SR Board Game Night - Chaos in the Old World

[Merc]

Mentioned this to Drac last night, I am suggesting a board game for next week: Chaos in the Old World.

It requires 3-4 players. If more than that show interest, we can hopefully split into two groups.

Date and time isn't set, but as an initial suggestion, I'll say Saturday 4/26 at 5:00pm PST (8:00pm EST).

If you prefer some other time and are interested in the game, please do post and say your prefered time! I'd obviously prefer to schedule when people are able to play.

The game typically takes 1-1.5 hours, but as most people would be new to the game, you might consider the addition of an hour to that? Consider that for your availability.

***

So what is Chaos in the Old World? Quickest explanation is that it's a war game/area control, ala Risk.

The main difference starts with the theme: We are each playing as one of the four Chaos Gods of the Warhammer setting (specifically in this case, it'll be Warhammer Fantasy). Chaos Gods are not nice beings.

Map of the Old World: ShowHide

We play in the Old World, which consists of nine regions, and with our available power each round, we attempt to dominate and/or corrupt those regions with our minions (cultists, warriors and greater daemons), as well as meet goals that increase our godly powers and threat. On top of that, we are also just generally screwing with each others' plans, and using our chaos powers to manipulate the board and each other's potential actions.

Each of the four gods plays differently, attempting to follow their theme of the Warhammer universes. For example, Khorne's chaos cards and threat advancements all involve killing, battle, and combat power. Slaanesh uses manipulation of others' pawns and generally has flexible abilities. Nurgle just tries to corrupt faster through cheap minions. Tzeentch uses cheap and plentiful chaos powers to react to what others are doing and planning around them.

There are two ways to win:
1. Advance your threat level to its maximum.
2a. Reach 50+ victory points (typically by dominating or corrupting regions).
2b. Have the most victory points when five regions are corrupted into ruination.

If seven rounds pass without one of those victory conditions being met, then we all lose, and the denizens of the Old World are the winners, simply by means of surviving our war.

***

Where would we play?

There are two virtual board games that have modules for Chaos in the Old World: Zun Tzu and VASSAL.

I briefly tried both of them, and I'd say I'm partial to the Zun Tzu set-up for this game. However,it's supposedly Windows only and requires a player to serve as host.

If people chime in with interest but note that they can't use Zun Tzu, then we can switch to VASSAL.

I'll post more details if there's obvious interest. Meantime, here's a link to the rulebook.

[Dracos]

Saturday works for me.  I'm game. :)

[Anastasia]

Next Saturday? Tentative maybe. Poke me if I haven't updated by mid-week.

[DY]

I should be able to make it to this, if anything changes I'll let you know.

[Dracos]

hmrgh.  ah my schedulin'.  Certain plans got messed up this saturday, so I proposed they get rescheduled for the coming one, forgetting about this.  The meat-eating goal will lure me out to not be here at that time.  Sadness.

Hope the rest have fun.  Up for an earlier run on saturday (possibly morning?) or evenings most of the week (though doing some podcast thing one evening.  Fuu, when did I get busy?  Weird stuff.  Need to go back to gaming hermit of time).  If I can't make it, hope the others have a blast regardless.

[Rezantis]

I'd actually love to try this except I'm away next weekend.  ;-;

That said I'd be totally interested in a board game around that duration in general, so do let me know if you guys tee something up!

[Dracos]

We try to every week or three.  Depending on how much I suck at scheduling :P

[Merc]

Reminder for people, SR board game night in approximately 45 hours.

DY and Dune are tentative yes, Drac goofed plans, and Rez can't make it this week. Anybody else?

I'll post rules summary tomorrow, though interested people are always welcome to read the rules linked in first post.

[Merc]

Okay, 'quick' tutorial. First on the program, then the game.

You can download program here: http://www.zuntzu.com/download/setup.exe

If you want to play around with the game, read card text or such, the game module can be downloaded here: http://www.mediafire.com/download/kj0tc26i6l8srah/Chaos+in+the+Old+World.ztb

Commands are pretty simple...

