Author: Damion Schubert (Page 8 of 125)

Designer: Richard Garfield

In this simple diceroller by Richard Garfield, designer of Magic: the Gathering, you play an epic monster engaging in a battle royale against other monsters as the screaming citizens of Tokyo flee in terror.

On each player’s turn, he rolls 6 dice (and can reroll any number of them twice). Based on the dice results, players can earn victory points, attack the leader, heal up, or buy a powerup, giving your hero unique abilities. The goal is to get to 20 victory points first.

Interesting Mechanic: King of the Hill. King of Tokyo is basically ‘King of the HIll’. Every attack die that is rolled attacks only the monster in the center of Tokyo (attack dice he rolls hits everyone else), and whoever is King cannot use healing dice while in town. However, he does earn victory points by hanging out downtown. This makes quite a press-your-luck game, as if you’re winning, you also have an inescapable target on your back.

King of Tokyo is a fast, easy game that is still a lot of fun. It seats up to 6 people and is simple enough that even kids can play it, while still keeping the interest of older gamers.

(Photo Credit: Panke-Spieler Berlin)

Designers: Nate French, Matthew Newman

The original Arkham Horror was the definitive Cthulhu-based adventuring board game for quite some time, but was also a finicky, swingy game that could go from zero to sixty at a ‘holy fuck’ rate of speed. Arkham Horror: The Card Game is a vastly better balanced, streamlined experience by the same company. In this cooperative game, players will seek out weapons and equipments, deal with their inner demons, and try to seek the secrets of whatever demonic horror is in whatever entirely too creepy location they’ve decided to wander into against their better judgment.

Interesting Design Mechanic: Clues. Arkham Horror: the Card Game does an admirable version of telling a storytelling experience in a very simple way. You set up the story cards in a certain order. You seek out generic clues, and when you find enough clues, you proceed to the next chapter of the story. This is a very simple mechanic that allows a detailed story to be progressed without an active storyteller while also being agnostic to whichever character (and character abilities) you have chosen.

Arkham Horror isn’t going to replace D&D for its storytelling, but if you’re looking for a well-balanced, interesting Cthulhu game that fits into a relatively short period of time, Arkham Horror: the Card Game may be a good fit.

(Photo Credit: Board Game Realm)

Designer: Stefan Feld

You are a merchant prince of Burgundy, and you seek to build up the family estate. Seek to flesh it out with pastures, castles, harbors, and… er, fields of knowledge. Or something.

Castles of Burgundy takes place over 25 turns, broken into 5 equally long phase. On each turn, players will roll two dice, then use those two dice to perform one of a small handful of possible actions: trade, hire workers, start construction, or finish a construction. When a new tile is constructed, it becomes a new hex and is added to their estate, at which point it is scored and, in many cases, fires off new mechanics.

Interesting Mechanic: A Euro with Dice. There was a time that most eurogames disdained dice, as the randomness of the dice simply undercut the value of the player’s tactical decisions. Particularly disdained was the idea dice being used as a chance for failure – i.e. high dice ‘hitting’ and low dice ‘missing’. Castles of Burgundy makes it work by having dice, but also by making their values relatively unimportant. Mathematically, whether you need a six or a two has nothing to do with which number is higher, and instead is based on which number is home to a tile you want to place. The game also is very generous in giving tools to manipulate those dice.

Many people consider Castles of Burgundy to be Stefan Feld’s finest game. I don’t (we’ll see him show up again later), but I do consider this to be one of his more accessible works. It’s thinky, with tons of options, and yet the dice rolling constrains the player a great deal, and helps to address the paralysis analysis that makes a lot of Euros unplayable against some people.

(Photo Credit: Opinionated Gamers)

Designers: Bruno Cathala, Serge Laget

This game is about nobility, about fire under pressure, about the ability to work together to solve problems, and of course, the ability to cry “TRAITOR!” and point to your neighbor at the slightest provocation.

Shadows over Camelot is a cooperative game — mostly. Each player is a Knight of the Round Table, criss-crossing the kingdom to fight wars, complete quests, seek out the holy grail, and otherwise combat the progression of evil, which advances at the start of each turn. Each victory results in a white sword on the table, whereas a defeat places a black one. The game ends when 12 swords are on the table – if more white ones are there than black ones, the table wins.

