Meople News: In the Orchestral Cave

Lookout Games

Dwarfs love the number two. At least that’s what Lookout Games tell us, and they wouldn’t lie to us. Because dwarfs love the number two the dwarfs in Uwe Rosenberg’s Caverna will get a two-player spin-off game. Caverna: Höhle gegen Höhle (translated: Cave versus Cave) will keep two players busy for about 45 minutes. It remains to be seen exactly how much conflict will happen between the two caves, both players still have their own player board to build their caves on, so the competition has to happen somewhere else.

Grey Fox Games

Champions of Midgard by Grey Fox Games is a rather popular viking worker placement game, not only since Wil Wheaton and guests played it on Tabletop. It is very satisfying to recruit and equip viking warriors and send them across the sea to fight mythical monsters – but there are very few games where the designers can’t find more to add. In Champions of Midgard, there was enough for two expansions. You can get both in the same Kickstarter campaign. The Dark Mountains fulfills a common request and adds components for a fifth player, plus a few more things for players to do. New monsters, dangerous overland journeys, that sort of thing. The Valhalla expansions adds more depth through new mechanics for any number of players. Your fallen warriors will now go to Valhalla where they curry favor with the Valkyries, who might be convinced to give you one of their blessings, or maybe an artifact. Also in Valhalla you’ll get new leader abilities and a leader dice to send into combat.

Sweet Potato Press

Companions’ Tale, on Kickstarter by Sweet Potato Press, is not exactly a boardgame. But it is a tabletop game and sounds fascinating, so give me a moment to tell you about it. Companions’ Tale is a storytelling game where the players tell the story of the mythical hero of the realm as seen through the eyes of his or her various companions. Depending on who’s telling the story, the hero will appear in a different light, creating an unusually faceted protagonist for your story. But in your tales you not only shape the hero, your tales create the culture and the very geography of the lands the hero visits, so you will end the game with a story you created together and a map where everything happened. That sounds like a cool, new way to create a story.

Game Salute

When a game gets a second edition only months after the first is released, that’s a game to have a closer look at. The second edition of Game Salute’s Black Orchestra is now on Kickstarter, and from everything we hear about the game it’s well worth the closer look. It’s a game about killing Hitler, something that had been tried in reality but didn’t find much success. In Black Orchestra you can take the role of conspirators against Hitler and see if you can manage where the real ones failed. You travel around Europe looking for the items you need for your plot to succeed, with the Gestapo on your heels and World War Two unfolding around you. We didn’t have a chance to try Black Orchestra, but from what we hear it’s a very tense cooperative game. By the way, if you’re wondering about the name: Black Orchestra (Schwarze Kapelle) was the name used by the Gestapo secret police to refer to an anti-Hitler conspiracy inside the German military.

Alderac

Thunderstone Quest (Alderac)
Thunderstone Quest (Alderac)

Bit by bit Alderac reveals details from their coming Thunderstone Quest. The latest preview post tells us more about the hero classes you’ll be able to recruit. There will be four of them, but in each class the available heroes will be individuals with strengths and weaknesses. Some fighters will be more competent with blunt weapons for examples, other with edged weapons. Speaking of weapons, in Thunderstone Quest heroes will have a skill rating that determines how much equipment, including weapons, a hero can use. Fighters are kings in that department, meaning they’ll be able to use more than one weapon at a time and really bring the pain. The other classes will have to bring something good in order to top that.

Ludonaute

Ludonaute’s Oh Captain is what I would call a three-way bluffing game. The players are shipwrecked on a strange island, and all but the Captain go foraging for weird and valuable items. When they return, they offer their findings to the Captain. Or they lie about it. Bluff one. If the Captain buys it and it was the item you advertised, he gets to use the items abilities. If it was something else, tough luck. If the Captain doesn’t buy it, then the finder may use the item he claimed it was on another player, who may call the bluff or accept it’s really that item. Bluff two. This will get confusing very quickly which, after all, is the point of this genre of game.

This week’s featured photo shows the Sheikh Lotfollah Mosque, one of the monuments lining Meidan Emam square in Esfahan, Iran. (Non-turquois dome by Flickr user Always Shooting, CC-BY)

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