We haven’t blogged for a couple of weeks, but we’ve been plenty busy writing up and testing the variant rules for Army Of Zero (and clearing out the stockroom, but that’s not as interesting). Actually, rather than talking about variants to the rules it’s maybe more accurate to say that we’re coming up with new games that you can play with the Army Of Zero deck.

As well as offering a different way to play, the additional rules will let you play with more than two players.

There are two main approaches that we’re working on. It looks like one new game will be purely cooperative, and will involve all the players working together to defeat a common enemy.  We like co-operative games when they play well, like Pandemic.  And here’s an example of an invented cooperative card game called Seamus.

The other approach will be more of a team game, with the players divided into (probably) two teams, and those teams competing against each other.  This version will use many more of the 84 character cards than the standard game - perhaps even all of them, if we can hone the rules to make it keep moving quickly - to give more of an “Army” vibe.  Zombies!!! is a game that does a great job of keeping things moving while there are lots of pieces in play, so it can be done.

It seems likely that we’ll be making more use of the clans in the new games, too. You’ll get extra benefits such as enhanced stats if you hold more than one member of a particular clan in your hand at once, so there’ll be a new “collecting” element to the game. This will make some cards more valuable than others, because not all clans have the same number of characters in them. There’s only one member of the Horse clan, for example, but there are three Hyenas.

None of this, of course, affects the basic game, which will stay just the same, but for those of you who have asked - and we’ve had inquiries particularly about playing Army Of Zero with three or four participants, and about adding a bit of complexity - it will add some new perspectives.

So, at the moment we’re drawing up the rules, but we are looking for play-testers! If you’d like to help us out, and have an influence over the new games, then please email playtest@pointzerogames.com.

Also - maybe it’s a bit early for this - we’re going to need new names for the games. We’re thinking along the lines of Army Of Zero: Blah Blah Blah or Army Of Zero: Whatever. Probably we need to play the games a few more times and do a better job at setting the theme, but if you’ve got ideas, or even ideas that we could use for codenames right now, let us know, again via playtest@pointzerogames.com.

A treat for those of you with a love for word games and extreme clever-cleverness…

You can divide games players into three types:

1. Those who play by the official rules.
2. Those who think they are playing by the official rules, but who have got something (usually slightly) wrong.
3. Those who play by their own modified versions of the official rules.

Actually, there’s also a Type 4 who don’t play by any agreed or consistent set of rules, but since these are known as “dirty rotten cheaters”, we won’t discuss them any further.

The game that I can think of where the three main types are most prevalent is actually one of the most successful board games ever - Monopoly.  I haven’t done the research, but I’m willing to guess that more people fall into types 2 and 3 with Monopoly than with any other popular game.

I’m not a fan of Monopoly (though we have two copies in the house, in addition to copies of Junior Monopoly and Anti-Monopoly), and I think a lot of people share those feelings, but it’s a great example of rule variants.  Some of the unofficial rule variants that exist are so well-known that they have become de facto rules that need agreeing, and the pre-game checklist  becomes:

• Choose a banker
• Pick your tokens
• Roll to see who starts
• Are we paying fines to the Free Parking square?

The preponderance of rule variants doesn’t reflect well on Monopoly.  Players usually introduce the variants to either make the game more interesting (like the Free Parking rule mentioned above), or to correct some real or perceived flaw in the gameplay.  For example, the start of Monopoly, according to the standard rules, is notoriously unfair in favour of the person who starts and to the detriment of those who set off last.  In a six-player game, the poor sixth player finds themselves following in the dust of the other players, landing on property that’s already been snapped up and not only having to cough up rent from the get-go but not having the opportunity to buy property themselves.

One of the variants most often introduced to tackle this is the rule that you can’t buy anything on the first time around the board.  I was never convinced by this rule, because at best all you’re doing is shifting the problem from the start of the game to the point where someone completes the first lap.  In fact I suspect it makes it worse, because by the end of that first lap everyone’s more spread out.  In fact it’s not inconceivable that the pace-setters could lap the tail-enders through pure chance, leaving the tail-enders with even slimmer pickings once they finally complete their first lap.

