InMotion
Food is an underrepresented subject in boardgames. There are a few good food games, but for some reason trains and buildings are still more popular subjects. InMotion have now started a Kickstarter project for a new food game: Cuisine a la Card. It’s a deck-building game where your cards mostly represent ingredients for your food. Ingredients, which come from four different cuisines, have special abilities, but at some point you’ll have to put together a dish from them to please one of the judges and earn points. Sounds fun, and it looks tasty. I propose the added rule that the loser has to cook and eat one of his compositions.
Portal Games
Portal Games will release their first micro-game this August: Tides of Time by Kristian Curla. I’m not opposed to my games being micro, as long as they are fun, and I have every trust in Portal Games in that respect. Tides of Time will be a two player drafting game: players pass their hands back and forth, picking one to keep for their kingdom each time. Cards have a suit and a scoring rule, and your goal is to score more points than your opponent. As usual in a drafting game, your picks should serve you just as much as they inconvenience your opponent, but with only two players the interaction will be much more direct.
Indie Boards and Cards
I recently played One Night Ultimate Werewolf for the first time, and although I was very unsure if I would like it, I had a blast. So I’m happy to see the Kickstarter project for Indie Boards and Cards’s One Night Resistance, a Resistance game following the same idea of having only one round to find out who the traitor is.
Z-Man Games
Expansion boxes with different modules inside are pretty common now, but eleven modules in one box, like in Z-Man Games’s Merchants & Marauders: Seas of Glory, is still a huge bundle of stuff. You’ll find options like changing winds, smuggling and crew happiness to enhance your seafaring adventures.
giochix.it
Giochix.it are running crowdfunding campaigns for their Historia expansions Capitals and Path of Destiny on Kickstarter and Giochistarter. Both are mini expansions for the civilization game. Path of Destiny gives you tiles to place on the development matrix to speed up a civilization’s development if it’s going in the right direction – or slow it down if it doesn’t. With Capitals, it’s little surprise that you get to build a capital for your empire, where they may collect treasures they can use to improve their civilization in other way.
Alderac
Nine houses fight for the crown of the Empire in Alderac’s Game of Crowns, a card game to be released soon. You won’t take the crown by violence alone, diplomacy is just as important. Diplomatic relations let you trade cards and favors with other players, and if they don’t want to give you can still attack them. Maybe a skillful player can win the crown without resorting to war. Any similarities between subject and name of this game to a popular series of novels is purely coincidental, I’m sure.
Fantasy Flight Games
The world of Warhammer 40.000 is a dangerous one, and putting it in a Talisman style game doesn’t make it less so. Not all threats you encounter in Relic: Halls of Terra are of the alien, tentacled kind. When traveling to holy Earth, you will be dragged into the even more deadly game of politics, but the rewards might be worth it. Two new scenarios will tax you in more traditional ways. During the Black Crusade, demons and servants of Chaos slowly fill the Galaxy, and if they reach Earth all players lose. The Lure of Chaos portraits Chaos from its even more evil side and give players the option to draw Corruption cards to change any die roll. The power of Chaos is tempting, but if only one player remains pure, he will win the game. On the other hand, if all players are corrupted, then the most corrupted one wins. From the description, this is my favorite scenario yet, it forces really tough decisions on.
FryxGames
Whether there is water on Mars or not is one of the great question in the exploration of our solar system. Even if it is there, it might not be enough to colonize Mars, or not easily accessible. So when Terraforming Mars, finding sources of water is an important step. Fortunately, Jupiter’s moons are just around the corner – on a cosmic scale, at least – and full of ice. Water Import from Europa, the latest preview card, brings in enough water to create an ocean.
Games Afoot
All you have to do to win Games Afoot’s Barnyard Legions is get five of your cards into a row. But there’s much more to it than playing Tic-Tac-Toe on a larger grid, your cards represent units from one of four punny barnyard empires, and they can move around on the grid and use their special abilities, which are different for each empire. The game, on Kickstarter at the moment, will be quick and tactical and I really can’t decide if I prefer the Republic of Ram or the Bovikings.
Dark Gate Games
I can never decide these days if people want to hunt vampires or be vampires. Dark Gate Games are firmly in the “hunt vampires” camp with their first Kickstarter project Vampire Hunters. The name does give away what the game is about. Vampire Hunters is a cooperative miniatures game for up to four players who will be, surprise, hunting vampires. The game includes 10 different scenarios to be set up from the modular board and sports an aggressive combat system where a vampire wounding a player immediately moves on the next player for the next attack. Those movie scenes with a feral vampire charging towards the group, using claws on the first hunter, kicking the next to the ground, jumping over number three and biting the last? That’s the feeling your supposed to get, a vampire charging you should cause panic.
Clever Mojo Games / Game Salute
Alien Frontiers by Clever Mojo Games and Game Salute is a popular game about space colonization and exploitation, quite strategic mostly with resource management and area control. There are number of expansions, all of which were recently available through Kickstarter in the Alien Frontiers Big Box. Why am I telling you this? Because there now is a campaign on Spieleschmiede to produce the Big Box in German.
Lookout Games
Alexander Pfister has posted on his blog about a new game by Andreas Pelikan and himself, probably available in Essen this year from Lookout Games. The title Isle of Skye makes me want to play it already, Skye is one of the most beautiful places I ever visited, but the game mechanics sound good, too. In this tile laying game, players put a price on the tiles they draw that other players have to pay if they want that tile. But every tile no one buys the player who set the price has to buy himself, paying the price to the bank, so you must balance your desire to make money with what your opponents might be willing to pay. Tiles added to your kingdom will be scored every round, according to scoring rules drawn at the start of the game, so they’ll also be different every time. Pfister himself rates this game as medium heavy and a good deal lighter than his Mombasa.
IDW Games
A game designer parodying his own work is something I haven’t come across before, but that seems to be what Kevin Wilson is doing. Awesome Kingdom: The Tower of Hateskull is a dungeon crawling game, just like Wilson’s Descent, only very different. You storm the dungeon playing characters like the Ragebarian or the Paladude. Awesome Kingdom is also not a game of pushing miniatures around, it’s a card game where the dungeon is a circle of cards and your heroes move around that circle and encounter cards they land on, be they treasures, traps or monsters.
This week’s featured photo, shot by Flickr user putneymark and shared with a CC-BY-SA license, shows the gate of the Iglesia de la Compania, a part of the world heritage site of Quito in Ecuador. Thank you for sharing!