Guardians Chronicles

  This is a miniatures "dungeon crawl" style game with a super hero theme.  One player plays the villain, and up to four others play the heroes.

  The heroes are the Liberty Patrol, the main villain is Dr. Skarov, a Dr. Doom type guy with hi tech and endless robots.


   The rule book is an absolute mess, so thank god for fan rewrites.     I have been dying to play this game for a while.

The heroes have their own deck of cards, the pick one or two cards to play, and where they place them gives them a power or a boost, or both.   

The villain plays either event cards or boosts to himself, his lieutenants or his endless robot minions.

Then one hero goes, then the villain, then a hero, then the villain etc...

Then at  the end, the villain gets to activate one of the traps on the board.  Everyone discards their cards and it starts over.

When a hero takes three  would cards, they are knocked out and out of the game.

The villain can only win if he knocks out all the heroes.  The heroes win if they stop the villain's plans and capture the villain.  Its a stalemate if they stop his plans but the villain escapes.

So the first time I played,  the heroes were crushing me.   I finally figured out how everything worked, and proceeded to whoop ass.

They deactivated my nukes, so no WW3, so boo hoo there, but then I KOed all the heroes, so Dr. Skarov escaped.

Then you get to build a front page of the Guardian Chronicles newspaper.  This is based on the events of the game.  Its a fun neat feature.

The game is a beast to figure out, and we are a bit rusty with the rules, but I think next play is going to go great.

I would give it a B.



Here is the board at the beginning.





This is the front page of the paper at the end of the game. I love this part of the game. Its goofy fun.

Yes.  Complete with Ham Action.

John wrote on Dec 29^th, 2016 at 6:15pm:

Sadly, I don't think it's going to happen:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/toyvaultinc/abaddon-shattered-command-a-tab...

Cthulhu Pandemic is the best version!

Jimmy and I decided tonight to run a semi campaign game of Battlelore.  He is the asshole Chaos fuckers, while I am the noble Daqan good guys.

While he beat me tonight by two points,  it  was neck and neck.  I didn't use the new units to the best of their abilities, but you learn. 

So the Mustering of the Militia at the Cursed Glen, as the battle will be known as from hear on out, was lost too Chaos.

We will keep the story going until one person loses by elimination.  Which is, they lose all their units.   


THEN


The loser takes the third faction,  the UNDEAD and we battle once again.  Then we will continue the story until one is eliminated.


Should be fun.

Did you tell her of the Slaughtering of the Battlemages?

Warrior Knights is easily one of my new favorites.  It's actually an older game, first edition is from 1985 ! 

The new Fantasy Flight edition is the one I have. It's sadly out of print and will cost over a hundred bucks on eBay. And the expansion easily another hundred.


It's been called medieval Twilight Imperium for a reason. And I agree. It's a epic game of war, politics, science, religion and economics.

The king is dead and his barons are squabbling over the throne. Moving is slow, war is iffy and the nation is in chaos.

You have to take cities by force; while staying faithful to the church, while manipulating the assembly to pass legislation benifitcial to you ( or at least get bribes for votes ).  You walk a tightrope, balancing the size of the armies with your income. Do you risk a fight with a neighboring baron? Do you let him gather influence? So much to plan.


And the best part? It's easy to learn and teach!

Every player gets action cards. You pick two cards to play and we all put them in a pile with two neutral actions ( three if we use the expansion ) shuffle the deck and then do this two more times. So each round each player has six actions, but they are never sure exactly when their actions will happen.

Each card tells you what you can do.  It's that easy.


But it's not that easy....
Each card after its played goes to one of three piles; economics which triggers taxes when full, politics, which triggers elections, and military which triggers mustering.


So each action can have two consequences. To you want to do a military action even though it might trigger mustering, which means not only paying your troops but hiring more for EVERYONE!

You put ten points per player in a pool and at the end of each round you dole out points based on cards and cities controlled. When the points are gone it's the last round . Most points win.


So many sub games on the main game.   Do you want to focus on religion and be th head of the church? If so you can take or give divine favors. You can punish the wicked or threaten to, unless they redeem themselves with a small contribution..

Do you focus on politics and vote yourself a nice wine concession with pays out every turn? Do you take a nice office that just happens to gov you a nice garrison?

Or with the expansion to you focus on science and build siege engines or better horseshoes?


So much to do, and once everyone gets a hang of it, it moves quick.



The expansion gives a long game variation where when the game would end a king is crowned, the person who would normally win and is given armies and is nigh unbeatable. But the game goes on till someone gets 16 points.  So unless you are the king, you best team up with the other players to usurp the newly minted monarch.


I could easily see myself playing this game for years. It has everything I want, epic storytelling, variety, many different moving parts all while using relatively few, intuitive rules. Such a great game.