HERO: TALES OF THE TOMES

Fantasy melee feels like tome to me

If you’ve ever found yourself tempted by Magic: The Gathering – and in particular its multiplayer ‘Commander’ format – but the idea of tossing bales of cash into a woodchipper puts you off, fret no longer. Hero: Tales of the Tomes steps forth to offer an alternative – a means for you and up to four friends to indulge in a Fantasy brawl with spells, summoned creatures, equipment and special abilities.

Each player picks a hero who comes with their own stats and their own suite of bonus abilities you get when you level up. Levels tick up automatically with each round, providing you with stat boosts on alternate rounds, and bonus abilities on the remainder. The abilities for each character are dual-sided, which creates a nice decision fork where choosing one denies you the other for the game. It also means that, having played as one character, you want to go back and try out the other options to see how they play.

Now your first objection may be – hang on, didn’t Epic already do this? A simple, Magic-lite game where players draft from a single deck, slamming monsters onto the table then attacking, blocking and board-wiping their way to victory? Well, sort of, but Hero – for all its streamlining – offers a touch more crunch, and a more satisfying game arc. Epic does away with things like lands or energy – the cards that serve as ‘currency’ to power your spells or creatures in Magic and Pokemon – which means that you can play big cards from turn one.

In Hero, on the other hand, everyone’s power starts low and creeps up round by round. Your hero can deal more damage, you gain additional abilities, and some cards can’t be played until you hit a certain level. In addition, you’re building a board state via companions and equipment, setting up blockers to protect your hero – once you take damage equal to your life, you’re out

– and to swing at your opponents. This gives the game a satisfying sense of momentum which Epic lacks.

Despite the similarities, it would be unfair to directly compare Hero to Magic, or rather, to expect it to offer the depth and variety of experience you can get from a fully customisable game with a cardpool in the tens of thousands. You’re all drawing from the same deck, and some cards are more suited to your character and creatures than others, so there’s a good deal of luck.

But Hero still offers a little bit of what makes multiplayer battles so fun – that is, table talk, politics and threat assessment. Essentially, as soon as there are more than two players, whenever you attack, you’re presented with a choice: who do I target? That immediately kicks off variously silly, wheedling, furious and desperate negotiations as each opponent tries to convince you that they’re not the threat. Most of the time, players naturally gang up on whoever appears to be doing

best, which acts as a natural buffer against outrageous good or bad luck.

And all of this squeezes into a tiny box (maybe a smidge too tiny – it would have been nice if it had left room for the cards when sleeved). The artwork is unspectacular but appealing, with key stats and abilities presented in an easy-to-understand format. The Lost Heroes expansion offers 3 new hero options, including Briar of Grindlehallow – representing the ‘plank of wood with rusty nails hammered into it’ archetype – and Gwendolyn Vale, who uses group hug effects to make everyone draw cards before dealing damage.

There’s a definite space in the market for Magic-like games where anyone can jump in and you can be done in under an hour. If you want a midweight, self-contained multiplayer Fantasy card brawl experience that you and a group can enjoy without investing loads of money and time on deckbuilding, Hero is it.

We shouldn’t see the effort. That’s the key. Whether it’s Gene Kelly gliding across the floor, defying gravity or Tiago Alcantara impudently switching play, it’s the result of the effort we see, not the effort itself. We don’t need to see the sweat and the setbacks, the self-doubt and despair. That is for the creator and not the consumer because that is the magic. Even though it’s far from it, to us, it seems effortless. See the guts of the machine and a part of the magic is lost.

Paris from Wolfgang Kramer and Michael Kiesling is an immaculately engineered machine, propelled forward by masterfully crafted pieces, expertly put together, a lot of sweat must have gone into honing this game. Honing what we see. We get the result of all of that work though. Even though it’s far from it, to us, it seems effortless.

It is also a game, and this is no surprise from such veteran designers, that harkens back to a tired old credo that is, nevertheless, at the heart of good gaming. It is almost criminally easy to learn but so deep that through a single play of Paris, different game states emerge, different strategies reveal themselves and at the end, as you’re totting up your points you can’t wait to dive back in because the design is so crystal clear that you can see what you’ve done wrong and you’re thirsty to rectify it.

Paris is like MSG drenched crisps or a pint that goes down just right on a summer day, irresistibly moreish.

In Paris, players take on the roles of property moguls seeking to get in on the ground floor of Parisian real estate and build themselves up into being the owners of the really decadent buildings.

The board starts empty with nothing to buy. Players, on their turn, will place a building on the board. Seeding the potential purchasing opportunities.

Players also start with a certain

number of keys in their colour. As an action, after you’ve placed a building on the board, you can place a key onto a bank in one of Paris’s districts, this will yield you the money you need to enter the market but will tie that key to that district. Or you can place on the Arc de Triomphe, you won’t get any money for this but when you want to buy a building subsequently, you can go to any district on the board.

