Gen 42
After a long time of silence, Gen 42 announced another expansion for their amazing strategy game Hive: the Pillbug is a new type of insect to add to your games. He doesn’t have much to offer movement wise, he can crawl one space and that’s it. But the Pillbug can also move another adjacent piece – friendly or not – to another free space around the Pillbug tile. That brings completely new options to the table.
Fantasy Flight Games
Fantasy Flight must have felt left out, with everyone but them in Essen. To fight that feeling, they’ve pushed out even more game previews than usual – I’m not complaining. This one is actually from before Essen still, and it’s about BattleLore 2nd Edition. Earlier previews have given you an idea how to construct the battlefield and your army, but what do you do with all that once you have it? That’s the topic of this preview: Command Cards and how you use the.
Necromancy doesn’t have to be disgusting. At least the cards for Necromancy spells in Wiz-War: Malefic Curses look quite cute, to be honest. But don’t let that fool you, necromancers will still steal your life and summon the undead to stand in your way. I assure you, they won’t be cuddly.
There’s a new expansion coming for Descent: Journeys in the Dark, and I’ll be honest here, this one excites me way more than any other so far. For the first time, you get out of the monster-infested wilderness and into the city – I always preferred urban settings in my role-playing. But Nerekhall does not sound like a great vacation spot. You can tell because vacation spots do not usually get titles like “Shadow of …” on their tourist guides, and Shadows of Nerekhall happens to be the title of this expansion. The city of Nerekhall fell victim to demonic invasion some time ago, when mad wizards went to far in their experiments. The invasion was turned back, life in Nerekhall slowly returned to normal. Or did it? That’s exactly what the heroes are sent to find out, and you can already imagine the answer will be – because figuring out that everything is fine wouldn’t require 19 quests, new demonic monsters and a new Overlord class that specialises in making the heroes fight each other. I just like everything about the sound of this.
We already know what players do in Eldritch Horror – I don’t mean go insane and die, I mean move, fight and find clues. But how does the game fight back? As it turns out, much more interestingly than its older brother Arkham Horror, at least potentially. Mythos cards still come with random events, they can still open gates, spawn clue tokens and so on. But there are two new features that take them to a new level. First is Strange Omens, an effect that reflects just how very, very wrong the stars are: Strange Omens change the constellation, and for each open Gate showing that constellation the Doom track advances. That might make the world end very quickly, you better watch those stars. But the real big thing is Reckoning: anything in Eldritch Horror can have a Reckoning icon on it: Status effects on the Investigators, Monsters, Rumors, anything. Whenever you draw a Mythos card with a Reckoning icon, all the effects on those elements are triggered, again and again. It will create a much more interesting story when that debt you have, or that disease you carry, may strike at any time, you never know when – everything becomes more tense and dense. Oh, and for added fun Mythos Cards now come in two levels of difficulty, adjustable difficulty being something I always missed in Arkham Horror.
Flying Frog Productions
The Wild West is not the first setting I think of when talking about dungeon crawler games. But there’s no reason why it shouldn’t go together, what could be more natural than fighting through an abandoned silver mine full of the recently risen undead? That must be what the great people of Flying Frog Productions were thinking when they put Shadows of Brimstone on Kickstarter, a game where you do exactly that. Only instead of undead you might find demons, lava monsters or mutant outlaws. Good times. The game’s a bit on the pricey side, but you get a bunch of miniatures for your money, more being added as the stretch goals are reached. A good dungeon crawler needs miniatures, there’s no question about that, and having Preachers and Saloon Girls battle through the dungeon instead of Rogues and Warriors is a nice, new touch.
Level 99 Games
Powerplay: Schemes and Skullduggery and Variant Souls could be classified as role-playing games if it weren’t for one thing: instead of working together to save the princess, you fight the other players to the last breath. They call this new idea Competitive Narrative Games, and I know a few people that this should be hilariously fun to play with. I’ll let you know when I tried. For now both games are available as PDF only, but there will be a paper edition in February.
Dice Hate Me Games
I have produced pretty much anything in boardgames now, from chocolate to cars to fine wine. But I can’t remember brewing beer before, so Ben Rosset’s Brew Crafters is definitely a first. It’s an optimization game, you try to brew the best beer buying ingredients, hiring specialists and doing research on new flavours and methods. You have a huge amount of options to pick from, like 15 different beer recipes and 15 different specialist workers. And that’s before going into your research options. Brew Crafters is currently on Kickstarter – I just miss the pledge level where I get one bottle of every flavor of beer.
The photo of the week shows the Holy Trinity Column in Olomouc, Czech Republic, a 35 meters high baroque monument. The photo was taken by Ana Paula Hirama and shared with a CC-BY-SA license. Thanks, Ana!