Bert Vandecasteele

Category: Board Games

  • Gloomhaven: Playing with myself

    Gloomhaven: Playing with myself

    March 2020, lockdown. Like everyone in the entire world, I was stuck inside with a lot to do, but none of them truly social. Some people coped by getting a pet, others took a creative hobby – I did something different. I started impulsive-shopping for board games.

    When the boxes upon boxes of games came, I obviously had no one to play with. I figured it’d get better after lockdown, but I forgot one thing: I have a toddler and a baby, and my options for easy, spontaneous contacts were inexistent. Furthermore, kids cost energy: Rarely did we have the energy to play games in the evening, so we settled on one game: the excellent Arkham Horror Card Game. So Root, Everdell, Scythe, Eldritch Horror… just stood there, gathering dust.

    But then Gloomhaven came. A huge, sprawling tactical dungeon crawler with a legacy-style campaign mode (one in which the game board changes dynamically as you play) that came in a gargantuan box, it was nerd heaven. And it was cooperative. So I could just, you know, play two players by myself. But that would be weird, right? Totally weird.

    So I did it anyway. I built the game board, put the minis and standees on it and played the entire thing in complete silence for a three hour session. I alternated between character/player 1, a warrior that looked like a rock, and character/player 2, a crystallized-style mage, defeated the bandits and packed the thing away.

    Then, the next night, I did it again. And again, and again. I suddenly found myself shopping for brushes and paint to paint minis. I had Spotify recommend me a good playlist. I looked up guides on the internet, added another character – a rat with mind control powers! – to my party. As someone who spends most of his time on a computer, managing tokens and moving pieces on a game board felt fun, because for once, something was just happening in my mind.

    My party: Otcho the Berserker, John the Doomweaver, Delka the Cragheart, Kuu the Spellweaver and Tomo the Mindthief. I had to retire MVP Delka and replaced him with John, whom I decided to hate, that’s why I didn’t paint him. Fuck you John!

    And now, three years later, I defeated the titular Gloom – and finished the campaign. The warrior and the mage have long left the party and were replaced by a barbarian and a ranger, making this huge box feel like a living, breathing thing. I had a blast, and I’m kind of going to miss this game, with its fiddly mechanics, its supertiny tokens, its rules upon rules that just work together like clockwork…

    So it’s a good thing this game has a sequel. It comes in an even bigger box. It has even more weird rules. And it’s called Frosthaven. That’s right – Gloomhaven on ice. It’s the nerdiest shit, and I’m having a blast.

  • Homemade Arkham Utensil

    Homemade Arkham Utensil

    I have a confession to make: I’m one of those people who got *really* into board games during the pandemic. Like, spend way too much cash on games like Root and Scythe, supercomplicated games you ideally have to have four players to play, which is ironic, because there’s only two people who can read in my household and we weren’t supposed to have people over.

    Suddenly, our house was littered with cardboard boxes containing meeples and coins and dices and oh my god these games are absolutely terrible to set up, aren’t they?!

    Thank God we had a second lockdown. One in which I decided that maybe I should get into woodworking. Because as it turns out: these two hobbies are pretty compatible!

    So it was obvious that one of my first projects was going to be something to clean up the table on our weekly Arkham Horror nights. Arkham is one of those games I pimped up the wazoo with custom-made tokens, arrow markers, session cards, etc. And I made it my mission to have them neatly stored on the side of the table so they don’t interfere with the game – and look cool doing so.

    This is how it started – with a few scraps of wood

    It had to hold eight kinds of tokens, and three sets of cards, two of these horizontally (the so-called act and agenda decks, which advance the game) and one vertically (the scenario overview, which tells you what the game’s symbols – essentially its dice rolls – mean in this scenario). The cards have to be visible at all times, the tokens have to be easily reachable so you don’t have to look for the right one. As an added bonus, I wanted to include the “mythos deck” in this utensil – the deck you pull a card from at the start of every turn, but I quickly dropped it because there was no way to do it elegantly.

    In essence, I made a box with five compartments. Originally, I wanted to divide one of these compartments into three more, and prepared all the pieces too – but that didn’t work because of how I did the lid. I gotta say: I love the lid. It doubles as a lectern that holds the cards and makes this box look hella unique.

    So I made some measurements and took them to class (I made this utensil in a workshop). There, the teacher handed me some leftover wood and essentially threw all the measurements out of the window. The rest was really quite unspectacular: we cut the wood to size, partially by table saw, partially by hand. Then I routed out the compartments and the lid, chiseled the sides to fit said lid, and grinded for what felt like ages before gluing everything together.

    After what felt like hours of careful chiseling, the lid fit.

    In the end, I slathered wax on it, which I will never do again because it was a smelly mess and it kind of cheapens the whole deal. But hey, at least I learned something.

    It’s not perfect by any means – I made some chiseling mistakes and the routing was off by a millimeter, creating a crooked look for the compartments if you look at it from above, but god damn it’s my first project and there’s nothing in this world that looks like this and I love it like a widdle baby.

    It works! It woooorks!
  • Arkham Horror – the card game

    Arkham Horror – the card game

    If the amount of posts in the last years haven’t been an indicator: I’ve been busy. Between an incredibly demanding but rewarding job, a family with children and a global fucking pandemic, there’s been way too little time for fun. Not because there is no time – worse: when the time is there, I have no energy for it.

    And yet, over the last year, I’ve always been able to squeeze in a round of Arkham on Sunday nights.

    For those wondering: Arkham Horror is a board game universe, set in the roaring twenties, that loosely draws on an indiana jonesized version of the infamous horror stories by H.P. Lovecraft. They usually involve archetypes (the mobster! the street urchin! the millionaire!) battling against cosmic beings that are very hard to spell. Arkham Horror has three boardgame versions (I’ll probably write something about the excellent third edition sometime) and the reason I’m writing this: a card game.

    Now I’ve been burnt by card games. Summer of 2000, fifteen year-old me spent all his hard-earned money on Magic: The Gathering cards. So let’s just say I was a bit hesitant. But one argument swayed me: the cards in these packs are fixed. You know what you’re going to get.

    And what you get is quite amazing. You get an interactive story in multiple parts, where the first session might have you start in a local town investigating a disappearance – and then eight sessions later you’re in outer space fighting witches and a cosmic fucking being. Things go delightfully off the rails, all the odds are stacked against you, but even if you lose, the story somehow goes on. It’s choose your own adventure meets deckbuilding and it’s delicious. And how’s the deckbuilding, you say? Well it’s quite the thing. One campaign, I took the millionaire – whose special power is, you guessed it, having a small fortune – and turned him into a philanthropist. Another campaigned, I played a boxer that could draw cards whenever he punched a monster – cards that of course lead to more punches being dealt.

    It’s storytelling times three through cardboard, and it’s completely my thing. Firstly, every Sunday evening, we experience a story simply by arranging cards on the table and reading some texts, like a form of D&D lite. Secondly, we choose characters and build them using cards that enhance their innate traits, as if we were equipping them in an RPG. And thirdly, we play those cards, battling hordes of enemies, in an order that causes stories to emerge out of nowhere. In one turn, I shoot at a monster and miss, but then I play a card and suddenly my bullet ricochets into the cultist next to him. It’s so much fun.

    So yeah, Sunday nights are for battling ancient ones now. If anyone wants to join, grab your tommygun and join the fun!