Author: Damion Schubert (Page 7 of 125)

Designers: Peter Lee, Rodney Thompson, Andrew Veen

You lead a mighty house of the Drow, dark elves that spend their time being all gothy, cutting yourself and shopping at Hot Topic. You’ll be trying to spread your influence throughout the breadth of the Underdark, competing against other players to claim the key locations of the game, all of which look like someone swallowed and vomited a couple Scrabble hands.

Tyrants of the Underdark marries the deckbuilding engine of Dominion with a territorial control game. You build a deck on the fly, and use the cards you play to send out spies, assassinate enemy troops, martial your own troops and summon reinforcements from the market.

Interesting Mechanic: Spies. Like most games, your troops can only be placed, fight or perform actions in places where you have influence — places that are adjacent to locations your troops control. However, Tyrants of the Underdark expands that by allowing you to place spies, and use those as beachheads of influence you can use to launch bigger invasions. Doing so is difficult and takes more time and effort, but the ability to blindside without worrying about adjacency really opens up new tactical avenues in the game.

Bonus Interesting Mechanic: Mix & Match Market Decks. A lot of deckbuilders suffer a certain sense of fatigue – you’re not seeing a ton that’s new in the market deck you purchase from once you’ve played the game a few times. Tyrants solves this an interesting way. At the start of each game, you choose 2 out of the four market decks in the box, each of which represents a creature faction (Elementals, Dragons, Drow and Demons) – two additional are available in a small, cheap expansion, for a total of 15 possible combinations. Each faction leans into a different kind of mechanic, and they tend to combine and contrast with each other in interesting ways. Overall, this provides a deckbuilder that has a lot more replayability than you’d first expect.

Tyrants of the Underdark is a solid game with a lot of replayability. It does have a certain blandness to it’s visual appearance, but is overall solid, fun and relatively quick. It does compete for playtime with Clank! though, which hits upon a lot of the same themes.

(Photo Credit: Board Game Quest)

Designer: Brett Sobol, Seth Van Orden

You are a stock trader. Over the course of five to seven turns, you’ll be presented with some secret information about one of six stocks, and then use that insider information to try to figure out when to buy and sell stock.

The meat of the game is the supply phase. At that time, you have the opportunity to contribute cards – face up and face down, to one of several stockpiles. These cards mostly represent shares of stock, but also may be action cards that manipulate the stock price, or trading fees. Afterwards, each player wins a stack of cards in an auction, and have an opportunity to dump stock they think will flame out.

Stockpile doesn’t bear much resemblance to actually playing the market, but it is a fun, fast game that is easy to teach and usually plays in less than an hour.

Key mechanic: Evo Auction. Stockpile has an auction mechanic that I first saw in Evo. The first player bids on a stack of cards. The next player can bid higher on that stack, or bid low on a different stack. If he bids higher, the first player immediately bids next. If he outbids someone, that person goes next. This process is repeated until all players have a bid on a unique stack of cards.

What is elegant about this auction system is that it is fun, highly and immediately interactive, and does a very good job at narrowing the distance between the game’s leader and the guy at the back. Most of the time, players flush with cash will fight over primo stacks of stock cards. Players who aren’t doing so well will get the scraps, but pay the lowest possible price for them.

(Photo Credit: Gameapalooza) 

Designer: Shem Phillips

You’re a viking lord with big ambitions to earn glory (i.e. victory points) by raiding far-off fortresses, complete quests for your chief and, er, get most of your crew killed with your incompetence that the Halls of Valhalla dedicate a wing to you.

Raiders of the North Sea is a relatively straightforward worker placement game. On a player’s turn, he places one meeple to activate it, and removes another to activate that one. Doing this lets him gather resources, hire viking crew, draw and activate cards, and eventually prepare for a viking raid, where he’ll get more resources.

Interesting Mechanic: Upgraded Meeples. The bunch of scallywags you start off with (represented by black workers) aren’t good for much. They tend to give less resources and can only raid coastal towns. However, when you raid a town, you’ll leave that crew there and replace it with the crew there (represented by a grey or white meeple). Placing this meeple will let you take on more ambitious raiding targets, and may also adjust the resources you get in town. However, that meeple won’t be yours for long, Once you place it, another player can pick it up and place it themselves over the next couple of turns. This does a great job of rewarding fast movers while keeping lagging players within arms reach.

