Month: December 2017 (Page 8 of 11)

Designer: Andreas Seyfarth

San Juan is a trading game game, where players attempt to manufacture and trade goods in order to build a larger and larger trade value. Players will choose roles, and then use the cards in their hands to produce goods, sell those goods, build buildings, and other actions in order to build a Caribbean trading empire.

Interesting Mechanic: Player Roles, Actions and Privileges. Each player chooses an player role, which comes with an action and a privilege. Other players also get to perform the action, but not to perform the privilege. An example is that the everyone can build when the Builder builds, but only the Builder gets a discount for doing so.

San Juan was designed by the creator of Puerto Rico, and it shows. An elegant, simple trading game that is easy to teach but difficult to master. In many ways, it is similar to Race for the Galaxy, which may have more depth, but San Juan gets the edge on being easier to parse and teach.

(Photo Credit: Board Game Geek)

Designer: Philip DuBerry.

The palace ballroom is a place full of conniving snakes vying for favors from the noble classes, and you are ready to prove that you are the greatest of all kiss-asses.

In Courtier, there is a tableau of various members of the elite royal class, including notable merchants, generals, clergy and the noble class. You will attempt to curry favor with these individuals, playing cards which let you place influence blocks next to these. If you have more cubes than anyone else on a noble, you control that noble. Your goal is to complete quests, which require you to target specific nobles for control. Also, having more influence in one sector of the ballroom will grant you additional powers — the person who controls the clergy can generate influence twice as fast, for example.

Interesting Mechanic: The Queen. The queen is the center of political intrigue, and she moves things along based on her whims. Whenever someone scores a quest, she flips a new card, which can dramatically reshape the politics of the ballroom (the queen is a fickle one, and cadres can fall in and out of favor quickly). One of these cards is the grim news that the Queen has been arrested. When this card is flipped, the game comes to an end.

Courtier is a lighter game that has drawn comparison to Steve Jackson’s Revolution (which I haven’t played). It’s a tad simplistic, but its easy to turn and is often a hoot.

(Photo Credit: Wired)

Designed by Bruno Faidutti.

Get money, use it to invest in real estate, and dodge hit men. No, this is not the New York mob scene, but a game called Citadels.

Interesting Mechanic: Action Roles. At the start of each round, players will draft one out of several possible roles. Then, each role is resolved in order based on the speed of the role. Each role has strong powers that interact with the board – the Assassin can kill another role, for example, which prevents that role from actually taking his or her turn (note that the player controlling the Assassin has no idea who has that role, and in fact, it may be that no one does!). The Warlord can destroy another player’s buildings. The thief can steal gold. So on and so forth.

After the action is taken, players then take their actual church, taking money, building buildings, or putting new possible buildings in their hands to be built later. The game ends when one person builds 8 districts.

Citadels is in a lot of collections because it is a simple game that seats 8 players. It can be a lot of fun, but it can also drag a little, if your game has too many directly offensive roles.

(Photo Credit: Board Game Geek)

Designed by Corey Konieczka.

You’re one of the last humans on earth, desperately trying to combat the evil Cylons. Or…. maybe you’re not! Maybe, instead, you’re a filthy toaster, in which case you need to start shoving humans in the airlock before they realize you’re evil and do the same to you.

Battlestar Galactica is a cooperative game, where you play one of the heroes of the recent reboot of the series, and on the way you need to deal with external attacks, food shortages, and political chaos. And one of the people at the table MAY be a traitor.

Interesting Mechanic: The Twist. Or maybe there are two traitors? Halfway through the game, players are dealt another card. Maybe it turns out you WERE a cylon all along. This twist keeps players questioning everyone, even their own actions (“how do I keep acting like I was acting but start meeting my new objectives?”).

Battlestar Galactica is a great game that goes on too long. Sessions are frequently 3 hours long, which is a little rough when game feasibility of a session is somewhat random. However, fans of the showwill love it. It truly captures the essence and paranoia that made the show great. Just don’t play with the New Caprica module that comes with the Pegasus expansion. That was just awful.

