Labyrinth

 Another change of subject today!

Through dangers untold and hardships unnumbered, I have fought my way here to the castle beyond the Goblin City...

You may not remember the exact quote, but I hope it sounds familiar enough. If not, the title of the post should provide a hint of what I'm talking about. If even so you still don't have a clue, then you are insultingly young. Whatever the case is, you should keep reading!

 

Go watch the movie. Watch it again

I got the chance to get a copy of the game from my local store some time ago, an English version at quite a cheap price, so it was a no-brainer, I had to get it.

Before I start talking about the game, let's have a look at the minis. Regular plastic miniatures, nicely detailed. I mean, you won't expect Weta Workshop quality, sure, but these ones are really cool, something above regular quality. Let's start with Sarah:

I had a hard time with the vest

Then her nemesis, Jareth the Goblin King:

Uhm. No, not this Goblin King

I mean this Goblin King

Then Sarah's allies. Hoggle:

Maybe the most accurate mini in the game. Really sweet

Ludo:

Don't you want to adopt this puppy?

And finally, Sir Dydimus riding his loyal Ambrosius:

You cannot paint this mini if you haven't ever painted a Bretonnian first

This pic is only to show that I painted the livery on both sides

Jim Henson rules

Well, now we can play! The game is really easy going, even quite simple. It somehow follows the story in the movie, so the four heroes must wander through the Labyrinth and face different challenges.

The board is beautiful, I love the art

No matter how many players you have, you must use the four characters. It helps the narrative, which is key in such a game. Labyrinth is a cooperative game, so the player(s) control the four characters and the antagonist's actions are just determined by a deck of cards. As you can see in the pic above, the characters have to start on the corners of the board, while the Goblin King remains on his throne.

All the characters have a stats card like this one:

Not complicated, I give you that, but enough for my purposes

You have to take account of three skills: speed, wit and brawn. You don't have permanent values for them. Instead, each time you have to use one, you  have to roll the corresponding die:

Besides, each character has a certain number of willpower points (the Jareth's eye tokens), which you may lose if you don't endure the challenges of the labyrinth. We'll go into that later on.

Let's see how the game works. It will have two separate parts. In the first part, our heroes wander through the Labyrinth and if they succeed, they may find the way to Jareth's castle, where things will work quite differently.

Each character rolls their "speed" dice and moves accordingly (you can roll a lesser die if you want, but you have to move the whole resulting number.

You just move through the tiles, no actual labyrinth involved :(

Then you draw a card from the deck and do as it says. It cannot be easier.

Quite self explanatory

In this case Hoggle chooses to run. He rolls his Speed die (D6, the green one) against the Purple Die (D10). He succeeds and nohing happens! May had him failed, he would have lost 2 willpower tokens.

Some encounters are easy...

...but some others are impossible

In this case poor Ludo had to test his Wit (the green D6) against the mighty blue D20. Quite unsurprisingly, he failed, and so...

...the Goblin Clock moves one hour forward!

That ain't good, for sure!

Ambrosius wisely decides to run, to Sir Dydimus' shame

In the meantime, Sarah bravely confronts some ugly Goblins!

That's quite the whole thing, there's little else to the game (or at least to this first part of it). You move, draw a card and roll for the test.

From time to time you can have some really nasty encounters!

 So it's not only random events which are solved in the same turn, but some cards can delay their effects, or extend them through several turns. For example, Ludo drew this card and got caught:

In fact it took him like four or five turns to get out of there!

Funny thing these cards were drawn by the same characters that in the move (this Snares one by Ludo and thre Peach by Hoggle, for example), it made the game more movie-like, but the whole system is purely random, so it can happen to anyone.

Here you can see an in-game example, Sir Dydimus fighting against the Faeries:

Chances were on him

General overview

You can see that the game is pretty simple. There's just this outer ring of tiles where you'll have the random encounters.

You can even fall into the Bog of Eternal Stench (and get a "Smell Bad" token)

You keep on moving along until you eventually draw the Entrance to Goblin City card (which, due to the mechanics of the game, won't be available until you have had several adventures first).

Hooray! At last! We found the entrance!

Then we get into the second part of the game, where things change quite a bit:

Down down down to Goblin Town

 When our heroes get to the entrance, they'll have to face some mighty enemies. They are represented by these tokens, but I believe there are plastic models too.

