Have I Got A Bargain For You

This week we have Bargain Quest, a kickstarter ( in all proper senses of the word ) game based on being a fantasy shopkeeper.

Not of course to be confused with afternoon British TV stalwart Bargain Hunt presided over by the will never not be creepy Lord Spraytan First of His Name, David Dickinson. But if Double Dee floats your boat you can imagine yourself in game slinking around dressed like a spiv to suddenly pop up out of nowhere, leer over an unsuspecting member of the public before disappearing the way you came with only the faintest smell of fake tan on the air. You do you fam.

A self published kickstarter from an unknown designer the theme of Bargain Quest flips the familiar trope of fantasy stuffs that sees you take on the mantle of derring hero thwarting all before you, to instead imagine you as the NPC the GM scrambles to plausibly flesh out when you turned left instead of right, and have you as a shopkeeper selling your crap fine wares to unsuspecting discerning shortly to be dead legendary heroes.

Gaining victory points from just amassing more wealth than everyone else being a no brainer, you also however gain victory points if the hero you just kitted out manages to successfully assault the villain threatening the village and, even more shockingly, survive the encounter. Glory by reflected association whilst doing little yourself. The best kind of Glory. The Glory of Management if you will. You can also imagine this a bit like sponsoring the hero with your gear. Like a football strip. If say Paddy Power existed in D&D. Or perhaps this Wizard sponsored by Johnny's Kebab Emporium. Come try our Rat on a Stick !

So with the premise firmly set, therein follows a modest card drafting and even more modest hand management game. Draft a whole bunch of interesting adventuring type items into your hand - each of which can appeal to different heroes, and each of which are more or less useful to their incumbent and priced somewhat accordingly.

Three heroes are set available to all, but crucially, each of which is only interested in and can only be equipped with items in their particular expertise and only has a limited amount of money to spend.

The hapless Heroes of Bargain Quest. David Dickinson not to be seen.

Players get to place one ( or two, or three ) items from their hand into their shop window, where, bizarrely, window display items cannot be bought, but will entice adventurers in to buy from your store." We're out of stock mate. Only got the one on display. No you can't have it. " . Players get to select which hero not already chosen comes to their shop to buy stuff, the turn order decided by whoever has the most exciting items in their window.

And thus we get to the crux of the game - there is some consideration going on when drafting - what are the current heroes looking for ? Melee things, magic, holy items ? What cards am I seeing in the round robin draft ? What should I place in my window to set my turn order, and what should I leave free to sell ? Placing great items in your window is all very well, but if that then leaves you with little to sell the chump coming through the door, that's not going to get you - or them - anywhere. Conversely, stick some crap in the window and keep the "good stuff" behind the counter is fine and dandy but ensures you'll have last pick of heroes and possibly be stuck with someone you can't cater to. Someone having more enticing items in their window than you and sniping the hero you had your eyes on is very real.

Heroes with money to spend and a villain to face down.

After everyone has sold crap to their sponsored customer the heroes go off to battle the visible villain and match their offence and defence against that of the bad guy. Heroes earn money for surviving ( Which is then used to buy stuff from your shoppe in future rounds ), and earn points for their sponsors by landing a hit and also surviving. After a round of adventure the heroes carelessly lose all their equipment and are once again available to all shopkeepers to squabble over. Or more likely most if not all of them die and a new set of heroes rock up to try their luck.

The game is short and not super taxing with a lovely theme and nice art that works really well and pitched from a viewpoint that is unusual in that it sets you to be the supplier rather than the hero. There is plenty of rich theme and fun to be had with the various items that you can grab from the deck, hitting all the familiar tropes of magic helmets, cat familiars, beserker axes, potions, scrolls and all sorts. It's nice, if you dig that kinda thing. Which I'd guess most RPGers will.

My Shoppe of Wondrous Delights. Nothing at all at the moment.
Might be getting a delivery later guv. Come back then. I Can order it in for you ?
A world before Amazon.

The game also has a somewhat cheeky undercurrent going on, with some items downright crap for heroes - the wineskin, appeals to all heroes, reduces defence by 1, and costs them 10 money. A poor way to prepare a hero. But does make you money. Or perhaps the swindler you can hire as a shop help, who simply fleeces the hero that walks through the door of 15 money with nothing to show for it. Harsh.