An alternative is to randomly stagger the start, so instead of everyone starting on Go, some players start from Go, some start from Just Visiting, some start from Free Parking and some start from Go To Jail.  I haven’t tried this myself, but it sounds like it makes sense (though if you don’t want some players to feel hard-done-by, it helps if they appreciate that Mayfair and Park Lane aren’t the best set of properties).

And so on and so forth.  Click this link for more suggested rule variants for Monopoly.

Another interesting phenomenon, particularly noticeable amongst the better known games - and again, Monopoly is a prime example - is the way that everyone thinks they know the rules, but actually they don’t exactly.  For example, I just found out - and I’m sure I’ve never played Monopoly this way - that if a player lands on an unowned property and decides not to buy it, then the property is auctioned to the highest bidder.  Wow, really?  Have a look at this PDF from Hasbro’s own site if you don’t believe me.

The reason for having this post in the first place is that we’ve been thinking about “official” rule variants for Army Of Zero.

There are a couple of rule variants that we’re playtesting at the moment and are broadly happy with, and a further couple that need a bit more work before we’re really happy with them.  The latter two are about playing Army Of Zero with more than two players: we’ll get back to you on those.

The other two are very straightforward, and we know of a few players already using them.  Firstly, you don’t need ten cards each at the start of the game.  If you want to play a quicker game, why not try five cards each?  Or if you want a longer game, try playing with 15 cards each.

Secondly, here’s a variant that can be used if you don’t like players having different sizes of Squad (after some warriors have been defeated).  Basically, when a combat is over, the losing player discards their warrior, and the winning player, instead of putting the winning card onto a separate pile ready for the next phase, just puts it to the bottom of their Squad Pile.  Play simply continues until one player has no cards left.  This variant was explained to me as a way to cut down on the space you need to play the game (you can basically play it on you knees, although some sort of container to throw the dice into is recommended!) but it also eliminates the way that some warriors don’t “get a turn” when the two squad sizes are different, because each card still comes up in rotation.

We’ll be “officially” making available a set of rules variants shortly.  In the meantime, feel free to contact us, either via email or in the comments below, if you have any favourite variants of your own.

We break from tradition in this blog post to talk about someone else’s game.  Regular readers will have realised my fondness for stuff that pretend to be one thing, but then turn out to be something different.  The delight I get from having my preconceptions taken away, ripped into tiny pieces and handed back to me is a rare pleasure, but one to be savoured, and it certainly inspired Army Of Zero, even if Army Of Zero’s dual nature isn’t really a secret.

And so, I’d like to point you in the direction of a “role-playing game” called The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen, by James Wallis.  Players adopt the roles of (let’s say) eighteenth century European nobles and challenge one another to tell tall tales, viz: “Tell me Baron, the story of the time you ate the King of Norway’s horse in most curious circumstances”.  Or: “Tell me Baron, the story of why the keeper of the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew classified your moustache as a herb”.  And so forth.  Disputes are settled by duels to the death (but if you don’t want to cause a mess on the floor, the Baron gives you leave to replace the usual duelling with a round of Rock-Paper-Scissors).

And basically that’s it as far as the game is concerned.  Is it a good game to play?  I dunno.  I don’t expect I’ll ever play it, because I’m not clever enough, and it requires an ability for improv. comedy that I suspect would defeat many.

But how the game plays isn’t the point.  The point is that the rule book is very, very funny.  It’s written in the voice of the eponymous Baron and published in a style that I haven’t seen since I attended a minor English public school in the 1970’s, which by my calculations makes it a reasonable facsimile of a book from two centuries earlier - all engraved illustrations, effs where there should be esses, and, wow, catchwords!  I haven’t seen catchwords for decades.

Here’s a sample paragraph from the book:

Gather the company and count its members.   If it is late in the evening then ask a manservant or potboy to do it for you.   Make sure that each player has a purse of coins before them equal to the total number of players—do not ask a servant to do this,  servants being by nature a shifty and feckless lot who will as soon rob a man blind as help him out of a ditch,  and I have been robbed in enough ditches to know.   If your company  numbers less than five,  then give each one five coins.   If it numbers more than twenty then think not of playing the game :  instead I advise you to pool your purses,  hire some mercenaries and plan an invasion of Belgium.

And so on, in a similar vein.  It says it’s a role-playing game, actually I would file it under humour.

You can order The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen from Mongoose Publishing.  And you can download a sample of the first few pages as a PDF from Magnum Opus Press.