For a worker placement game, Raiders of the North Sea is quick yet engaging, as well as a solid theme and great viking art. People who like Lords of Waterdeep should take a look

(Photo Credit: Tabletop Finder)

Designers: Peter Lee, Rodney Thompson

In Lords of Waterdeep, you are the leader of a great house in the most notable city in the Forgotten Realms D&D setting (that would be Waterdeep, of course). You send out your agents (i.e. workers) to perform various actions for you. The most notable is collecting adventurers for you, who you can then use to complete quest cards in your hand, which are the primary way to earn the victory points you need to win.

Lords of Waterdeep is basically a gateway Euro game. It’s ridiculously easy to teach, and you can complete a game with a full table in about 75 minutes. It’s not going to satisfy people who like Caylus or Viticulture, but it may help you find and groom those players. The game almost never fails to provide a satisfying, tight experience. The downside is that the production values of the game are a tad flat, and at some point you will crave more complex experiences.

Favorite Mechanic: Building Buildings. One key action your agent can perform is to build a building at the Builder’s Hall. Doing this will let you add a new worker placement option to the board. This placement option tends to be much better than the standard locations on the board, but anytime a worker is placed there, the builder of that building takes a cut. Not only does this mechanic offer a different direction and activity for players to pursue, it also results in a dramatically different set of worker placement options each game, increasing the overall replayability of the experience.

Bonus Favorite Mechanic: Corruption. The Scoundrels of Skullport expansion adds a reasonable amount of depth (and playtime) to the core Lords of Waterdeep experience. The best part of the experience is the addition of a Corruption mechanic – new buildings may offer huge payouts, but at the expense of corruption tokens, which are worth negative points at the end of the game. The exact value of corruption tokens is based on how many are taken, which results in a press-your-luck game of chicken with other players. If you like the base game but feel like it needs just a tad more oomph, Scoundrels of Skullport is definitely a value add.

(Photo Credit: Toko Board Game)

Designer: D. Brad Talton, Jr

So just how meta do you like your games?

Millenium Blades is about collectable card games – but it ISN’T one. Instead, it’s about the collectable card scene. Players play as your typical nerds playing a Magic-the-Gathering-like game, trying to acquire rarer cards to play in tournaments. They will open boosters and collect rare cards, acquire deckboxes and card sleeves to protect their cards (and give more points), and try to find broken combos to win local tournaments. And a lot of this with in-jokes that laughs at hardcore gaming and geek culture in general.

But this is all a boardgame. A boardgame about being a card game champion. I know, it’s very confusing.

Interesting Mechanic: Buying Expansion Packs. I just like the fact that opening a ‘pack’ of cards just gives you a single rare card, which mimics how most high-level players treat collectable card games.

Favorite Game Component: Stacks of Cash. A lot of games have boring paper bills. This one has boring paper bills — but wrapped with a wrapper to form a ‘stack of cash’. It’s actually the first time that I’ve found paper money to be anywhere near as cool as gold coins.

Millennium Blades is a complex, chaotic game that won’t be for everyone, but if you are at all familiar with hardcore gaming and especially the competitive collectable card scene, it is fascinating, hilarious and deep.

(Photo Credit: Shut Up and Sit Down)

Designer: Antoine Bauza

You are one of ancient earth’s great civilizations, competing with each other to build the mightiest wonder, or if nothing else, a good bathhouse.

7 Wonders is a card drafting game. Each player will be given a hand of cards. From that, they’ll choose the card that they want, and pass the rest to a neighboring player, who will then choose a card from that hand, and pass it around. Since all of these hands are rotating simultaneously, game speed remains quick even with 7 players.

What you build are resources, military outposts, scientific studies, various leisure rooms and, in the final round, cards that are worth victory points for whatever else you’ve managed to build. Those cards in particular are prone to hate-drafting (i.e. drafting nearly useless cards that you see as being highly valuable to the game’s leader).

Interesting Mechanic: Only Caring About Your Neighbors. 7 Wonders isn’t the most interactive game in the world, and given the need to keep the game moving, it would be reasonable if it were very close to solitaire. But it’s not, really – the game has you care primarily about only your neighbors. Your military is compared only to your immediate neighbors, for example, and if you lack resources you need, you can also purchase them from immediate neighbors. This system allows for, even in a game with 7 people, players to see all possible multiplayer interactions they have as they are all within easy eyesight.

