Author: Damion Schubert (Page 12 of 125)

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)

Designed by Bill Eberle, Jack Kittredge, Bill Norton, Peter Olotka, Kevin Wilson.

Cosmic Encounter is the sort of game you play if you long to be an Amoeba or a Virus with a penchant for stabbing your friends in the back.

You start the game with five planets, and four ships on each planet. You want to get your ships on 5 of the other guys’ planets. At the start of each turn, you’ll draw a card that tells you who to attack, and from there, you have to figure out how to go to war. You have several tools at your disposal, but most crucially, you can ask other players for help. If you get an ally to help you raid another guy’s planet and are successful, you’ll BOTH land ships on that planet and send their ships to the void. But they can ask for allies, too.

Interesting Innovation: Special Abilities. Cosmic Encounters is probably not the first game to give different races special attacks, but they are likely the most ambitious about it. The most recent reprinting of the game has about 50 of them. And many, many of them are gruesomely overpowered. The game pretty much depends on players identifying players who have huge advantages and ganging up on them to balance them, because the power differential between various races is titanic-sized.

A game 30 years old, Cosmic Encounters is STILL the premier game regarding diplomacy and negotiation, which is to say it’s a great game if you have a table full of wheelers and dealers – or who think they are.

(Photo Credit: One Of Us)

Once upon a time, there was a game company called Cheap Ass Games who decided board games were too expensive. They decided that you likely could borrow pawns and dice from other games, and therefore sold most of their games in paper envelopes printed on crappy paper. Since then, CAG has moved onto a more traditional board game development model, but their flagship game from that era (since reprinted at quality) still wacky and brilliant.

In Kill Doctor Lucky, you play a party guest at the house of Doctor Lucky, determined to kill him. The problem is, that’s true for all the other players as well. As the game progresses, Doctor Lucky will wander from room to room in his spacious mansion on a predetermined path that you can modestly adjust. Your goal is to kill him before anyone else does.

Interesting Mechanic: Escaping Line of Sight. And how do you kill him? Well, you need to get in the same room as him and be alone. Simultaneously, you also need to not be within line of sight of any other players. Trying to get in positions where you can be poised to ambush Lucky when it’s your turn, while ensuring you maintain line of sight of your opponents, is a tricky balance, and makes for an interesting challenge.

(Photo Credit: Board Game Quest)

Designed by Stefan Feld.

In Bora Bora, you manage a small pacific tribe competing against other tribes. To win, you’ll need to outperform them by doing crucial things such as building huts, praying and, um… collecting shells and getting really dope tattoos.

Interesting Mechanic: Dice Worker Placement. At the start of a round, everyone rolls three dice. They can place them on one of 7 potential locations. The benefits an action space gives is based on the number on the dice. So you get less resources if you place a 1 on a die — but it still may be advantageous! Because you can only place a die on a spot if that space is empty, or if it’s lower in value than any dice already on the space. This means that all die rolls have gameplay values: high rolls earn you more benefits, but low rolls are optimal for blocking opponents.

Bora Bora is a dense Eurogame from Stefan Feld. It’s a crowded, complex game, and I love it, but frankly I don’t play it very much anymore because it’s a beast to teach (mostly due to an overabundance of iconography).

(Photo Credit: Metagames)