All of this can set up a bit of light narrative tacked on top of the game, which with the right crowd will make the game memorably funny. Like Honest Tim the Honest Shopkeeper - enticing heroes into his shop with a wineskin. No use to anyone. Just booze. The lowest of the low. Or at least we thought so until the next turn he simply had a "fake potion" on display. A bottle. Of water. In the window. Or at least you hope that yellow liquid is water. After selling a hapless Cleric some goods, Tim then proceeded in the following round to send out a thug to beat the hero up, leaving him senseless in some dark alley. See that holy cleric over there ? Go duff him up ! Shocking. The very worst kind of shopkeeper. Chaotic Evil. I suggested Tim was actually a criminal with an adventuring equipment fake front and a sideline in protection rackets. Honest Tim. A nice chap. Moral. Avoids social deduction games because it helps you practice lying. Not averse to beating up holy men in dark alleys however. Just beware if he ever opens a shop eh ?

An impressive Magic Lamp on display entices the young
hero into my shop. Who was doing astonishingly well until
the deck of random halved their surivability. BS ! TABLE FLIP !

 If there's one minor fly in the ointment to this easy going Beer and Pretzels kind of game then its the random card that gets dealt on top of a hero before they go fight the villain. These can range from - no effect, to effectively cutting your offence or defence in half ( or both if youre really unlucky ), to boosting both by 50%. There is no way to mitigate this. None. Nada. Pick a card, any card. Oh bad luck, you lose. WHAT ?! Needless to say this is monstrously swingy and can and often does make the difference between success and failure and who gets points regardless of your careful curation of equipment.

It does mean there's always a chance for you, and always a chance a smug player will get smacked down. But it works both ways. And is arguably too much. But also somewhat needed to make things a little uncertain. In any event should you really hate them you can just do away with them, or trim the deck to take the worst swingy offenders out. And in the end the game is not supposed to be an AP perfect information paradise, but more of a fun romp watching ill equipped heroes die at the hands of a Goblin King.

And for those that intensely dislike mean spirited take that kick your neighbour kind of games, Bargain Quest is light on the doing the dirty to everyone else kind of actions. They are in there, but none of them are terribly impactful. Think more an occasional light hearted interference rather than a devastating razing of your neighbour.

Bargain Quest - a great bargain ! *leers at you with a David Dickinson creepy ass smile*

PS. Do you think David Dickinson walks around everywhere like that ? A fanned fistful of 20's in his hand. Here he comes. To the supermarket checkout. Fanned 20's. David points at his fanned 20's and leers. Yes. Very nice David. Well done. No I don't have any bargains for you. Why are all these 20's smeared in orange ?

Glory to Rome

A sample set of the now complete custom personalised version of Glory to Rome !

Random Number Generator

This week the lovely looking Dice Forge made it to table at NoBoG, a simple fantasy themed game centred around how well you can roll a pair of dice.

Dice Forge box, a stylistic copy of Dark Crystal if ever there was one.

Familiar ?

Dice. The original Random Number Generator. In years ancient and dusty, dice were the venerable go to method of driving just about any kind of turn or event in a game. How far can you move ? There's a dice roll for that. Did you secure that lucrative career ? There's a dice roll for that. Did you just stab Fred successfully ? You get the idea. In fact so ubiquitous was the die that the idea of a game having any other kind of controlling mechanism was unimaginable. Gotta have dice innit. Otherwise how do you tell what's happened ? Just pick an outcome ? Ha ha ha ha ha. No. Dice inject that real world chaos, you need them. In every game. If you were being particularly special and bucking the trend just for the sheer hell of it, you might have got a spinner instead ( Game of Life ), or bizarrely, the "Pop-o-matic" a contraption formed from a clear plastic bubble, a bit of deformable metal and a die trapped forever within.

The Pop-O-Matic. If you're of a certain age you can
probably still hear the dink, donk, rattle of this going off.
An amazingly frustrating and unsatisfying way to
roll a die, unable to caress it lovingly to
encourage it not to screw you over or whisper
darkly to it that a terrible fate of the "bad dice bin"
awaited it were it to once again give you a crap result.

Scroll on to today and now dice have *mostly* been relegated to table top war games which still can't imagine a world in which dice don't determine whether you win or lose. Where dice do crop up in modern games they are often firewalled neatly behind Euro mechanisms, or constrained in their ability to rain pure Randomness onto the table, but even so, for some, any mention of dice in a game harks back to those dark old days when everything was a d6 lookup table.