First rival is the Humungous:

Bravely defeated by Sir Dydimus

Then you have to face the Goblin Infantry

Only to face the Goblin Cavalry!

 If you lose an encounter (in this case all of these are solved with the Brawn attribute), you may lose a willpower point. What happens if you lose them all?

You fall into the Oubliette

Note to self: Hoggle is not specially good at fighting, and he even speaks of himself as a coward. It's a bad idea sending him to fight against the Goblins!

The character is not dead (this is a family oriented game about a family oriented movie!), but has to remain the next turn in the Oubliette before recovering.

Let's keep on, we're so close to the end!

At this final stage there are some special abilities that may come in handy. You can use them at any point, but I think it's here when they prove most useful. Each character has a card enhancing one of their skills. For example:

 

Just like the movie!

 

This way Ludo defeated the Goblin Artillery! Hooray! Then the way to the inner Castle is open...

Only Sarah can get in. That's the way it's meant to be

 For the final encounter, Sarah must defeat Jareth in a duel of will using her Wit. Every turn Sarah fails, the Goblin Clock moves forward, and if it reaches the thirteenth hour... everything will be lost!

 

Again, a perfect moment to call for your special ability

This way Sarah recues his little brother and wins the game!! Time to come back home!

I've skipped some stuff in the game, but I hope this gives you a general impression of how it works. It's not a complex game at all, you could almost call it a filler, but it serves its purpose and my kids enjoyed it, which makes it all worth of it. Who would tell, they love the movie (which is awesome, given that they're 8 and 5, and they enjoy the movies I watched when I was about their age, like this one!!) and that's what pushed me towards sharing the game with them. So this was absolutely satisfying.

This is it for today! I have some different stuff on the painting queue, but I'm still not sure of what will I finish first, so I'll let you know as soon as it happens!

Cheers!

Formula Pod

No way you (or anyone) could foresee this. I've played a game again! Right, unbelievable! I can confidently say that I've played more only in 2023 than in like the four precedent years altogether.

What was it this time? Something unexpected too, as I went to the races! Which races?

The classic Boonta Eve Pod races in Mos Espa!

Here come the challengers!

Ready to speed up!

They belong to the MicroMachines Pod Racing series, but with the wheels stripped out and rebased for the game.

An old friend I had lost contact with (much to my regret) got me into his gaming group. I knew most of the people in there and was pleased to meet new ubergeeks like me, so it kind of felt like family!

The owner and master of ceremonies has built a custom version of the Formula D board game, and it's awesome beyond words. It's not  an absolute 100% copy, but an adaptation, and I'll let you judge if it works fine. This will be my racer:

Ratts Tyerell. Not a good omen that he was the only casualty in the movie race

If you want to catch up with the Boota Eve race, you may refresh your memories (as I had to do!) here!

My pod has a couple custom traits, which are "light pod" (allowing me a free turbo action) and "family ovation" (allowing me a two-tile extra move just after first lap). As I'm not familiar with the original game, I cannot tell for sure if this is a mere translation of the Formula D traits into the setting or if it's pure homemade rules.

Anyway... let's race!

We determined the starting positions by rolling a die:

Our MC decided it was cooler if he used that weird pod

Quick basic thing about the game mechanics. You use manual drive, so you have six gears. Everyone starts on first gear. You roll a D4 and move that number of tiles. Next turn you may want to speed up to second gear, then you roll a D6. For third gear you use a D8. Then a D12 for fourth, a D20 for fifth and finally a D30 for sixth. BUT they are not regular dice. The D4 only has 1 and 2. The d6 only has 2, 3 and 4 (specifically one 2, two 3 and three 4). The D8 has one 4, one 5, two 6, two 7 and two 8. And so on. This way you make sure that a higher gear means higher speed. Each turn you may want to keep your gear or to change it one up or down (you may want to force the gear, but it's... not wise).

Well, so the participants slowly begin to move. Everyone? Not everyone!

My pod stalled when trying to start!

Some of the racers begin to speed up!

From this point on, the turn is decided just by your position in the race. You may see all the tiles overlap, so there always will be someone a little bit ahead than another one.

Some of the pods begin to set distance from the group

We got the opportunity to enjoy some homemade rules too. For example:

Clegg Holdfast ends his turn on this tile. He takes the slope and...

...jumps over the canyon!

In the meantime, most of us still were on the first curve!

