Gestalt Cards

[Miss Ruhnke]

Aswe head into RichieCon soon, I wanted to highlight some games that I think a lot of people will want to play during RichieCon: Flock Together is one of them. Spoiler Alert! We liked this game! I think a lot of my friends will really enjoy this game!

The set-up has a great picture: it is well-notated, well-labelled, easy to read, and spans two opposite pages easily so you can correlate the picture with the directions! Fantastic! What an easy set-up!

The game is light and plays quickly: you take your two actions per turn, leveling up while you eat, attack grubs, attack predators, and forage for food! You can always go back to the coop to heal if you need to.

At the end of my game, I felt confident I could teach my friends this game; it was fun and breezy. I enjoyed the puns and flavor text on the cards. It was only a 20 minute game and I had fun. I could see Flock Together getting slightly repetitive if the game lasted any longer, but the solo game felt just the right length! And there was always something interesting to do on your turn, even if you only had two actions! The game moved quickly and I had a good time.

My first cooperative play went pretty well. My friend Teresa loved this world! She loved the art, the cute game, the flavor text, and she loved the chickens! And of course, we made tons of chicken jokes as we played: we were poultry in motion!

Honestly, it was the weather cards that destroyed us: the weather had us doing 1 less damage to a predator. We did look back on the game and realized we made a few strategic mistakes, but the bad news weather cards screwed us more than we cared to admit.

As we played, we actually got annoyed at this first player marker: we kept passing the player token back and forth, but since none of the rules say anything about when to do this, we forget a few times and lost track of who the first player was!

Although you have all your actions on your player board, a turn summary/outline would have been nice: if we had one of these, we could have addressed the first player issue! It also would have reminded us of our actions at the end of each turn. It seems silly, given that this game is pretty easy, but a little turn order card would have been useful.

Me and (most of) my friends recommend Flock Together! The components and art are just stunning, the game has a silly vibe which puts you in a good mood, and the gameplay moves quickly!

I love the Shut-up & Sit-Down videos, but over time, I realize that I am anti-correlated to their opinions! They loved Arkham Horror the Card game and hated Marvel Champions! I was completely the other way around! So, maybe I would love Batman: Gotham City Chronicles with the solo and co-operative expansion?

If I ever want to play these Scenarios, I will have to use Google Translate to translate them to English. That seems less than ideal. I hope Monolith recognizes the problem and sends out another copy? Or at least some kind of fix? Monolith: please publish these scenarios in English on your web site so I can print them!!

I think Batman: Gotham City Chronicles is probably nigh unplayable without these extras. Make sure you get the Batcomputer Expansion Box (which has these sheets) or print them yourself from the Monolith website. These sheets DO NOT come with the base game.

After getting everything I needed, the next day was all about reading all the rules and setting-up the game. These actually kind of went hand-in-hand, as I learned rules, I set-up the game and I set-up the game, I learned the rules. See above as I get ready to play!

Every AI activation card is a lot of work. You get used to it, but then you still have to consult the Scenario to see what the special rules are for the villain. And remember, these rules for the AI are ON TOP of all the rules in the base game! Remember that 60 pages of rules for the base game?

I still had to consult the solo/co-op book quite a bit, because each scenario has differences that need explaining! See above!! What I really want is for the solo/co-op book to be two separate books! One for the Scenarios (which I can keep open with a decent binding), and one for the actual rules (which I can consult when I have questions)!

The maintenance on the AI turn was still a bit much. I think I fudged it a few times. It almost feels as is the AI needs a flowchart: there are a lot of rules to operating the AI that can get lost in the sea of rules of Batman: Gotham City Chronicles.

This was heartbreaking, as Batman moved through the Drones to solve the final riddle of the Riddler, spent most of his points, but could NOT roll three successes, even with a reroll! It was very frustrating. Again.