Your other option is to buy. All buildings have a numerical value and are placed in the corresponding space. To buy is simple, pay the value of the building and put your key on it. Later you can upgrade to higher value buildings by paying the difference between the two.

End game scoring in districts is a form of area control, with the player holding the higher value in buildings getting the majority of the points. Act ostentatiously though, and skip the lower value buildings and you’ll be skipping over the heart of the game – the bonus track.

In most games bonuses are just that, a petit bon-bon that puts a glaze on success or ameliorates failure but in this game they are the engine that whisks you through to the end.

You can go as far forward as you want on the bonus track but you can never go back and, of course, the bonuses get more juicy the further along you

go. They include things like resources or money, but later on its huge scoring opportunities or extra keys which are incredibly valuable. Which poses the dilemma. Do I creep along the bonus track and hoover everything up but risk that juicy scoring tile being snaffled by someone else or do I just leap forward and leave all that money on the table? Also these tiles can mould your game and dictate your moves. They are a strategy guide built into the mechanisms of the game.

What is so astonishing though is how well these bonuses have been designed in relation to one another. So much work has been done for you here. The bonuses bounce off each other, ricochet across the board and knock your scoring marker up the track and the result of this is that you feel super clever.

There are zero rough edges in this game. It is carpentry of the first order. This is a game that would fit perfectly in the Sun King’s palace next to all of the Boulle Work. Also, I still can’t get away from the fact that, for all of the depth and complexity here there are only four pages of rules.

Every time I’ve played this game I’ve got to the end feeling exhilarated and satisfied. Paris is a game that gives you the intellectual stimulation of a discussion in a coffee house on the Rive Droite and all of the visceral excitement of a night on the Rive Gauche.

This is a game of two top tier designers doing what they do best, doing all of the work and only showing us the result and even though it’s far from it, to us, it seems effortless.

WE SAY

❚

This game is the quintessence of expert euro design. Criminally easy to pick up but so difficult to be good at. This is a game that reminds you what board games can do if they’re done right.

Sniper Elite, the hit video game of sneaking and shooting baddies has landed on our tabletops finally, and it’s like it should have always been with us. It’s got none of the fat that you usually get in video game to board game translations. Instead of the bloat that comes with nods to fans and weird capitulations the main thing that’s been offered to fans here is… a really good game.

One player takes the role of the sniper and the other takes the role of the ‘defenders’. The defenders have three squads of three on the map of the submarine dock or infrastructure, and the sniper has… nothing, on the board anyway. This is a hidden movement game, so instead the sniper player draws their moves on a smaller wipe clean representation of the battlefield, only placing their sniper figure on the board once they’ve been spotted, or done something noisy. There’s a tiny bit of the honour system to this – and we liked to draw our shots, misses and so on, as one of the most satisfying parts of this surprisingly quick game is the debrief afterwards.

The sniper can take shots at the defenders, drawing a number of tokens from the bag to see if their shot reaches (you need a number of hit tokens equal to the number of spaces, including the one the target is on). Draw two noise tokens, or five non-shot tokens, and you’ve either misfired or alerted the defenders to your position. The sniper can improve their bag through kills, especially on officers – and because the sniper always decides how many tokens to draw the risk and reward is in their own hands.

If the sniper runs past the guards that player has to point out which guards were dashed past – as if he’s tapping them on the shoulder. This is amusing for the sniper player and infuriating for the defender, for a bit anyway – there is payback.

As the sniper, the first part of the game – before the first reveal – makes you feel like the Predator hunting down Arnie and co. You can drop soldiers easily, or even set mines for them to trip on – while you’re nearly on the other side of the map. Once your position is given away however, the defenders have a good chance of being able to pen you in – only smart dodges and shots will get you out of this. As the defender this feeling is reversed – you’re powerless at the start and have all the cards in your 30-60m

WE SAY

16+

hand after the first reveal. Eventually you feel inevitable.

The rules are light and impossibly smart – line of sight works box to box, not model to model, further heightening the hidden danger the sniper presents. The defender has a lot of options, taking two actions per squad per turn, and only needs to get the sniper twice to win. It’s hard to overstate what a breeze it is to learn and play. You will want to pick up the expansion for the game for the additional maps – although the two included have a lot going on in them. And the solo mode by Dávid Turczi uses a push your luck mechanic to give you a similar thrill to the head to head game. Which is to say, while this is an enjoyable three on one game, the best player count is one on one.

If you want to see the future of hidden movement games in the best possible package, this is it.

CHRISTOPHER JOHN EGGETT

❚

A perfectly balanced game of deadly hide and seek brings the hidden movement genre right up to date. Impossibly smart, and thoroughly immersive. And someone said they even made a video game of it…