Check it out if you want: About Game Master Dice

If you’re not really into painting them yourself, or you want to supplement your existing collection, or you just want some quick, ready-to-play figurines, you may want to check these out and pick up a few of them.

Take a look at them here: http://www.gmdice.com/miniatures?product_line=106

Here are just a few of them, so you can get an idea of what they look like:

A very exciting addition for us is the Reaper Dark Heaven Legends and Warlord miniature figurine lines.  Ever since I bought Game Master Dice, I’ve wanted to add RPG miniatures to our lineup, because I think they’re really cool.  We’re now carrying the top 50 best-selling miniatures from both of those lines.  It’s only been a couple of days so far, and customers are already buying them, which is just lovely.

We’ve also added the Chessex Signature dice sets product line, which includes the 26 best-selling dice sets that Chessex is known for.  We’re selling these at a significant discount from their suggested retail price, in order to be competitive and hit the ground running.  Check them out for yourself!  This is the first time we’ve carried any Chessex products in our store, and we’re looking forward to picking up more of them if these sell well.

In anticipation for Valentine’s Day, we’ve also added some Sweetheart Dice.  These dice are red with white hearts or white with red hearts, and are 19mm in size, which is pretty big for dice!

Chessex Scarab Scarlet + Gold RPG Dice Set

Kneeling Assassin, from the Dark Heaven Legends line by Reaper Miniatures

Red Sweetheart Dice with White Hearts

Tags

Visitors to Game Master Dice can now mark products with their own tags.  Do you think a dice looks particularly diabolical?  You could add a diabolical tag to it.  It’s fun!  I’ve tagged a few of the products myself already.

Layered Navigation

Layered Navigation Example - Red 6 Sided Dice

With our new Layered Navigation feature, you can filter the products you see like never before.  You can choose to filter your results by category (how many sides the dice have), price, color, brand, size, style, and material.  This will make shopping very convenient, especially if you’re after a specific kind of dice.

Friendly Emails

All the emails our shopping cart sends out have been overhauled to be prettier and more user friendly.

Wishlist

If you register a free account with us, you can now add products to your wishlist and share it with others.

Stock Notifications

One of the most common email requests we get are asking when a particular item will be back in stock.  With our new website, if a product is out of stock you can just click a link on the product page to be notified automatically when the item is up for sale again.

Conclusion

The new site went live yesterday, and we’ve already started receiving orders in it.  I hope you like it and, more importantly, I hope it’s easier to use and a better experience for you.  If you have any questions or comments, please don’t hesitate to speak up.

Small World: Proving that it's a world of slaughter, after all

I played Small World
for the first time not long ago, and was very impressed by it.  It was simple, attractive, and fun.

Small World is a territorial conquest game, vaguely resembling Risk or Axis and Allies.  The board is seperated into territories, each of which is a different kind of terrain: mountain, farmland, hills, forest, or swamp.  Some territories also have bonuses or indiginous people who need to be expelled before you can take it over for yourself.

Random pairs of races and attributes are generated, such as “bivouacking humans,” “stout giants,” or “pillaging ratmen.”  There are five such pairs on the table at any time available for the choosing.  Each player picks a race/attribute combination at the beginning of the game, and can change later on if he puts his existing race into “decline.”

The game’s main random element is the combination of races and powers.  This combination also specifies how many army pieces the player is able to use.  Each turn, the player can put those armies on the map during the conquest phase.  It costs two armies to conquer an unoccupied territory, or the number of occupants plus one to overtake a territory already controlled by someone else.  If you lose a territory to conquest, you keep any armies that were on it less one, and so in time the number of your forces will diminish.  Thus, eventually you will want to change up and choose a different race.  The game lasts a finite ten turns, however, so you have to be judicious about putting a race into decline.

On the last territorial conquest attempt of your turn, you can choose to roll a die.  The result will be added to the number of troops you’re committing for the success determination.  The die in this game is interesting.  Its faces contain alternately blank, 1, 2, or 3 points.  It reminded me of Fudge dice, each face of which is either a plus, a minus, or blank.