Interesting Mechanic: The Traitor. At the start of the game, each player is dealt a card which may be a traitor card or not (of 8 possible cards only one is a traitor). The traitor wins if the party fails, which means finding ways to sabotage your efforts and that of the group as a whole without drawing attention to yourself. The traitor mechanic quickly pushes the game into paranoia and suspicion. Traitors can be officially accused, but false accusations can be disastrous for the war effort.

Shadows over Camelot is not the only coop game to have a traitor mechanic, but it is the best. People who like sowing paranoia and distrust among their closest friends will find this one a classic.

(Photo Credit: Defective Yeti)

Designers: Robert Dougherty, Darwin Kastle

Build a fleet, and take it to war. Star Realms is a tight, well-balanced and interesting deckbuilder designed for two players.

Each player starts his turn with five cards. These cards have effects when played, such as giving them money to buy more cards, deal damage to their opponents or their starbases, draw more cards, make their opponents discard cards, and other effects.

At the end of the turn, the cards they played and acquired go into their discard, and they draw five new cards. If they do not have enough cards to do so, they shuffle their discard to form a new deck, and draw from the top. This is a deckbuilder similar to Dominion, where players effectively are building an engine on the fly.

Interesting Mechanic: Starbases. Unlike other cards you play on your turn, Starbases are not discarded. They stay on your tableau once played, until your opponent deals enough damage to force you to discard them. Starbases tend to have persistent effects, and enable color-matching synergy combos, which are at the heart of deckbuilding in Star Realms.

Bonus Mechanic: Trashing. Many deckbuilders have the concept of ‘trash a card’ – which is to remove a card from your hand or discard pile from the game, but Star Realms pushes it front and center, making it the central mechanic of one of the four factions. Trashing cards is underappreciated by most new gamers, but is crucial towards weeding out the crappy cards in your starter deck so you can more reliably draw your power cards. Trashing cards makes crazy looping combos fire much more reliably, and makes the genre in general much more fun.

Star Realms is a small, cheap deckbuilder that is great for two players, and has recieved a wealth of post-launch expansion support.

(Photo Credit: Monopolis Wonder)

Designer: Chad Jensen

This game is complete, unbridled, organized chaos. And it’s fantastic.

You play as one of the major creature classifications: bird, lizard, spider, mammal, insect, amphibian. Your goal is to become the most dominant of all of them through migration, exploration, speciation,, evolution or other standard actions. Your goal is to claim as much territory as you can, adapt to new environments, and rule the world. Each turn, you will place a certain number of meeples on actions, and then those actions will be resolved one-by-one.

Interesting Mechanic: Glaciation. One of my favorite ‘take that’ mechanic in all of gaming. Dominant Species is at its core a territorial control game, and the combat for territory is fast and fierce. But does one player have too much of a lead? Well, that’s nothing that a little ice age won’t fix. Glaciation will instantly make any single piece of territory inhabitable, and played correctly may divide an enemy’s force in half. It’s the nuclear option and it won’t make you any friends, but damn if it isn’t fun.

Dominant Species is a messy, highly swingy territorial control game. I’ve seen players go down to about three cubes, and yet find a way to claw back to the top. The game isn’t without it’s problems — most of the points are scored in the final scoring, which can hide a lead. Also, scoring is minorly obtuse, as you need to use a ‘dominance’ paradigm that is somewhat mathy and needs to be constantly recalculated. But if you don’t mind these things, this is an ambitious, starkly different game that takes world domination in an entirely new direction.

(Photo Credit: The Thoughtful Gamer)

Designers: Sérgio Halaban, André Zatz

In Sheriff of Nottingham, you live the high glamorous life of a customs agent, patrolling the borders of Nottingham seeking contraband that might be sold on the open market. Sure, he may say he’s a harmless chicken farmer, but those bags aren’t exactly moving and clucking all that much. But you might be convinced to not take a peek… for a fee.