(Photo Credit: Living Dice)

Designer: Marsha J Falco

You throw some cards on the table. Each card varies based on symbol shape, shading, color and count. If you see a set of three cards that either share or are different on all three axis, you say ‘Set!’, claim the cards, and replace them on the tableau. When the deck runs out, the player who has collected the most wins.

SET is a very different sort of party game. I often have it at one table, and players will wander in and out of the experience, while a couple of people playing the game will be staring intently at the table. Still, it never fails to captivate those who decide to be interested in it.

Key Mechanic: multilayered set collection. Set collection in games is pretty standard – either collect everything sharing a color, or make a set of one of each color. However, having players build sets by comparing multiple axes is pretty novel, and there may be some good design space here to incorporate something like it in a bigger game.

(Photo Credit: The Board Game Family)

Designed by Chris Kluwe.

Do you like Magic: the Gathering? Well, Twilight of the Gods is Magic: the Gathering on crack, only without the need to buy hundreds of expansion packs.

Players play resources (similar to land), summon creatures, and attack the other player. The other player’s health is represented by their total deck size – deal damage to them, and you’ll flip cards from the top of their deck into their graveyard. Once their deck is exhausted, you win! Similar to Magic, but with some useful differences.

Interesting Mechanic: Resources and Manifest. Having insufficient mana is the worst part of Magic the Gathering, and almost everyone who has tried to get in on the collectible card game has tried to get rid of it. Twilight of the Gods has a convoluted solution that turns land into weapons. And by convoluted, I mean it’s deep and interesting but damn if trying to write the following paragraphs wasn’t a pain in the ass – but it’s really neat!

There are three kinds of resources: Tier I, Tier II and Tier III. Each spell you have will have a cost of those (such as 3 Tier I, 1 Tier II, 2 Tier III), which you need to tap – sorry, exhaust – in order to summon the spell. But these spells also ARE the resources — each card has a symbol for one of those on their back, and a card played face down in front of them is played as one of these resources.

But players don’t play these cards from their own hand. Players play land by negotiating with each other – one player will say ‘let’s exchange Tier IIIs’. If the other agrees (and he likely will early on, as both sides are trying to build their mana bases), each player will swap those cards, and place them in their resource base face-down without looking. That card can now be exhausted to summon spells.

But each of these cards you’ve given to the player is also a trap! Each card has a secondary effect (the “heresy effect”) on the bottom that happens when you manifest it. Manifest is a common keyword, and the effects typically help you or damage your opponent. Thus, every card you give your opponent is a potential trap, waiting for you to trigger it.

Twilight of the Gods is deep, interesting and combolicious. Casual Magic players will likely find it overly complex, but hardcore ones will likely find it an intriguing take on the genre.

(Photo Credit: Victory Point Games)

You know those heartwarming episodes of Walking Dead where the gang has to decide to kill another human being – once thought an ally – not because he or she was a zombie but because he or she might be losing their mind? Yeah, Dead of Winter is kind of like that, only with more paranoia.

You control a couple of survivors in a post-apocalyptic world, as does the other players. You will, semi-cooperatively, work together to scrounge for food, find gas and ammo, solve crises (randomly created every turn), protect survivors, and do mundane things like take out the trash. Oh, and there are zombies from time to time, too. Not a lot, though. Much like Walking Dead, the zombie threat is rare and the real threat is man’s inhumanity.

Interesting Mechanic: Personal Goals. A lot of coop games have hidden traitors (including some on this list). This game takes it a step further, by giving every player a personal goal to aspire for. That goal may be minorly squirrelly, such as collect the most cans of food, or it may be full on betrayal of the compound. The hidden nature of these goals makes it hard to tell — why WON’T that guy give his soup to the survivors?

Bonus Interesting Mechanic: Crossroads Cards. This mechanic is a real treat. Before each turn start, one player will draw a crossroads card and remember it for the rest of the turn. Crossroads cards have a trigger on them (for example, stop play and resolve this card as soon as someone first searches for food this turn). The triggered result brings some story, and may also provide players with harsh choices with effects on the game.