So, I liked this cooperatively: me and my friends had a good experience. The girls liked the game, but they just noticed there are a lot of rules here! I had to explain to them that our enjoyable two-hour session was the evolution of many days and reading and printing and set-up! I had gotten to the point where I could shepherd the cooperative experience fairly well. And that made a potentially horrendous experience into something fun and palatable. We had fun.

I previously mentioned the Shut-up & Sit-Down video where they trashed the game. I want to reflect on a major point they made during their video, now that I have some experience with the game:

Players make a pyramid of cards and try to make matches (on revealed cards) to slowly eat away those cards, until all the cards in the pyramid are gone! If you matched ALL the cards in the pyramid, you win! If you run out of cards (in your hand) on the way, you lose! See above at the starting game!

To get rid of cards out of the pyramid, you must make matches. You can match in one card: either the color or the number. In the example above, the player hand is at the bottom: the green 6 can either match the Green 2 (color) at the bottom or the red 6 (number)! Sometimes, you need two cards to match: in which case you can do math and add/subtract!

The reason this game is called Ultimatch: if you match BOTH color AND Number, then you get a special match called The Ultimatch! You strive for The Ultimatches! Why? Because you start the game with a limited number of cards, and the Ultimatch is the ONLY WAY to get more cards! When you make the Ultimatch, you discard both cards (and the card from the pyramid), but you get 2 cards back!

The solo player is given 13 cards (see the bottom) and told to get going! The only new cards the solo player can ever get is from making Ultimatches, so the solo player tries to find all the Ultimatches he can!

The Alta-hand is a shared group of 3-5 cards (see photo above, the Alta-Hand is below the pyramid). The players share the cards in the Alta-Hand: they can use those cards (as well as the unshared cards in their hands) to make matches. Managing this resource (Alta-Hand) is key to winning.

We found, after losing quite a bit, that the trade action (action 1, Trade A Card: see above) is quite important! It allows people, who may not have an Ultimatch, to offer cards that may help. It does double duty: a trade may give you an Ultimatch, but it may just be sharing information about the cards available.

Each player takes the role of one of 6 characters (see above) in the game: these characters are all magically oriented. These are the good guys! They have magic powers and spells! Note how nice those dual-layer boards are!

This game almost has a worker placement feel as well: when you end your turn in a room (see above), you activate the special ability of the room. See above for two rooms! The top one will allow you to get resources and the bottom one will allow you to rewind time! Each room has a very different ability to activate in the game!

Many cooperative games have some flavor of timer on it: you must win in so many turns, you must win before the Bad News deck runs out, and so on. Time is handled very interestingly in this game! In between the concentric circles of the rooms are two rotating rings that tell time! The first ring (above) is like the hour clock: as you play, time advances from sunrise to morning, to afternoon, to night, and back around! See above!

Players can also recruit Companions to help them! Companions cost resources (of course), but give two main abilities! First, they usually give a nice little power you can use once (before you recharge).

Possibly more important, the Companions give another position to play cards, so you reset time less often! (Every reset causes a Scarab phase!) See above as Oliver has two companions, so he can play two cards without resetting!

Maybe this is your favorite game of all time! Maybe you want to explore all the characters and how they work together! I remember in Set A Watch (a cooperative dice placement game we reviewed most recently here), the 4-Character solo seemed daunting! Over time, I came to love that 4-Character solo mode after I had totally absorbed the game! Maybe the same thing will happen here?

The experience point tracks work really well: you get to make choices and advance your character at the same time! I think this one mechanism engages players more than might have expected: you become attached to your character as you care how he levels up! And your character just gets better and better as the game goes on, so you feel like you are doing something!

Solo mode worked great for learning the game: it was basically the same set of rules as the cooperative game! The solo player does the best he can to set-up the next player (who just happens to be himself) for easier placements!

Nekojima would probably make my Top 10 Cooperative Dexterity Games if I ever redo that list. This is probably a solid 7 out of 10 overall, with the cooperative game being more fun than the solo game.

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