Alderac Entertainment
Preview cards for Pretty Pretty Smash Up are showing up on Alderac’s Facebook page. I can already tell that smashing it up against a Princesses deck will be annoying as hell, Eliza has the ability to cripple some other factions, especially Robots and Wizards.
Fantasy Flight Game
We’ve heard about quests in The Witcher Adventure Game, about monsters, about travelling – everything but the heroes, the players alter egos in the game. The latest two preview posts fix that and present the four heroes and how each of them plays the game. They not only differ in the hero dice they use, but also in which actions they can take, which tasks are easier for them to complete, and what kind of cards they draw from their development deck to improve their odds. For instance, Geralt of Rivia, the witcher himself, is a seasoned fighter and uses three hero dice (instead of one, like everyone else). His development deck contains potions he can brew in preparation and drink in battle. Bard Dandelion, as another example, earns gold easily and uses it to pay the friends from his development deck for their services. The second preview presents sorceress Triss with her spells and dwarf Yarpen with his dwarven-made equipment.
Expansions to Descent: Journeys in the Dark don’t have to be big boxes with lots of new miniatures inside – although those are nice, too. The latest expansion, Heirs of Blood, comes in form of a book and contains an all new campaign for the basic box. It contains a total of 32 new encounters, with an epic final quest of three encounters, all about the fight against Eliza Farrow and her siege of the kingdom of Saradyn.
A lot has been said about the campaign game of Star Wars: Imperial Assault that has a lot in common with Descent: one player, controlling the empire, fights against all the others as Rebels. But in Imperial Assault that’s not the only way to play, the skirmish game uses the same basics to set to small armies against each other. In this strictly two-player variant of the game, both players start by spending 40 deployment points in units of their faction: Rebels, Mercenaries or the Empire. The same deployment points can also be used to buy special abilities for your army, but then you’ll have less bodies on the battlefield. Once the armies are assembled, they fight to destroy each other, but also to score points from missions.
Grey Fox Games
Captain’s Wager is a new Kickstarter project by Grey Fox Games, and like half the successful games on Kickstarter ever, it has a steampunk theme and plays on airships. I’m fine with that, I love airships. Even better, each player is the captain of a pirate airship, and they all send out their crews to collect treasures. If they are confident in their crews abilities to get the treasure before any of the others can, they can bet some money on their success. But can they trust the other captains to play it straight, or do they have some useful item from previous excursions … or are they maybe just bluffing?
This week featured photo was taken by Flickr users Ken and Nyetta. It shows the impressive Mausoleum of Khoja Ahmed Yasawi in Turkestan, Kazakhstan. Thank you for sharing, guys! (Photo license: CC-BY)