My Father's Work - Perfect for Halloween

Board Games – Do you love Frankenstein? Are you a Victorian Horror aficionado? Is being a mad scientist interesting to you? If so you probably want to check of My Father’s Work.

This game from Renegade Studios seems really interesting:
The walls were lined with iron shelves, each metal slat overfilled with glass jars containing formaldehyde and grotesque curiosities within. Pristine brass tools and refined metals of a quality I had never before laid eyes upon were strewn across sturdy slabs of rock and wood, their edges sharp with use. However, my eyes were soon drawn to a sturdy writing desk, its mahogany eaves inlaid with thin strips of copper, the center of which contained a well-worn leather-bound book. My father's journal — passed down to me and representing years of knowledge and countless experiments. And inside that weathered tome, atop the pearly parchment oxidized yellow at its frayed edges, were the deliberate quill marks of a crazed genius outlining the ambitious project he could never complete in one lifetime — his masterwork.

Without realizing it, my hands were shaking as I clutched the book to my chest. At once, I felt an ownership and anxiety for the scientific sketches scrawled so eloquently on those frayed sheets. It was at that moment that I began my obsession: I would restore this laboratory to its former brilliance and dedicate my life to completing my father's work!

In My Father's Work, players are competing mad scientists entrusted with a page from their father's journal and a large estate in which to perform their devious experiments. Players earn points by completing experiments, aiding the town in its endeavors, upgrading their macabre estates, and hopefully completing their father's masterwork.

But they have to balance study and active experimentation because at the end of each generation, all of their experiments and resources are lost to time until their child begins again with only the "Journaled Knowledge and Estate" they have willed to them — and since the game is played over the course of three generations, it is inevitable that the players will rouse the townsfolk to form angry mobs or spiral into insanity from the ethically dubious works they have created. The player with the most points at the end of three generations wins and becomes the most revered, feared, ingenious scientist the world has ever known!

description from the publisher

MERCs-like Halloween

MERCS? – Our annual Halloween zombie fest happened again this year. Ben took the iniative to create a Left 4 Dead variation using the Zombie rules I came up with a while back and generic survivors. Basically the table was set up as a 3'x6' board covered with terrain. The survivors have to run across the board to grab and objective and then run back to trigger the escape button. Easy right?

To start the survivors have no weapons. Throughout the board are random tokens that allow you to either heal or draw an item card. This is how your character levels up during the game. Essentially going from a sneak-theif to a bad ass zombie killer. The rules set is based on MERCS with movement cards and firing numbers. It worked really well and fit the bill for what we were trying to do.

Zombies are loosely controlled by a GM spawing a random number each turn and moving toward what ever they can see. If the survivors fire a gun or kill something it generates noise which overrides the LOS movement.

Once the survivors reach a set point on the board an event triggers which essentially changed the rules of the game. The instance we had was a flash flood. Which reduced movement and increased firing numbers.

The surviors died several times while moving across the board and had to be respawned by a teamate to continue the game. We made it to the objective and then had to call the game because the store was closing.

Overall it was really fun, in our post game parking lot discussion we had some tweaks we would make to the game to make it move a little faster and smoother.

• Reduce the size of the map – 6' is really far to cross when your model moves and average of 6" per turn. I think with a 4' map we'd be golden and have a shot.

• Give survivors a basic weapon – Having to run a grab items was fun, but it seriously slowed down the first part of the game and forced the survivors to make some "bad" moves.

•  Allow models to "fire and move" or "melee and move"– some spots where we had to choose to kill a zombie or run made it impossible to get away. Thematic for sure but it's more fun for players to be able to smash skulls then to run and hide.

Happy Halloween

Short post today but I wanted to share the nifty costume my wife made me. My daughter has become infatuated with goggles and decided to go as a Mad Scientist. 

I also found two pretty cool proxies for the Halloween Encounters.