7 Wonders is in a lot of game collections, not just because it’s a simple game with a relatively novel core mechanic (card drafting), but because it is very fast to play and comfortably seats 7. The Leaders expansion is also worth considering. While it adds perhaps too much iconography for the game for casual players, it also gives players strong identities and goals, and mixes up the core gameplay quite a bit.

(Photo Credit: The Board Game Family)

Designer: Bernard Tahitian

Each player is given a collection of pieces resembling Tetris shapes. They place their first piece in the corner closest to them. After that, each piece they place must connect diagonally to one of their other pieces, but must lay flat on the board and may not share an edge with any of their own pieces. The winner is based on the number and size of pieces they are ultimately unable to place.

Blokus is an attractive, inviting experience and takes less than 5 minutes to teach even non-gamers. It’s also surprisingly aggressive, and yet is abstract and friendly enough where opponents will frequently help each other find places to play their last piece. The biggest problem with Blokus is that the game simply doesn’t work well except as a four player game.

Key Mechanic: Diagonal adjacency. It seems simple, but this provides a lot of depth to the game, and results in some pieces you wouldn’t expect being unusually powerful – the U-shaped piece for being able to close off an opponent’s expansion opportunities, and the single square for being the primary way to sneak into enemy territory.

(Photo Credit: Toys R Us)

Designer: Alexander Pfister

In Mombasa, you play an 18th century chartered company involved in trade in Africa. But not slaves. Seriously, there was enough people wondering about this once the theme of the game was announced that the developers felt compelled to assure players that this game is totally not about slaves.

It is, however, a very good albeit dense Eurogame. Players will go searching for diamonds, trade goods such as bananas, coffee and cotton, and explore the continent. It’s well-balanced and very good.

Interesting Mechanic: Tableau management. Players have a fistful of cards they can play, but they can only play three cards horizontally. At the end of the turn, the cards you’ve played go to three columns above your game board. They then choose one of the COLUMNS to take into their hand. Players need to carefully plan in order to set up monster turns later in the game.

Mombasa is a dense game and it really needs 4 players to shine. However, the core mechanic that drives action selection is really well done, and is well worth your time.

(Photo Credit: Shut Up and Sit Down)

Designer: Uwe Rosenberg

Do you fantasize about being a dwarf, perhaps for their lovely beards and charming drinking songs? Farming pumpkins? Mining ore? Going on quests? Making babies? Keeping donkeys as household pets?

Caverna is a game by the same designer who designed Agricola. Uwe will show up again, but not Agricola – it’s a sprawling flawed game, and Caverna fixes most of those flaws. Players will place workers, which will allow them to expand their farms, harvest food, gather resources, and engage in a little light animal husbandry, but without potentially unbalanced profession cards and with a far less oppressive people feeding mechanism.

Interesting Mechanic: Expanding Action Space Options. That being said, one of the best game mechanics from Agricola does make an appearance, and that is the ever expanding board of actions. Early in the game, there are only a handful of spaces you can place your dwarf. As the game ages, new action spaces which unlock new resources and/or offer greater efficiency become available. As you the player are also unlocking new meeples by making babies, the game continues to be highly contested for the most valuable resources.

Agricola generally gets the ink, but Caverna offers an easier to teach, easier to understand and more balanced gameplay experience for your farming simulator. Also, it has dogs and donkeys, which Agricola specifically lacks.

(Photo Credit: Pokemon Central)

Designer: Michael Kiesling

Azul is a gorgeous, zen-like ceramic tile based game with a surprising amount of ‘fuck you’ hidden in there.

Azul is played in a series of rounds. In each round, four random tiles are placed on each of the coaster-looking disks on the table. Players go in order, taking all of the tiles of one color from a disk, and putting the rest in the middle. You can choose to take from the middle as well, which can get you large piles of tiles of the same color, but also loses you a victory point if you’re the first player. Players are ultimately trying to get exact counts of the tiles they need — if they get more than they need to fill the pattern location they’re trying to fill, they lose victory points for the overage.

Interesting Innovation: really, the whole game. The game really shines on paying attention to the overages. Savvy players may find themselves choosing between grabbing a couple points, or making a slightly less-than-optimal choice to leave their opponents with guarunteed overages. I’ve seen a guy get about seven more tiles than he could score before. He lost.

(Photo Credit: Plan B Games)