Author: Damion Schubert (Page 7 of 136)

“Make your wreckland run in this solo hero series game!”

Link: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/353411/wreckland-run
Playing Time: 30-45
Weight: Midweight
Genre: Solo Dice Manipulation
Designer: Scott Almes
Players: 1

Scott Almes is most well-known for his ‘Tiny Epic’ line of games, but for my money, his best title is this one, a little known solo-only game that launched with very little fanfare. In this multi-chapter campaign, players will take a Mad Max journey across an irradiated wasteland, all the while beating off a series of baddies and killing bosses. In between battles, they’ll upgrade their car to prepare for bigger, badder bosses.

The core combat is pure dice-chucking. Players will equip their car with weaponry on the 8 compass points around their car, each with a corresponding die number. Enemies will attempt to surround the car. The player will roll dice, and activate them in order to use their weapons to attack their opponents (as well as other effects like heal or herd the attacking cars). If they damage the cars with exactsies, they’ll earn scrap, which can be used to repair or upgrade the car between battles – or perhaps do an extra action during one.

The core campaign is six missions long (although extended by the expansion) but the core box contains several base vehicles, each of which play very differently (and are further manipulated by several drivers with different powers). The end result is a game that you should definitely check out if you like solo gaming, mad max, and rolling fistfuls of dice.

“Six trainhoppers hop aboard a ghost train and must work together to escape.”

Link: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/340325/vagrantsong
Playing Time: 45-120 Minutes
Weight: Medium
Genre: Boss Battler
Designer: Matt Carter, Justin Gibbs, Kyle Rowan
Players: 2-4 Players

You and your fellow players are hobos on the train and you’ve discovered to your chagrin that your train is haunted. Apparently, very haunted, as defeating one ghost will lead to summoning the next. To defeat them, players will need to help the ghosts rediscover their humanity, with a mix of ‘combat’ and scrounging for whatever tools or clues they can find on the train with them. Every ghost is a different puzzle to solve, and as the players progress through their campaign, their heroes will get better tools to take on more challenging foes.

I’m not going to lie – the real winner is the wonderfully imagined setting. I’m not the biggest fan of the ‘boss battler’ genre – a usually overbloated genre that tries to replace clean mechanics with selling loads of plastic miniatures – but Vagrantsong is an exception. To some degree this is because the focus is on simplicity but to be honest, it’s really the theme and cartoony aesthetic that’s the real hero here.

“Cooperate as Marvel Heroes to stop the Villains’ master plans!”

Link: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/298047/marvel-united
Playing Time: 40 minutes
Weight: Light
Genre: Cooperative Boss Battler
Designer: Andrea Chiarvesio, Eric M. Lang
Players: 1-4

The premise of Marvel United is simple – gather a collection of heroes and take them to beat up a boss. The core gameplay is incredibly simple – most hero cards you play are going to center on combat, movement or ‘heroism’, which is used to beat missions and rescue civilians. But what’s really amazing is how the designers have managed to stretch this incredibly simple gameplay into a wide array of hero powers and, even more impressively, some wildly divergent villains which represent the core challenge you face.

There are a bazillion Marvel United characters available but honestly you only probably need a core box and maybe an add-on to have more flexibility than you’ll ever need. That said, look at these minis. The chibi minis are not only a unique and charming take on Marvel visuals they are (and I can attest to this) great for learning to paint as well, as the big eye, big head aesthetic makes for MUCH easier painting.

“Bid for the stalls to attract customers at the night market.”

Link: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/367201/taiwan-night-market
Playing Time: 60-80 Minutes
Weight: Light-to-Medium
Genre: Auction
Designer: Zong-Ger(蔥哥)
Players: 2-5

Every night in Taiwan, when the bars and clubs close, the masses stream homewards – but they’re hangry. This is a problem you’re willing to solve. You’ll be setting up shops along busy thoroughfares, hoping that you can attract those customers before your opponents do.

Taiwan Night Market is, at it’s core, an auction game. A handful of foot lots are put up for auction every round, and players get a sense of which customers are coming and what they’ll be hungry for. If they win a lot in an auction, they’ll determine what drunk food they provide (boba, meat, donuts or noodles).

In general, customers will stop at the first stall that offers the food they want (assuming its unoccupied), but as players progress, they can build extra tables, loudspeakers to attract more distant stalls, and even franchises (buying two adjacent stalls to allow them to serve more customers and raise prices).

Taiwan Night Market isn’t the thinkiest game, and in fact should be seen as a filler game. But if you’re looking for a simple filler game to close out the end of game night – well, thematically it’s quite a fit.

“Push and pull your fellow pirates to be the last one on the ship.”

Link: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/35505/walk-the-plank
Playing Time: 20 Minutes
Weight: Light
Genre: Betrayal Engine
Designer: Shane Steely, Jared Tinney
Players: 3-5

A light, breezy filler game. Each player controls a couple of absolutely dogshit pirates, whose disgraceful conduct has finally earned the wrath of your boss pirate, who would very much like to throw the whole lot of you to the kraken. Your goal is to be the last to go in the drink.

Rounds pass with players simultaneously revealing cards to play. Cards offer simple effects, such as pushing another meeple out, pulling one of their own pirates in, or even extending or shortening the gangplank. Surviving will take a massive frenzy of short-sighted asshattery of the silliest sort.

