Meople News: A Maniac of Consequence

Not the busiest week in news, but that was to be expected with Gen Con happening last weekend, everyone was busy there. Everyone except me, that is. But I’m just a little jealous of everyone that got to see the great coming games early. I hope you all had fun there.

Maniac (Image by Mythos Labs)
Maniac (Image by Mythos Labs)

Mythos Labs

You are the Maniac found our Facebook page this week. and my first thought was “How did they know”? Then I realized it’s the title of a new horror movie card game that looks to be on the light side game-wise, but brings some awful horror movie humour to the table. Athlete’s Foot, anyone? The winner is the maniac that collected the most points, which mostly come from victims you offed during the game.

Fantasy Flight Games

We already had a look at the megacorps of Android: Netrunner last week, but what about their opposition. Heroic runners, trying to free the world from the oppression of the capital. Or maybe not so much, some just want to redistribute wealth into their own pockets and others just get happy creating chaos as they do. Here they are, anarchists, criminals and high tech heroes.

This was fast even for my level of expansion cynicism. My box of Descent: Journeys in the Dark hasn’t even arrived yet – although I have been watching the postman trying to lift it out of his car for the last two days – and the first expansion has been announced. Judging by the photo of the box contents, it’s still going to be as big as the full game box for other games, but it does contain new heroes, new quests, new monsters and even a full-grown dragon. Hence the name Lair of the Wyrm.

Schmidt Spiele

I’m not sure how well known Dog is outside of the German speaking part of the world, at least it doesn’t seem to be published in the rest of the world. It’s basically a variant of Pachesi / Sorry that is played with cards instead of dice. All players have an identical deck,  taking some of the notorious luck out of the game. The new Dog Royal extends the basic idea, adding new cards – and I’m guessing not just with higher numbers – and special abilities for the pawns. After about 25 years, this may turn out to be a Pachesi-like game that I actually enjoy.

Ares Games

We talked about it just a few weeks back in Nostalgia: Incognito. Turns out, our timing was better than we anticipated because Ares Games is bringing the game back to the market next year.

Consequential (Image by Asmadi Games)
Consequential (Image by Asmadi Games)

Asmadi Games

Carl Chudyk and Chris Cieslik – I’m fighting a strong impulse here to shorten that to C4 – have a new game on Kickstarter that brings an interesting new idea to boardgaming: episodic game-play with downloadable audio content for the start and end of each episode. The box of Consequential  – that would bring it up to C5 – will contain the basic set of cards and three sealed bags with more cards for acts two, three and four, to be opened when the story progresses to that point. The first season is planned as a sixteen episode story arc, and calling it the first season implies there might be more. This is one of those ideas that could either go wonderfully right or horribly wrong, but looking at previous games from the two parts of C4, I think C5 has a good chance to come down on the great side.

2F-Spiele

Well looky here, more visual teasers for Fremde Federn. There are no easter eggs quite as funny as on the cards – or maybe I missed them – but the office worker’s hobbies are a nice touch as well. What you see are the ten standard actions for the action selection part of the game.

Red Raven Games

City of Iron (Ryan Laukat) is a new Kickstarter project that looks very interesting – and not only because it’s steampunk. It’s basically a deck-building game, but with some new twists: you get to use cards that you buy immediately, but you have no way of removing cards from your deck that deck-builders, so that card will clutter your deck for the rest of the game. You’re also not building one but two decks, a citizen deck and a military deck, as you make your way to economic and military supremacy by building your city and conquering others.

Kuznia Gier

Piotr of Kuznia Gier posted on the Boardgamegeek forums with the rules for the new locations in Alcatraz: Maximum Security. The Tunnels give you a very convenient way to travel quickly. The Lighthouse lets you manipulate the deck of Task Cards – sounds like a very useful location to not be left behind – and the Chief’s Office allows you to move the Chief, about whom we know pretty much nothing at this point, so the jury is still out on the usefulness of that location. That’s some really cool stuff to add to the game that I thought didn’t lack anything, I’m excited now to find out more.

The featured photograph of the week shows Pashupati Temple in Kathmandu Valley, Nepal. The whole valley is a World Cultural Heritage with more famous and impressive sites. The photo was taken by Flickr user jeeheon and shared with a CC-BY license. Thanks a lot!

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