Month: December 2017 (Page 7 of 11)

Designed by Devin Low.

New York is under attack by the nefarious Magneto! You will need to fight back! But first, build a deck!

Legendary is a deckbuilding game in the spirit of Dominion. You start with a fist full of shield agents, which you can use to buy better heroes and fight bad guys. The better heroes you can recruit are all your classic heroes – Wolverine, Iron Man, or Captain America, but at this point they have so many expansions that you can play with almost any Marvel hero you can think of.  During the course of the game, you’ll want to recruit character that have good synergy with each other, and weed out the bad cards.

Meanwhile, the city is under attack. A new villain is drawn every turn, and every now and then they snag an innocent bystander to drag along with them.

Interesting Mechanic: Villains, Schemes and Master Strikes. Each game has a designated Supervillain. He’ll need to be defeated four times for you to win. Each supervillain has its own scheme, which is to say the mechanics that detail how they engage with the players. Most notably, there’s two cards that trigger the supervillain’s activities: ‘master strike’ abilities that trigger their attacks, and ‘scheme twist’ cards that move you further to the end of the game. The wacky thing is that the mechanics for each villain are all starkly different, which means that master strikes and scheme twists need to be handled very differently in each game. Not only are these mechanics usually thematically strong, they also add a lot of replayability to the game.

Legendary will often earn an upturned nose from hardcore gamers, but Marvel fans should love it. It’s also a ridiculously well-supported game. They’ve released a ton of expansions to this game now that have delved deep into the comic book hero vaults for new heroes, and do a good job of identifying potential new mechanics to add.

(Photo Credit: BoardGameGeek)

Designer: Antoine Bauza

If there’s a horde of crazed oni attacking your idyllic Japanese village, who ya gonna call? You, apparently.

Ghost Stories is a cooperative game where players take the role of mighty Taoist warriors, attempting to stave off the ghosts who are invading the village, attacking from all sides. Every turn adds one — or more — ghosts to the invading force, and if left unchecked, they’ll destroy the village. Players need to leverage their abilities and the innate abilities of the village locations, to survive this onslaught, which builds up to an attack by the notorious head honcho, Lu Feng.

Interesting Mechanic: The Village. Several coop games have randomly generated locations. However, the locations are more relevant here.  The Village is a randomly generated village of 9 buildings in a 3 by 3 grid, where each location offers different benefits to the ghost hunters. Skillful use of these location advantages is essential to success, which means that every game of Ghost Stories is a unique puzzle that needs to be solved.

Ghost Stories is very good, but very hard – one of the most difficult coop games I’ve played. The White Moon expansion helps soften this a good deal, but if you’re looking for an excellent coop experience that truly challenges your table, this is a good choice.

(Photo Credit: Board Game Geek)

Designer: Vlaada Chvatil

In Codenames, you and a teammate will pretend to be spies, and then proceed to blame each other for ridiculous leaps of nonsense logic.

Codenames is a very casual game that plays about 10 minutes per game. Cards with words are laid out on the table in a 5X5 grid. Half represent your agents, and the other half represent the other team’s agents. On each player’s turn, the player will give a simple clue (such as “Milkshake: 3”) that tells the player a related word to tiles he wants his teammate to flip, and how many tiles that keywords points to. At that time, the other player makes guesses. If he reveals the proper hero, huzzah! The first team to reveal all of their agents is the winner.

Interesting Mechanic: Duet. The base game is designed for four players (two teams of two). However, Duet is a 2-person cooperative challenge. In this game, a random puzzle is assigned to players with double-sided cards, whereas each player only sees half of the puzzle.

Codenames has been a wild success for it’s designer Vlaada Chvatil, who let’s face it has one of the most remarkably varied work product in gaming (he also did the hilariously overcomplex Mage Knight Board Game). It has spawned multiple alternate versions, including a Disney one, a Marvel one, and one where the clues are just pictures.  Codenames is one of the most immediately successful gateway games released in years, and was an instant evergreen success when it launched.

(Photo Source: The Board Game Family)

Designer: Matt Leacock

The grandfather of modern cooperative gaming, Pandemic is one of the most popular games that has ever been made. You play a member of a team tasked with fighting a world crushing epidemic.

Interesting Mechanic: Epidemics. How epidemics spread is interesting. Every turn, you will flip over a couple of cards to determine which cities will get one disease cube. If a city gets more than three cubes, shit goes sideways fast. However, if a player draws an EPIDEMIC card before this phase, you will draw a card from the bottom of the deck, then shuffle the discard pile – which includes the card you just drew – and put it on TOP of the deck before revealing your epidemic cards. This rule means that the same handful of cities are the ones under constant threat, and players have a good idea of which cities are always at risk and can accomodate accordingly. Understanding the cycling of the Epidemic deck is the key to success in Pandemic.

Pandemic is one of the games that I’ve played the most on this list, but it’s since been surpassed by other coop games – some of which appear on this list. Still, I consider it to be one of the classic gaming essential gateway games that should be in almost any board gaming collection.

(Photo Credit: Board Game Quest)

Designed by: Frank Brooks, Stephen Hand, Kevin Wilson

In this assymetrical game, you and your friends will hunt Europe for everyone’s favorite bloodsucker, determined to kill him. Then one of you will find him, and go ‘fuck, I’m totally not prepared to go mano a mano with Dracula’ and running away like a frightened child.

Interesting Mechanic: Hidden Trail. Every other character in the game has a pawn on the board, and is clearly visible to everyone. Dracula, however, is not – he moves without leaving a trace, by playing cards tied to locations that leave a trail. Other mechanics the hunters have allow them to find traces of this trail, that allows them to spiral onto Dracula, corner him until help arrives, and then try to bring him down before Dracula wins by causing Bad Things ™ to happen.