Link: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/408180/shackleton-base-a-journey-to-the-moon
Playing Time: 60-120 minutes
Weight: Mid-to-Heavy
Genre: Worker Placement
Designer: Fabio Lopiano, Nestore Mangone
Players: 1-4

I’m a little leery of putting a game I’ve only played once on this list – especially one that still isn’t in wide release – but this is a game I really enjoyed and can’t wait to get some more plays on.

Shackleton Base is about a collection of space agencies working to colonize the moon. They’ll be building domed habitats on the moon’s surface, which acts as a territorial control game. They’ll also be drafting a set of workers in three colors at the start of each round, and on each turn, placing a worker. Of the places they can place workers, one of the places will be on the surface of the moon, where they can harvest resources from every habitat in a straight line – but they’ll have to pay their competitors if the largest hab in a hex they are harvesting is not their own.

On top of that, each game has 3 corporations, which adds a new minigame experience that players can leverage and new endgame goals to chase. These corporations all play wildly differently, and there are 7 of them, meaning every collection of corporations should result in a wildly different play experience. Does it, though? I dunno, but I can’t wait to get my hands on a copy and play it more to find out.

“Take advantage of the passengers’ special abilities to colonize Mars.”

Link: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/18258/mission-red-planet
Playing Time: 60 Minutes
Weight: Medium
Genre: Territorial Control
Designer: Bruno Cathala, Bruno Faidutti
Players: 3-5

In an alternate reality, Steampunk technology has allowed humans to race to the stars in the 1800s, and you are one of several mining companies competing to stripmine the orb and turn Mars into a viable colony.

Over the course of ten turns, players will choose one agent, who will help them to move people to Mars, find the best minerals, and slow down your opponents. Agents have an initiative order that’s strictly followed, and can pilot ships of colonists to lucrative territory, convert enemy soldiers to their cause, or even blow up a shuttle on the launch pad. Corporate espionage ain’t beanbag.

Mission Red Planet works for a lot of reasons. The simultaneous action selection goes fast and is easy to teach, and resolution of the effects plays out similar to Citadels. The territorial control game is brutal, but still somehow light and breezy, probably helped significantly with the campy steampunk aesthetic.

“Contribute a card to the one strongest combination to score.”

Link: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/394887/surfosaurus-max
Playing Time: 20 mins (if that)
Weight: Very Light
Genre: Cooperative Poker
Designer: Ikhwan Kwon
Players: 2-6 players

This year, I really focused on finding new smaller filler and card games, and Surfosaurus Max turned out to be one of the bigger hits of this endeavor.

Each player is dealt a hand of 7 cards. They then take turns playing a single card until everyone has played 2 or 3 cards (depending on player count). Once that is done, all the assembled cards are put together and the best poker (like) hand is assembled from the played cards. Each player then earns points based on the cards they contributed to the ‘winning hand’. It’s fast, it’s light, it’s breezy, and it’s remarkably silly.

Not gonna lie, my favorite design element is the fact that each player has a surfboard. The first player token is a little T-Rex, which happens to fit perfectly on it!

“Gather your Viking crew in order to plunder seas and lands for glory!”

Link: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/170042/raiders-of-the-north-sea
Playing Time: 60-80 minutes
Weight: Midweight
Genre: Worker Placement
Designer: Shem Phillips
Players: 2-4

Players play as a clan of vikings. They’ll head to town to try to amass the resources they need, and then use those resources to embark across the frigid waters in a series of raids on castles, keeps and monasteries, which earns them the victory points they need to win the game.

What makes Raiders of the North Sea so good is a unique two-part worker placement system. On each turn, players will pick up a worker from one location, and place it in another, which will effectively activate both locations. This makes for a much more interesting game than a worker placement game where spaces are simply blocked – a blocked space is an opportunity now! But it does create a new challenge of finding the best two-action combination you can do with the spaces that are open and full.

Raiders of the North Sea is the game that put Garphill Games on the map, and honestly it’s still one of their best ones. It’s a straightforward design with a simple twist that adds a ton of depth to the game, and yet is still familiar enough that a game teach is done in less than five minutes and a table that knows what they’re doing can be done in less than an hour. Raiders will be in my collection for a long time.

“Success is measured in money as you build your global smartphone empire.”

Link: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/246684/smartphone-inc
Playing Time: 60 Minutes
Weight: Lower End of Midweight
Genre: Territorial Control
Designer: Ivan Lashin
Players: 3-5

Smartphone looks like a meaty game but it’s really not. It’s a complex-looking Eurogame that you can teach in 15 minutes and play in an hour. It’s got quick turns, a slick modern presentation, and a lot of interesting decisions that leads into an easily understood territorial control game.

The cornerstone of the game experience is the action selection system, where players take two game pads, shown above, and overlays them over each other. The icons left showing are the resources that you have to play with this turn. In the above example, the player has two logistic actions (the blue trucks), one research (purple gear) and increased stock of two (the black crates – which also come with a price cut – this player is trying to make cheap phones in bulk!).

Along the way, players will research additional cardboard chits they can place over their pad (the red and purple duo in the picture) allowing them to get more and more satisfying resource yields each turn. It’s an simple puzzle that breaks your brains in new and interesting ways.