginning to fall victim to what's known in collectible games as power creep.

In collectible games such as Magic: the Gathering or Heroclix, the business model relies on enticing players to keep buying more product, rather than them buying just a single game. In an effort to keep players interested (and buying), the designers of such games have in the past felt compelled to make new cards more powerful and complicated. This may have proved effective in the short term (at least, it did in the heady CCG days of the 1990s and early 2000s), but in the long term the added levels of complexity usually end up creating a barrier to new players that's far more detrimental than having older players get bored and move on.

Board games that have followed a similar model of using frequent expansions to sustain interest from an existing player base have fallen victim to a similar problem, where the crushing weight of increasingly complicated expansions makes the games unplayable (I'm looking at you, Arkham Horror). This isn't the exact problem with Shem Phillips' games, but it is similar, as he appears to be increasingly relying on his existing fan base (via Kickstarter) as the main audience for his new games, and so he feels the need to ramp up the scale on each new game.

All of which brings us to Paladins of the West Kingdom, the second in the West Kingdom series and the fifth in Phillips' overall series of medieval-themed games. Like his others, this one starts with a basic worker placement mechanic, and then builds on it with an unusual series of innovations. Rather than giving each player a finite set of workers, Paladins instead has different types of workers (warriors, priests, laborers, and so on), and players draft different combinations of them at the beginning of every turn. Game play then involves choosing from a dizzying array of options, so many that a key component of the game's strategy is to decide what you're going to do and stick to it -- the worst thing a player can do in this game is try to do a little of everything, because the scoring system is focused on doing a lot of the same thing.

It's an interesting game with a lot of options, and it's different from any of Phillips' other games while still being familiar thanks to the consistent illustration and graphic design across the whole series. And that's really kind of the problem. In his rush to avoid repeating himself, he's created a game with just a little too much going on. There is a lot to keep track of in this game, from building garrisons to sending out missionaries to hiring townsfolk (with two different options for each) to choosing whether to fight outsiders for a one-time benefit, or convert them for an extra end-game victory point condition. It's just a little too much, especially when compared to the other games from this designer.

We play (and enjoy) Raiders of the North Sea and Architects of the West Kingdom quite a bit, and we find that both games (even Raiders with two expansions) offer just as much depth and entertainment value, with a much lower level of complexity. In short, they're just as fun but a lot easier to play.

Rating: 3 (out of 5) an interesting game design, but a little too complicated when compared to this designer's other games.

• Paladins of the West Kingdom official website
• Paladins of the West Kingdom on BoardGameGeek