• Left mouse, Hold+Drag: Pan camera, or Drag token.
• Right mouse, Hold+Drag: Zoom in/out.
• Mouse Wheel: Rotate tokens. (Note: this will only matter for the threat dials)
• Left mouse, Double Click: Roll dice (click on dice), or Inspect stack (click on stack of counters)
• Right mouse, Double Click: Flip cards.
• Ctrl+Z / Ctrl+Y: Undo / Re-do, respectively.
• Spacebar: Drag card or token into the "Hand" menu bar. (more on this later)

Here's a screenshot of the module for the game open in Zun Tzu:

"Zun Tzu": ShowHide

#1 marked there is the dice pool. It only gets used during the combat phase of the game. If you want to roll dice, if you double click on the first die, only one die will roll. If you double click on the last die, all five will roll.

#2 shows the threat dials. The only thing you'll want to do around there is rotate the dials through the mouse wheel, if you get a threat dial advancement. Reminder, advancing yours from Start to "<Character> Victory!" is one of the ways to win.

#3 shows the victory track, it goes up to 54, though you only need 50 to win (or be the highest on it if five regions are ruined).

#4 shows the game chits, the Old World Tokens. These are tokens that get distributed onto the board regions as a game round might dictate. Their effects are summarized on the player aids (Item #7).

#5 shows the Old World deck. We'll randomize these at the start of the game and only put seven into play. Generally one shows up per round, if these run out, we all lose.

#6 shows the Ruination deck. There are five cards of these, and they show points earned by ruining a region from corruption. As each region gets corrupted, the next card gets revealed.

#7 shows a Player Aid, as mentioned above. It shows how your draw mechanic works (it's always just draw 2 chaos cards unless you're Tzeetch), what you need to do to advance your threat dial, round sequence summary, and world token summary. It also has your power bar, which starts at 6-7, and gets used up by playing minions or chaos cards. Finally, it shows the Cost/Damage/Health of each minion type.

#8 shows your corruption tokens. These come out either through cultists or chaos card effects, and are used to drive regions into ruination.

#9 shows your miniatures, with your greater daemon on the left, the warriors on the center, and the cultists on the right.

#10 shows the chaos card deck. You'll be drawing these into your hand by using the spacebar key (or dragging them with the left mouse). The hand menu bar is typically hidden, and you can open it by clicking on the hand icon on the bottom right of the program (third from the right). If you want to leave it open, you can also click on the pin icon afterwards, otherwise it auto-closes each time you move away from the menu. Once you've dragged cards into your hand, the player icon under the dice bar will show a hand symbol and list how many cards/tokens you have in your hand.

***

Last thing to note: Pressing Esc will open the menu (or clicking on the upside down arrow on the top-right). Under Settings > Player, you can set your nickname.

[Merc]

Game tutorial:

Game consists of seven rounds. As stated previously, the ways to win are:
1. Advance your threat level to its maximum.
2a. Reach 50+ victory points (typically by dominating or corrupting regions).
2b. Have the most victory points when five regions are corrupted into ruination.

Each round will have six phases.

***
Initial Set-up:

Spoiler: ShowHide

• Create the Old World deck by shuffling cards, then drawing seven cards and placing them on the game board.
• Seed each of the nine regions with one game chit (randomly selected from two noble tokens, three warpstone, and four peasants).
• Everybody shuffles their cards, then draws three chaos cards into their hands. Cards are shuffled by double clicking on the card stack, which will open the Stack Inspector, then click on the middle icon on the top left to shuffle the cards. Close the stack inspector, then press spacebar over the top three cards to draw into your hand.
  
  Remember that you're going to unhide the hand menu bar by clicking on the hand icon on the bottom right. Also, you'll want to double click with the right mouse button to reveal your cards (once they're in your hand, of course).

Phase 1: Old World Phase

Spoiler: ShowHide

Reveal a card from the old world deck. If a task needs to be done, unless stated otherwise, the player with the Lowest Threat value will be responsible for carrying it out.

Phase 2: Draw Phase

Spoiler: ShowHide

If you're not playing Tzeetch, draw two chaos cards. There's no hand limit.

If you're playing Tzeetch, you may discard one card, then draw up to five cards.
Reveal a card from the old world deck. If a task needs to be done, unless stated otherwise, the player with the Lowest Threat value will be responsible for carrying it out.

Phase 3: Summoning Phase

Spoiler: ShowHide

This is where most of the game will be spent. Starting with Khorne, then moving to the right (Nurgle > Tzeetch > Slaanesh), each player takes one of two actions:
1. He can summon a minion.
2. He may play a chaos card.