Fury of Dracula is somewhat of a confusing game, and it’s likely that players won’t ‘get it’ the first time they play it. However, once you understand the mechanics and the limitations of what Dracula can do, it’s a very tightly balanced game that almost always provides for a tight, tense ending.

(Photo Credit: Sorted Gaming)

Designer: Matt Leacock.

In Roll Through the Ages: the Bronze Age, you’re running a fledgling civilization. You’ll need to roll some dice, which translates directly into the food and resources you need. Those resources can be used to build Monuments (i.e. Wonders), technological advancements, stave off disaster, build new cities (i.e. unlock new dice) and, of course, feed your people, who frankly can get a little whiny if you don’t.

Interesting Mechanic: It’s got to be the pegboard, right? I mean, that’s just fun.

Roll Through the Ages: the Bronze Age is a simple, compact, short gaming experience that does a great job filling in between heavier games. I haven’t played the followup (set in the Iron Age) but reviews of that one suggests that it’s more complex and not as streamlined as the Bronze Age is.

(Photo Credit: Board Game Geek)

Designer: Scott Almes

In Tiny Epic Galaxies, you are a space-faring civilization, looking to colonize new planets blah blah blah. You know the drill by now.

On player’s turn, they will roll a handful of dice. The dice results will grant them resources: energy and culture, or they will let them colonize, expand or activate a planet. Their goal is to gain 21 points, which they can do by either colonizing planets or by upgrading their home world, which grants them more ships and dice to roll.

Interesting Feature: Culture. The energy resource can merely be spent to reroll dice on your turn. Culture, on the other hand, can be spent on another player’s turn to copy their action. This allows those players to leap ahead of other players by getting free actions. Culture is a great mechanic in that it keeps you engaged on other player’s turn. It’s also the strongest move in the game, and feels overpowered until players understand that culture-generating planets need to get off the board as quickly as possible.

Tiny Epic Galaxies fits a solid, hour-long galactic expansion game into your pocket. It’s relatively easy to explain and fun to play.

(Photo Credit: Gameology)

Designer: Ted Alspach

Don’t you want to be a city planner? Suburbia gives you the chance to zone your city just the way you want. So go ahead, put those undesirables next to the airport and the garbage dump!

Suburbia is a simple game: players buy tiles and add them to their cities. Every turn, players buy one hex, and add it. Where the hex is added will have effects on their cities, including the population, the popularity and the income of the city. Residential zones will add population, for example, whereas building a commercial sector will bring the bucks rolling in. All three things need to be managed and maximized to be successful.

Interesting Mechanic: The Real Estate Market. The prices for various buildings depend on how long they’ve been on the market. Something that you really want may come on the market on your turn, but have the most expensive price possible. This is an incredibly simple mechanism that creates a dilemma – while you are tempted to wait a turn to let the price fall naturally, there’s not guarantee it will still be there if your opponents snag it before you.

Suburbia often gets compared to Castles of Mad King Ludwig which is a game by the same designer. Suburbia is less wacky, and many players prefer the simpler pricing mechanic of the Real Estate Market. The biggest problem with Suburbia (that Castles solved) is that the game does require you to have a tad too much awareness of what’s happening in your opponent’s cities (airports score based on how many exist in all cities, for example), which can be hard to track. It’s still a game that is likely to appeal a great deal to people who like things that feel like SimCity.

(Photo Credit: Dad’s Gaming Addiction)

Designer: Klaus-Jürgen Wrede

Carcassonne is a great game, but honestly gets old and simple after a while. Since then, there have been several derivatives of the game, most of which are as good or better. Carcassone: the City is my favorite.

Player take turns placing tiles. If they complete a feature (such as houses, roads, castles or markets), they score it. Very Carcassonne.

Interesting Mechanic: The Wall. In the base Carcassonne, the city may grow organically in any direction. This is not the case in The City. Once you are a third of the way through the game, completing and scoring a feature allows players to extend the city wall around the city from the gate. This constrains your building option, and forces completion of features for scoring. Players can also put guards on the wall, which scores for players based on the number of special features they see.

The tile-laying game is a simple, intuitive genre and the wall adds a new, interesting scoring mechanic to it which also helps to constrain the building and push the game to the end. This game is both simpler and yet more strategically interesting than base Carcassonne, and has a very satisfying table presence.

(Photo Credit: Cardboard & Wood)

Designer: Philippe Keyaerts

In Evo, you control a dino species vying for domination amongst your fellow great beasts before a meteor smashes into the island, thus proving the futility of life and trying to make an effort to excel at all.

During your turn, you’ll place dinosaurs, migrate them, occasionally attack each other, and then build your own dinosaur. At the end of each turn, a climate wheel will turn, which will determine which biomes are too hostile to support life, forcing you and your opponents into conflict with each other to escape the coming genocide. The game ends when you flip the tile showing the meteor.

Interesting Mechanic: Build Your Own Dinosaur. Once per turn, there is an auction for new mutations for your dinosaur species (using a very clever auction mechanic). Examples of mutations are feed (increases monster speed), horns (increasing attack power), eggs (reproduction rate) and fur (increasing resistance to cold), among others.

I first played Evo with Will Wright, when I was contracting for Maxis. He looked at it as a source of inspiration for Spore, thus the game has always had a goofy place in my heart. That said, I did like the First Edition better, as I preferred the goofy, cartoony art.

(Photo Credit: Clever Move)