Here are some keen links I’ve found while surfing for the last little while. Enjoy!
Glossary of GM Terms [via Treasure Tables]
Key Posts from Treasure Tables
Battlestar Galactica CCG – Official site.
High Stakes Drifter CCG – Official site.
Conan CCG – official site
Serious Games Source – clearing house for games with serious purpose.
Grim Tales RPG system reference document
A Book of Versus RPG – a free RPG
Carcassonne, designed by Klaus-Jurgen Wrede, is a deceptively simple boardgame. Players take turns drawing tiles from a stack, placing tiles adjacent to other tiles on the table, placing tokens on the tile just placed, and scoring points.
Of course, it’s not that simple. For one, all the tiles are marked with some combination of city elements – road, city, field or cloister – and the tile you place must fit with the surrounding tiles. All city walls must close off, roads must join together, etc.
For another, you can only place your scoring token on one part of the tile. For example, if the tile you’ve placed contains a field bisected by a road, you can place your token on either side of the road, or on the road. The catch is that no other token can be on the connected pieces, no matter how far away. There can only be one monk in the cloister, for example, or one bandit patrolling a given length of road.
It’s perfectly legal to join up disconnected pieces of road, city or field, each with their own scoring token. The player with the most tokens on the piece scores the points for that city element. In the case of a tie, both players score full points for the city element.
The catch is that each player only has seven tokens to place, and they don’t get the tokens back until a city element is complete.
There are two scoring stages in Carcassonne. Each turn, players check to see if they’ve complete a city element (cities are complete; cloisters are surrounded by field; roads connect two points or complete a circuit) and then the player with the most tokens scores a certain number of points for each that tile composing the element. The number of points scored per tile depends on the city element: Cities are worth two points a piece, plus possible bonuses; cloisters are worth 9 points; and roads are worth a single point per tile.
Bigger cities and longer roads are better.
Once the element is scored, the player retrieves the scoring tokens and can use them again.
Tokens placed on fields are only scored at the end of the game. Each field that is adjacent to a complete city is worth points. Large fields can be adjacent to many completed city, which increases that player’s score. One field can be worth 4 points for one city, or 16 for four cities. This sounds like a great deal, except that the cities have to be completed in order to for fields to be worth anything, and tokens placed on the field can never be reclaimed, because they’re only scored at the end of the game.
Managing limited resources is the name of the game. Not only to you have to place the tiles in ways that are advantageous to you (and, ideally, not terribly advantageous to your opponents), but you also have to figure out how to score the most points. Do you take the points for a small city and run? Do you build a large city element at the risk of not being able to finish it? Do you place tokens in the fields and try to build a whole bunch of smaller cities…cities which might belong to another player? Do you try to place a piece so that it prevents another player from completing an element?
Even incomplete elements are worth something, but only at the end of the game. Players score points for each tile in an incomplete city element, but only at the rate of one point per tile. Completing the elements is always more lucrative.
I only played Carcassonne once, as part of a five-player group, but it was wicked fun. The game is also supposed to be terrific with only two players, so I’ll have to find a quiet moment and try it out with Dina.
Like the city in the game, the Carcassonne game is a sprawling development. There are numerous expansion rules and tiles to supplement the base game. In fact, the core game comes with the River expansion, but I’d also like to try the Inns & Cathedrals, Traders & Builders, The Count, The Princess & the Dragon and King and Scout. There are also standalone variants of the game: The Castle, Hunters & Gatherers, Ark of the Covenant and The City.
I’m sure more expansions and spinoffs are forthcoming. I’d like to find the best of the expansions and limit my Carcassonne experience to those, rather than succumb to expansion fatigue.
I opened my original Roborally game last night after at least a year, and saw that all the instructions booklets and quick reference cards had been damaged beyond use (a cat was involved, shortly before I closed up the box…it’s a long, smelly story).
Operating on the assumption that information is never lost forever on this fancy Interweb of ours, I Googled “roborally rules” and found copies of most of the information I had lost. I retyped one quick reference card myself, and then decided to host copies here.
If you’re a fan of the original RoboRally, enjoy!
RoboRally Core Rules – The rules booklet for the original game. [via Gaming Corner]
Armed & Dangerous Rules – The rules booklet for the Armed & Dangerous expansion. [via RoboRally.nl]
RoboRally Factory Floor Guide – The definition of all the board elements in the game. [via Gaming Corner]
RoboRally Timing Summary – The timing of all board elements from the basic set to the final expansion. [via me]