If the action has a power cost associated with it, you pay that first. When your power is down to zero, you may no longer take any actions, not even playing chaos cards with cost of 0. If you pass, your power automatically goes down to zero. The phase ends once everyone's power is down to zero.

Summon Minion
When summoning a minion, you may select -any- of your minions (including one already on the board), and place him on a legal board region, after paying the summon cost.

If you have no minions on the board (or if you're moving your only minion on the board), you can summon in any region. Otherwise, you must summon in a region where you either have another minion, or one adjacent to that region.

Play Chaos Card
You may play a chaos card anywhere on the map, even a region where you have no minions. However, each region only has two spots where chaos cards can be placed and still affect that region.

Chaos cards take effect immediately after being played, unless they state that they take effect at some later point in the round.

Also note that some chaos cards have a symbol on the top right corner, next to the cost. These are magic symbols (which Tzeetch can take advantage of for meeting his dial threat advancement).

Phase 4: Battle Phase

Spoiler: ShowHide

Going in region order (starting at Norsca, then following the arrows between regions), everyone entitled to an attack rolls dice.

Battles happen simultaneously, but since Zun Tzu is on a shared screen, and there's only 5 dice, we'll have to take turns rolling them.

A roll of 4-6 will hit. A roll of 6 will also explode/crit, and allow you to roll an extra die. After you've tallied up the number of successful hits, you can assign them to enemy targets.

Even if you kill a target, note that they still (may) roll against you, as combat is simultaneous. Will probably want to rotate a target sideways, to show it's going to die when the phase ends, but remind the player to roll for it still.

Phase 5: Corruption Phase

Spoiler: ShowHide

This phase is the scoring phase, and has two parts, each going in region order. The second part does not resolve until the first part ends.

Domination
The first part is domination, which scores you points for exceeding the resistance value of a region, which is the number in the red circle next to a region's name.

Add the cost of your chaos cards in the region and the number of minions in that region (NOTE Important, it is the NUMBER of minions, not the COST), and if this number exceeds the resistance value as well as being the highest domination score (in case someone else exceeds it), you score a number of points equal to the conquest value of the region.

Typically, the conquest value is equal to the resistance value. Some tokens/cards can increase or decrease either without affecting the other.

Ties means nobody dominates a region.

Corruption
At each region where you have a cultist, drop a corruption token. Some cards may allow you to drop corruption tokens for some other reasons, but cultists are typically it.

If the number of corruption tokens in a region is greater than 12, remove the topmost Ruination card and place it over that region. If you placed at least one corruption token in the region in that turn, you immediately get 3-5 bonus points, depending on how many regions have been corrupted so far.

Phase 6: End Phase

Spoiler: ShowHide

As the player aid says, in order you:
1. Remove chaos cards from board.
2. Resolve hero tokens.
3. Score ruined regions.
4. Advance threat dial; If you met your dial advancement condition multiple times, then compare against other players to see if anybody got more dial advancement counters. If someone has a majority, they get two advancements instead of one. If you didn't meet it, then obviously you get zero.
5. Check for game end conditions.

Note that if the game ended in multiple ways, they resolve in the order listed: Someone finishes their threat dial, someone got 50 points, five regions ruined (highest victory point total wins even if <50), and no more Old World cards.

[Merc]

Game in a couple of hours, at 5pm PST/8 pm EST. If you haven't already, download Zun Tzu if you're planning on playing or watching.

I'm hanging out in #SR-boardgames, we can use that to chat (or we can use the program itself, up to everyone else)

[Anastasia]

Having some technical issues with the client, just a heads up.

[Merc]

We ended early, Dune had to leave for other stuff, but we played through 3 rounds of the game. Was just DY, Dune and myself.

Dune was having some technical issues with Zun Tzu, but otherwise it seemed like it worked pretty well as a virtual tabletop. One complaint is that text chat vanishes after a few seconds. I'm going to post recommending that they add a log tab to support the chat. We'll see if anything happens. I'd post Dune's problems, but I have no idea how to frame it so that developer could trigger it himself and fix it.

I will probably suggest a second try for Dixit next week. We didn't have much luck last time it was suggested, but hopefully it'll work out this coming week. I'll make a new thread for that.