The artwork is magnificent.  It’s the most beautiful board game I’ve ever played.  The theme and the color really come alive in this game.

The session I played was only two players, and had a bit of a runaway leader problem.  I’m sure this would be alleviated if multiple players had participated, because weaker players would have been more aggressive towards the one with hegemony.  The game scales well; it even has alternate boards depending on how big the game is.

Altogether, I really enjoyed the game and am looking forward to playing it again in the future.

Red November, a cooperative crisis game on a gnomish submarine

I recently had the opportunity to try out two new board games: Red November by Fantasy Flight Games and Small World by Days of Wonder.  I’ll be discussing Red November in this post and Small World in the future.

Red November is a cooperative stress/crisis game, where players take on the personas of maritime gnomes on a submarine, literally running around and putting out fires.  If you can survive for 60 “minutes” without getting killed by a kracken, asphixiating to death, drowning, burning in a fire, or getting crushed by pressure, you win.

The submarine is divided into 10 cells, some of which have special functions, such as being the supply room or the reactor control room.  While in a room, a player gnome can undergo a number of possible actions, such as attempting to fix a problem, stocking up on supplies, drinking grog, or trading inventory tiles with other nearby players.

The most intersting mechanic to the game is how actions are undertaken.  When you want to enact an activity, you can apply any inventory tiles in your posession for a fixed bonus, such as crowbars or fire extinguishers, and then you decide how many “minutes” you want to spend attempting the activity.  Then, you roll a d10 and if your result is less than or equal to the amount of effort you spent, you succeed.  This mechanic provides an interesting risk calculation because every 5 “minutes” or so, you have to draw an event card, most of which are bad, such as fires breaking out or rooms flooding.

Overall it was a pretty fun game to play, and I’m satisfied with the mechanics, but there were a few things that annoyed me about the materials.

First of all, the iconic symbols for asphixiation, pressure, and the reactor didn’t match between the board, the inventory tiles, and the event cards.  It would help if they were consistent so you can identify them easily.  Also, the oxygen/asphixiation icon looked like a pressure gague, which was confusing because the pressure gague was a gear.  A better choice would have been an oxygen tank for the oxygen track and a pressure gague for the pressure track.  The reactor icon should have been the nuclear symbol instead of a lightning bolt.

Second, the d10 that was provided with the game seemed cheap.  Most 10-sided dice will have an underline or a period after the numerals 6 and 9 to indicate their orientation, but this one didn’t.  I’m sure this is just nitpicking, but I run a dice store, so I think I have the right to be picky about board game dice.

The third thing that bothered me were the timer tokens.  Each time you move or take an action, you have to move your colored token forward, and stack it on other tokens if they share the same “minute”.  The tokens themselves were too small and lightweight to manipulate easy, and this is coming from someone with pretty nimble fingers.  By the end of the game, we were just putting the tokens adjacent to each other on the table instead of stacking them because they just didn’t handle well.

Finally, the theme seemed a little weak.  The fact that the sailors were gnomes instead of, say, Russians, wasn’t exploited at all.  It was like a throwaway reference which didn’t affect the gameplay in any way.  Some people may like the gnomes because they are a little cartoonish, which helps relieve some of the stress of the game, but I would have liked a serious and straightforward approach just as well.

Don't be fooled by the clever artwork: Piece o' Cake is actually about pies.

Piece o’ Cake by Rio Grande Games is named wrong.  It should actually be called “Piece o’ Pie” or “Pie in the Sky” or something like that, because the artwork is clearly indicitive of pies and not cakes.  I’m getting a little ahead of myself here, though–let me start from the beginning. 

Piece o’ Cake is a very simple game.  There are 57 pie slices, which compose 5 pies of 11 pieces each, with two pieces left out of play.  The game is five turns long, one pie per turn.  The object of the game is to get as many points as possible. 