As the racers manage to set higher gears, the pods begin to move faster

The access to the canyon becomes a bottleneck

These curves are tricky, you better slow down a bit

When you go through curve tiles (you see them with those marks), you have to end your turn on one of them. That's the way to represent the racer going a gear down to get control of the vehicle. If you don't do so, you'll lose as many structure points as extra tiles you moved past the curve.

In fact, that happened to me there, I went simply too fast and, though I passed many racers, I lost a lot of structure points. From now on you should imagine a dense, black cloud of smoke pouring out my pod...

Some nasty actions are also in order

When a pod ends its turn adjacent to another one, they can accidentally bump into each other (with an eventual loss of structure points), but not only that; a racer can deliberately hit a rival, so you may want to take care of who you have close to you...

Mars Goo takes the final straightaway

And, in taking the last curve towards the straightaway...

...I lost my last structure point and crashed just in front of the authorities!! Booom!

I thought that the accident implied that I was out of the race, but instead of that, I was allowed to respawn, but just with one structure point (one out of the original twelve). Once again, I cannot tell if it's part of the original Formula D or if it was a homemade rule. Anyway, now my goal was to run the engine again and get to boxes.

You can recover structure points there rolling dice

Some of the pods begin their second lap

Then things went wild. Our pal began to run random events all over, just to make the race more interesting.

A Sarlacc!

An Imperial Checkpoint!

Totally handicrafted

Tusken Raiders!

Womp rats!

Banthas!

Second lap is definitely in hard mode. Let's see it!

Anakin crashes and loses his last point. Just as happened earlier.

Pods at boxes, other ones speeding up... We're on it!

Ouch! Metal scrap. That's not good for the engines!

Mars Goo jumps over the canyon and avoids the Sarlacc

Just a side note: At some point Mars Goo was literally the last one, and now he just overtook almost everyone. A good control of your gears, a good strategy approaching curves... and, well, some old school good luck with the dice can turn the tables in no time.

Control on the curves is 80% of this game, as you are about to see in the next pic. If you go too fast your pod is going to suffer...

Anakin crashes again

Are you trying to go through the checkpoint? Imperial pursuit!

Om nom nom

Seriously, Anakin, today's not your day

By then I had just recovered my structure points at boxes, so I was ready to squander them all again in a crazy run.

Revving again

Release the Krayt Dragon!

At this point I'm no longer sure if this is Star Wars or Mad Max

Trust me, better race than the one in the movie

Unfortunately I had to leave the game at this point, as it was getting really late. It's a shame, but I couldn't stay. I was disqualified -which in the end I guess it's pretty close to what happened to Ratts Tyerell in the movie!!

If I get notice of who won and get more pics of what happened after my departure, I'll edit the post!

Some brief conclusions about the game. First of all, ambientation is everything. I don't think I would have been easily tempted into a Formula1 board game. However, a race in the Star Wars universe got me hooked since second 1, even if it was about the Phantom Menace! The mere idea of making a pod race was pure genius, but the translation of the racers and the rules into this setting broke my awesometer. The special traits of the pods were reasonably balanced, no one getting really overpowered. The fact of some engines stalling at the start of the race was so hilarious, but at the same time so atmospheric!

As I said earlier, you can't really take anything for granted. Taking curves properly is enormously important. You have to balance your speed and how much risk are you willing to take. For example, I took those two close curves (where the Tusken Raiders were to appear later) way too fast. That allowed me to overtake quite a lot of other racers and put me in a competitive position. But I payed quite a high price and lost most of my structure points. Later on I was too fast when facing the last curve of the lap and, even if I reduced two gears on a single take (which causes damage by itself!) there was no way I could slow down enough to avoid going too far, so I took that additional damage and ended up loosing all my structure points. As I told, a correct strategy on the curves is essential.

The game mechanics are sweet. The use of the modified dice is pretty ingenious and a fantastic way to represent speed and particularly acceleration. There will be some times in which you'll want to run faster but the road will be too crowded, or moments when you'll need to decelerate quickly even under the risk of burning your engine. The control of the structure points is important too, because sometimes you'll prefer to lose some of them, but get out of that curve overpassing other players, allowing you you go first on the next turn and taking the initiative.

So in the end I'm so happy that I got to play. The game itself is great, but the modified version is freakin' awesome. I also got in touch again with pals I had lost contact with long ago, so I'm most definitely calling this a win!