So to Dice Forge. A modern game unashamedly powered by the continual rolling of 2d6. A bold strategy Cotton. Let's see if it pays off. The dice in Dice Forge are a little special. At the beginning of the game the dice have little variation in them - 9 out of 12 of the faces have 1 gold on them, but as the game goes on you have the chance to pop the faces off and replace them with whatever you can afford and fits your current strategy.

Buy new faces for your dice, pop off the old ones and add the
new ones. What new faces you choose and what you replace is up to you.

The game itself is very straight forward - roll dice and gain 1 of four resources, moonstones, firestones, gold or straight up victory points. Gold is used to buy different die faces, whilst fire and moonstones are used to buy cards from the table that have points and or powers associated with them. At the end of 8 or so rounds the game finishes and the person with the most points wins.

Everything that can be purchased in the game is limited - so getting to something first can be crucial, and getting to something powerful twice can be a game winner. Judging what balance of things to put on your dice - do you go for more stones, more money or just straight up points - and what card powers could help or hinder others is the key to winning this game.

A selection of new faces for your dice. Pay your money take your choice(s).
Are you gonna prioritize points, money choice or something funky ? Choose wisely.

The game is fairly short, plays quick with little downtime, and won't leave you agonising about what to do - the choices are straight forward and the complexity low enough that this is more of a kick back and relax kinda game than an Analysis Paralysis of perfect information deal. Building new faces on your dice is an innovative mechanic that is satisfying to do and doubly satisfying to see in the slow changing of probabilities in what you can potentially roll. Although the luck of the dice are the heart of this game, the amount of mitigation and control you feel about what results those dice can roll, and when to transition from setting up your dice to getting on with earning powers and points is very cool.  In fact if you squint there are some familiar tempos going on here - build your dice to get the results you need, then power on to use what you're rolling to garner points and powers, in much the same way that early stages of Euro games can often focus on building your engine or capabilities before you make a concerted effort for end game objectives.

Combined with the relatively short length of game and minimal downtime - all players get to roll their dice and gain stuff regardless of whos turn it is - means this game hits the sweet spot of random but not critically luck fest frustrating.

The main board - effectively a market place of cards on offer

There are however some rough edges to the game. Some choices seem overly powerful and promote a rush to who can get them first ( 6 gold die face I'm looking at you ! ). This combined without any decent kind of catch up mechanism can mean the game can be a bit of a runaway affair under the right circumstances. With all things being equal, a pinch of luck, and all players on the ball however, the number of times this happens should be fairly limited.

It also has to be said that despite you being able to determine exactly what your dice are gonna roll, if you spend all game hitting your best rolls and your opponent rolls nothing but crap, the game is going to be a foregone conclusion. Given the amount of dice being rolled however this is also unlikely to be a serious balance issue with timing of what to buy when arguably being more crucial than minor variations in luck. But with some exploitation of Over powered combinations and a bit more luck than your neighbour you might at times feel like there's little you can do except wait for it all to end ( but as that's not very long, that's not so bad ).

If you're being super objective about the game, then you can also say that the schtick of the buildable dice is pure gimmick. Effectively this is a deck builder but where you shuffle your cards after every deal - you choose what die faces to put on your dice, in the same way you choose what cards to stick in your deck. The game would be far cheaper, easier to handle and also way less visually and tactile impressive if the dice were replaced with a deck of 12 cards. You could also make a case for eliminating a greater range of luck out of the game by making players rotate through their whole deck like your typical deckbuilder, instead of always having a random result from that dice roll / shuffled deck.

Overall the game is gorgeous, fun in a very tactile kinda way, and seems like an all round excellent game for the younger player, whilst also being cool for the oldsters.

* One might argue that in our contemporary Euro dominated design world, the very opposite of die driven zealotry now holds true. Dice ? In a game ? But how can you successfully plan for the future ? Just leave it to luck ? Ha ha ha ha ha. No. Picking outcomes injects that real world planning into a game. You need it. In every game. If you were diving further down the rabbit hole of game design, you might come up with a theory** that stated the nature of early Ameritrash game design with bundles of dice and probabilities represents something deeply cultural about the Anglo Saxon mindset, and that the perfect information non random everything is based on The Precise Plan in Euros represents something deeply cultural about the German mindset ( Germans being the champions of the Euro design style ).

** I didn't say a good theory