Interesting Mechanic: Mutually Understood Bribery. Sheriff of Nottingham is, at it’s core, a game about lying, bribery and mutual understandings, wink wink nudge nudge. You fill a bag with goods and declare the contents of them, and pass them to the current Sheriff. The Sheriff then decides whether or not your bags merit closer inspection, and that decision might be made easier with a donation to local law enforcement, which is woefully underfunded by an underappreciative public. If he looks and you have contraband, you’re in trouble, but the penalties are staggering if his instincts are wrong. But don’t get too cocky – eventually you will take your turn as the Sheriff.

Sheriff of Nottingham is, at it’s core, a social game, and is far better in a group that is extroverted, silly and familiar with each other. It is a tad prone to lucky streaks – a player can get so lucky drawing goods that he rarely or never needs to lie – but this is a relatively quick game where the experience is generally more valuable than winning or losing anyway.

(Photo Credit: Board Game Meeple Lady)

Designer: Mac Gerdts

All the fun of owning your own steam ship line around the turn of the century without the buzzkill of finding out your flagship crashed into an iceberg to the strains of Enya.

The gameplay is relatively simple: buy ships, and deploy them along certain trade routes. If a trade route has more than 3 ships, then the oldest one is pushed out. Ships that are deployed can periodically triggered to collect income, which can be increased by building trading houses. You’ll also need to gather coal to power the ships, and one particular trade route gives bonuses for having the fastest possible ship.

Interesting Mechanic: Action Selection. Each player starts with half a dozen action cards – what they can do on their turn is play one of those cards, at which point they can’t play that card again until the card is refreshed. You refresh cards with the same action that adds new cards to your deck. Players who want more power fast will do this quickly, but the game incentivizes you to hold off a few turns if you can.

Bonus Interesting Mechanic: The Stock Market. There are always six ships for sale. If a ship is purchased, another ship is put to the side from the market into the stock market. This acts as a multiplier for final scoring, making ships that haven’t been bought more valuable. This very simple mechanic adds a nice little economic speculation to the game.

I only played Transatlantic once, and I really enjoyed the experience, which was that of a simple yet deep economic sim. I am told that Transatlantic is similar to and not as good as Concordia, which was made by the same designer, but I am not in a position to make that analysis.

Designers: Aaron Dill, John Kovaleski, Sean Sweigart

In Firefly, you run a scrappy crew of outlaws, flying the galaxy, running odd jobs, trying to avoid the law, reavers and cancellation by Fox.

Firefly is a huge board with generally simple mechanics. Players will need to hire crew, pick up resources, upgrade their ship, get and complete missions and dodge the bad guys. They can trade in contraband, but beware, doing so will bring the wrath of the Alliance.

Interesting Mechanic: Full Burn vs Mosey. When you travel, you can fly two ways. The first way is to mosey, in which case you just move one space and face no risk at all. The second is to Full Burn, which is to engage your engines. You move a lot faster, but each space you move has a chance to draw the attention of reavers or the federation (which are typically controlled by the player to your right).

Firefly has a lot of randomness in it, so some players won’t like it. But if you call yourself a browncoat, the game absolutely drips flavor and provides a meaty gaming experience.

(Photo Credit: Game Paradise Store)

Designer: Yves Tourigny

You are an architect, and you’ve been handed the blueprints of a building to build. Sure, you could build them – but you could also say ‘fuck it’ and pursue your ultimate visions of grandeur.

Blueprints is a short, accessible dice-drafting game. Players go in a circle drafting a die, and then adding that die to their building plans card. The color of the dice they choose, and how they arrange the dice in the plans and in relation to each other will determine their score, and by extension, whether or not they win.

Interesting Mechanic: Building Vertically. One of the key things is that Blueprints has a 3D aspect to the building – which is to say you can stack dice on top of each other. The rule is that every die must be placed on top of a die with an equal or lower number. This does add a certain amount of risk to, for example, trying to earn the award for building the tallest tower – there’s a good chance the die you need won’t be there to go that high!

Ironically, the 3D building also contributes to the worst part of Blueprints, which is the final scoring, where you have to delicately take apart your creations to see what values are on each die. Still, this is a light, fast game that I love – and would still play frequently if it had not been replaced by another dice drafting game we’ll get to soon enough.

(Photo Credit: Board Game Point of View)