Alderac
Another preview card from the Mythic Horses faction of Pretty Pretty Smash Up, the coming Smash Up expansion, has arrived. I like how the horse’s wings hide the part of the card title where the second part of the name would be, if this were from a certain pony-themed kids’ cartoon. Which of course it isn’t. Very subtle. I also like how it lets you draw cards, that will pair well with the many factions that are starving for cards.
Pirates make everything cool. Except cruises, maybe. But games, definitely, pirates make games cool. I can see that working for Dark Seas, coming from Alderac next spring. It has pirates and it sounds like a cool game. You place hex tiles around your port, and when your ship moves past them you may use those tiles’ abilities. Where you may move and which tiles you may play depends on your dice roll, but the ship can also be moved through hexes with your captain meeple on them. However, if he’s there that means he’s not on the central hex improving your income. Like many recent Alderac games, Dark Seas is light but sounds very entertaining.
Historical Games Factory
Good news for English speaking gamers: Historical Games Factory will run a Kickstarter campaign early in 2015 for an English edition of Theomachie, their poker game of the gods. Even better news: that edition will include three new pantheons to pick your god from. Besides the Egyptian gods you’ll be able to pick the Great Old Ones and the Outer Gods, both from H.P. Lovecraft’s mythos. I really hope I’ll be able to upgrade my box with those.
Lifestyle Boardgames / Asmodee
Artificium, to be released this month by Lifestyle Boardgames and Asmodee, is a game about ruling your medieval kingdom and building the most efficient production engine. So you might turn wheat into bread, which feeds the mines producing ore for the Smith, who makes swords to … and so on. The game is card-driven and, as far as I can tell, not a worker placement game, even if the Asmodee page claims that.
Cryptozoic
The third box of the DC Comics Deck-building Game lets you join the dark side. It’s titled Forever Evil, so you can have a pretty good guess what’s inside. You’ll finally be able to play as the villains of DC Comics, villains like Pandora, who gets a huge Power boost from having differently priced cards available. Forever Evil is a stand-alone game, not an expansion, but obviously you can mix it with other games from the series. After all, what fun is being a villain without heroes to humiliate?
Hobby World
Yuri Zhuravlev’s Viceroy (Hobby World) is now on Kickstarter in an English edition. Viceroy was a very popular game in Essen this year – so popular that we didn’t get a spot to try it, actually – that is not too complex in the rules, but looked like a lot of fun to play. As rulers in the fantasy world of Laar, the players have to build up their power base and eventually rule the world. To do that, they buy character cards in auctions that they then place in their Power Pyramid, a structure of at most five rows of cards where each card has to be supported by two cards below it. Placing cards higher up in the pyramid is more expensive, but also yields different rewards, though not always more valuable, depending on the situation a card may be more valuable to you further down in the pyramid. At the same time, you also have to match colors with adjacent cards in order to earn gems, the currency used to pay for buying and playing cards.
Plaid Hat Games
Plaid Hat Games released more information about Specter Ops: Shadow of Babel, their recently announced science fiction stealth game. One player will be an agent of A.R.K., a group of rebels opposing the Raxxon cooperation. His mission is to infiltrate a Raxxon installation and stealthily steal three objectives. His opposition will be one to four other players, agents of Raxxon, trying to kill him before he escapes. The genetically enhanced Raxxon hunters are always visible on the board, but the A.R.K. agent only has to reveal his position to them when he crosses their line of sight. So his game is stealth and secrecy, while the hunters try to deduce his position and box him in.
This week featured photo shows frescoes from the crypt of a church in the historic centre of Vilnius, Lithuania. The photo was taken by Charlie Phillips and shared with a CC-BY license. Thank you very much, Charlie.