Bonus Bonus Interesting Mechanic: Noise. If players don’t get what they want when they scavenge, they can dig deeper — but the rustling might draw in more zombies. A really elegant, thematically cool way to solve the design problem.

Much like video games, board games are currently awash in a sea of bad zombie games. Dead of Winter is one of those, but one that also really focuses on the human elements at play. By focusing on the story and leaning into clever design, it brings something new and welcome to cooperative gaming and the zombie genre.

(Photo Credit: Board Game Geek)

Designed by Richard Launius.

You are an adventurer in a kingdom under siege! Orcs, dragonkin, undead and assorted other bad guys are closing in on your kingdom. You must travel the world, killing bad guys, and gathering the resources you need to defeat the four bosses leading these armies before Monarch City falls into ruin.

Defenders of the Realm is Pandemic but with a cheesy D&D fantasy art theme. If you can get behind the theme, it’s a much more impressive experience, with dozens of miniatures that helps create the sense of an encroaching hoard. If you like the epicness of Lord of the Rings and the teamwork of Pandemic, odds are you like this.

Interesting Mechanic: Quests. One area of interest is that each player can be on a quest at a time. This quest might ask them to kill specific monsters in a certain location, or to search another location. These quests encourage players to make tough choices and let some problems fester in hopes of unlocking additional power — the party likely won’t win without completing a few of them. Also, the game has a concept of ‘win more’ – yes, everyone wins together, but completing quests lets you be the winningest of winners. This creates a little bit of selfishness that helps prevent the tendency for one player to shanghai the whole game.

Defenders of the Realm is very good if you like coop games, and breathes new life into the Pandemic formula. Also, the various character expansion packs are also very good, and add a great deal of replayability to the game. The Dragons expansion, however, is hella hard.

(Photo Source: The Board Game Family)

Designed by Günter Cornett and Alvydas Jakeliunas.

You’re a penguin. You want to eat fish. You don’t want to be trapped on an ice floe. And, er, that’s the whole game.

Interesting Mechanic: the Collapsing Board. A turn is simple. Pick up one of your penguin, move it in a straight line, as far as you want in any direction to a connected tile, and pick up the tile where you started. That tile has fish on it – a count that is added to your score. The result is a game board that gradually shrinks and a game experience that rapidly gets claustrophobic over time. While simple, the game becomes cutthroat quickly, as you see opportunities to orphan your opponent on one corner of the map.

Hey, That’s My Fish is a simple, elegant game that even young kids should be able to pick up, but still has a surprising amount of tactical fun.  It’s worth ignoring the stupid name.

(Photo Credit: SAHM Reviews)

Designed by Trey Chambers.

You are a teacher of a mystical arts school that is definitely NOT Hogwarts, and the Chancellor who is definitely NOT Dumbledore has just passed away. Now, you and the other teachers will jockey for position to take over this thankless administrative bullshit job that mostly consists of dealing with PTA meetings and very concerned parents who are upset that their son Bobby isn’t yet turning his sister into a newt at a third grade level.

Argent: the Consortium is a worker placement game – on crack. You will place your workers – er, students- in various locations around the campus, where they will generate various resources, which allow you to collect artifacts, earn more powerful spells, and politic key council members, among many other things. The exact rooms in the campus are randomly chosen, and doublesided, meaning the game has a near infinite amount of replayability.

Interesting Mechanic: Meeples with Powers. You place five students per turn, but the interesting thing is that each student has different powers. Red students can send another to the infirmary and take their place, whereas green ones are immune to those attacks. Purple students allow you to take two actions and blue ones are immune to magic cast by your opponents – so on and so forth. These meeple powers transform the normal passive-aggressive nature of most worker placement games into a knife fight.

Argent: the Consortium is a chaotic, big, sprawling mess of a game. It takes an astonishing amount of table space to play a four player game, and the aggressive nature of the game can make it hard to form a chaotic strategy. Still, if you like worker placement games, this is a big, ambitious one, and a very fresh take for one as well.

(Photo Credit: Jesta the Rogue)