Each turn, one player divides the pie into a number of segments, and the other players then get to choose which segments to take.  The pie comprises several different random slices, such as strawberry, pecan, chocolate satin, apricot, and more.  Players try to maximize their points by hoarding matching pieces.  You only get credit for a collection of slices if you have more of that kind than anyone else.  It can get interesting when you have mutliple players all trying to collect the same kind of pie. 

You can also choose to eat the slice right away instead of saving it for later.  If you do so, you get fewer points for that slice than what you would get if you won the collection, but the points you get for eating it are guaranteed. 

The game mechanics are very similar to the card game Coloretto.  This should come as no surprise, since both games are published by Rio Grande.  In Coloretto, you try to collect more of a set of colors than the other players.  If you like Piece o’ Cake, you might want to look into Coloretto too. 

Piece o’ Cake is a very simple game which can be played quickly.  I’d recommend it for very casual gamers or children, or as an appetizer for a heavier, more complex board game to serve as the main course.

The box for Betrayal at House on the Hill, Second Edition

The University of Utah had a board gaming event on Saturday, which I went to with a few friends.  There were 28 total players in attendance, comprising 26 men and 2 women.  (This turnout seems typical.  Why is it that there are so few women in the hobby?)

It was a fun event and I got to play a couple of new games I hadn’t ever played before: Betrayal at House on the Hill, and Piece o Cake.  In this post, I’ll be writing about my experience playing Betrayal at House on the Hill.

Betrayal at House on the Hill is one of the best board games I’ve ever played.  Its two strongest suits are its heavy theme and the plot twist which occurs when “the haunting” begins.

Betrayal at House on the Hill is a complex game, with a lot of rules.  Each player takes one of twelve predefined characters who are exploring a mysterious and spooky mansion.  Each character has four attributes, including Speed, Might, Knowledge, and Sanity.  When a player takes damage, he moves a slider on his character token down.  Likewise, if he gets a boost, he moves it up.  This mechanic reminded me of the game HeroClix, because the attributes change on a scale instead of just adding or subtracting by one each time.  Players also have items which can affect their statistics or can be used for special effects in the game.

Players can move a number of squares equal to their current speed value.  The house starts out with just five squares discovered, and players explore the house by moving into undiscovered space and drawing a tile at random from the deck.  I thought this was a great way to keep the game dynamic and replayable.  One thing that always bothered me about the game Clue is that the board was so static, so this was a refreshing change.

Some room tiles have symbols on them, which indicate that the player should draw a card.  The three kinds of cards are Events, Omens, and Items.  If you get one of these on your turn, you have to end your turn even if you have movement speed left over.  Every time you get an omen card, you have to roll 8 dice to see whether the haunting begins.  The more omen cards have been drawn, the higher the probability of triggering the haunt.

The haunt is a prewritten scenario which is picked at random based on the omen card drawn and the room it was drawn from.  Usually, when the haunting begins, one of the players becomes the traitor and he has to compete against the other players for victory.  When the haunting occurs, the game really comes alive.

I participated in two games of Betrayal at House on the Hill at Saturday’s event, the first with six players and the second with four.  In the first scenario, the house had been carried away by a giant bird and we had only three parachutes among us.  So, we had to fight to the death to see who would end up with them and escape.  (I was one of the lucky ones.)  The second scenario involved the animation of Frankenstein’s monster, who ended up killing everyone quite easily.  (I was not so lucky that time.)

The game comes with eight six-sided dice, each of which has two sides each of nothing, one pip, or two pips.  So, it’s effectively a d3 dice with a range of 0-2 and a 33% chance of any one result.  The dice are used to determine whether the haunting occurs when an omen card is drawn, and also frequently with other cards to determine what happens, and in combat or when trying to get past a trap.

It’s the perfect game for a Halloween party.  In fact, I think we will be playing it at my annual Halloween party this year.  I can’t wait to play it again.