Meople News: Between Sultan and Pharaoh

Daily Magic Games

Pharaoh is dead and without heirs, giving you a chance to succeed him. The way to get there is by using your workers cleverly to build monuments along the Nile, where Pharaoh’s burial barge will pass. Sailing Toward Osiris is a classic worker placement game, but with a higher level of interaction than many of those have. For example, you can send a worker to the city to pick up a city card. But you’ll get two, and one you pass to another player. Accepting bribes is encouraged. Another example, the first player to use a caravan action each round becomes the caravan leader and takes one resource from every other player joining the caravan. Sailing Towards Osiris doesn’t reinvent worker placement, but it does add a very interesting dimension.

Days of Wonder

Five Tribes: Whims of the Sultan (Days of Wonder)
Five Tribes: Whims of the Sultan (Days of Wonder)

Life doesn’t get any easier in the Sultanate of Naqala: with the new Five Tribes expansion Whims of the Sultan the sultan himself will get involved in the game. He’s a generous man who only wants to give you money. When you visit one of the new Fabulous City tiles you take a Sultan’s Whim card that is worth extra money when you meet its requirement. Besides those cards, the Great Lake tile and the new djinn will change things even more. It’s time to go back to the desert.

Horrible Games

We’ve already talked a lot about Horrible Games’ Alone, presenting the various preview posts over the last few weeks. Let me just sum it up once more, because today the Alone Kickstarter has launched. Alone is a sort of inverse dungeon crawler, where one Hero is opposed by up to three evil dungeon masters. It’s in a science fiction setting where the Hero is opposed by some rather horrible creatures, and where information for the Hero is limited to his own perception: he can only see his immediate surroundings, and some actions by the evil players give him auditory clues where something just happened. It’s a really cool package of space creature horror.

Plaid Hat Games

After the Flower Clan in the last Crystal Clans preview was unexpectedly innocent, this week we’re going back to the likes of Meteor Clan and Skull Clan: the latest art preview is for the Blood Clan.

I didn’t see that coming. Dead of Winter is already very tense and sometimes deadly. I’d expected a new expansion to ramp up that tension, but what Warring Colonies will do is far beyond that. Instead of one colony struggling for survival, now there’ll be two. And while the two colonies will fight over territory and resources, they will also have to work together to cope with crisis cards affecting both colonies. I don’t see that ending well. And you can still add the Lone Wolf character, who is on his own and works against both colonies. Not only will this make for exciting games, Warring Colonies will let you play Dead of Winter with up to eleven players. How do you even keep that many people alive?

Fantasy Flight Games

You may have heard it last week: Legend of the Five Rings is making a comeback as a Fantasy Flight Games living card game. This week we’re already seeing the first gameplay preview, showing how to get cards into play, and how to get them into your hand in the first place. That later part is more difficult than you might be accustomed to, because drawing more cards than your opponent will damage your precious Honor. And now there’s another preview that goes into the real meat of the game: conflict. Whether it’s political or military, conflict is where you decide the future of your dynasty.

Star Wars fans will finally be able to enter the center of the Empire’s power: Imperial Assault: Heart of the Empire lets them go to Coruscant. The new sixteen-mission campaign in this expansion takes place on all levels of the planet-spanning city. As we’ve come to expect from an Imperial Assault expansion, there will be new heroes to join the rebellion, new troops for the Imperial player to mobilize and new game mechanics to figure out.

It’s a good day for Star Wars expansions at Fantasy Flight Games. Star Wars: Rebellion – Rise of the Empire expands the large scale space strategy game backwards in time. Inspired by the movie Rogue One, the expansion will let you start games before the time of the original trilogy. The characters from the movie will also join their respective sides in the game, together with new combat units and a bunch of new cards related to the latest Star Wars prequel.

Stonemaier Games

Between Two Cities: Capitals (Stonemaier Games)
Between Two Cities: Capitals (Stonemaier Games)

Are you tired of being Between Two Cities? Well, tough luck, with the expansion for the Stonemaier Games game you’ll still be between two cities, only now they’ll be Capitals. Thus expansion gives you some more thing to think about in planning the two cities you’re building with your two neighbors. There is now a landscape to pan around, there are the new civic buildings that want to be next to some types of cards and can’t be next to another type, and there are districts, introducing a majority score for having the most tiles of one type connected in one area. You know, just because building two cities that both score good points wasn’t tough enough yet.

Space Cowboys

Your next mission as T.I.M.E. Agents will once more confront you with new, exciting challenges. This time, your new challenges is religion. Lumen Fidei takes you to 15th century Spain, and your receptacles are more or less faithfully Christian. Just how faithfully depends on your behavior as well, and there are very tangible effects. The most pious get bonuses on their dice rolls. So do the most heretic, but falling to the bottom of the faith scale will have unforeseeable consequences for the outcome of your mission. That sounds ominous.

Our photo of the week was taken by Loi Nguyen Duc in the beautiful Trang An landscape, Viet Nam. Thank you for sharing this photo, Loi! (“Trang An, Ninh Binh, Vietnam“, Loi Nguyen Duc, CC-BY)

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