Fantasy Flight Games
The new edition of Cave Troll is still in the making and today’s preview shows the different abilities of heroes and monsters you can send to the dungeon. There will be two variants of Cave Troll in the box that share the same basic rules but differ in the characters at your disposal. I didn’t know Cave Troll before, but after this preview my first thought that it would be yet another dungeon crawler is definitely proven wrong. It looks like a really clever majority game that just happens to be set in a dungeon. And have troll miniatures.
Recently Fantasy Flight Games announced a new edition of Runebound, an adventure game in Terrinoth that lets you travel the fantasy world as a big hero, completing quests all over to gain experience and collect trophies before finally facing your nemesis. This week’s preview for Runebound shows details about how you travel and how you quest.
Plaid Hat Games
We’ve read a lot about birds in Plaid Hat Games’s Tail Feathers already, but they are not the only ones fighting for you. Your ground troops of brave mice are just as important, and this latest preview finally pays attention to them. Mice move across the trees in a more traditional manner than birds, they simply move as many spaces as their move score allows, then they may either attack or make another move. But they have their own interesting twist, they can stand on a leaf and cut it loose from the tree, floating over the battlefield to an opponent’s tree. Ground troops may also be assigned to complete missions, which add another strategic dimension to the game. With the right missions, you can rescue your birds after they were shot down, or shoot at enemy bords from the undergrowth. But your opponent can launch an Intercept mission to attack your rodents on their mission, and a Decoy mission doesn’t really go anywhere but suddenly adds a lot of fighters to your home nest. Missions will have a strong Poker element where you try to bluff and deceive your opponent into leaving your important missions alone.
Cosmic Wombat Games
I wonder if people in the US consider their election campaigns just as much of a circus as us outside their country do. It makes a boardgame about US elections seem much more reasonable than the real thing. So Cosmic Wombat Games’s Campaign Trail is unrealistic in that regard, but it does look like a great strategy game set in the presidential elections. The goal is obviously to be elected president, requiring the majority of electoral votes which are acquired by majority in each state. No big surprise in a game about elections, Campaign Trail is all about majorities. To manipulate those, you use your hand cards in a variety of different ways. Each card has four possible actions on it, but you must pick one when playing it. That way you can advertise and campaign, some cards let you execute a special event and some are better kept for the big debate. With two to three parties in the running (Democrats, Republicans and Independents) and one or two players per party, Campaign Trail scales from two to six players and only needs slightly clunky special rules with five. It looks a lot more enjoyable than following the real campaigns, and is worth a closer look on Kickstarter.
Spielworxx
Your goal in Alexandre Garcia’s Dilluvia Project is to build a city in the clouds. With space on the ground in short supply due to overpopulation and technologies becoming available to make the first flying city a possibility, the players run companies building and managing the city of Dilluvia. Their main concern, at this stage of the project, is to attract people to actually live there, high above everyone else. Preorders for Dilluvia Project are now open on Spielworxx’s website and the game will be released at the Essen fair. There will be only one print run of 1.000 copies, so if you really want a copy, you might want to strike early.
Sit Down!
In the unusual and somewhat surreal settingof Sit Down!’s Ekö, the players were once heirs to a mighty empire. After their father died, their greed destroyed the empire quickly, and their father’s ghost cursed them to forever stay behind in the wasteland they had created, eternally fighting their wars with troops made from rock, sand and wind. Despite this beautiful backstory Ekö is an abstract strategy game where players armies are stacks of varying heights, moving across the battlefield to attack smaller stacks. Your own stacks are also currency to create buildings which score victory points at the end of the game, as does capturing your opponents’ emperor discs. The game sounds interesting and looks good, but I was actually considering to buy it before I knew any of that, just to have that beautiful box on the shelf.
LudiCreations
Thematically, LudiCreations’s new Kickstarter project is far, far off from what you usually find in boardgames. The goal in …and then we held hands is for the two players to reach a series of emotional objectives on the game board without losing their emotional balance. That doesn’t sound all that difficult at first, but the problem is that players may not communicate yet always have to make sure that the other player has the resources to make a valid move on their turn. Although it’s very abstract, …and then we held hands sounds like a very tense two player cooperative game. Plus I’ll never complain about new game with Marie Cardouat’s illustrations, the cards illustrating the emotions could be straight out of Dixit.
IDW Games
IDW Games’s The X-Files boardgame has its first expansion coming in November. The main feature of Monster of the Week will be serial villains from the show, those that appear in multiple episodes as well as some that escape at the end of their episode. So you’ll have fan favorites like Eugene Tooms and the Peacock family getting in the way of your investigations.
Kyy Games
The first Kickstarter campaign for Kyy Games Cabals: The Board Game was cancelled, not because the game looked bad – it looked and sounded great then and still does now – but simply because the campaign was slow to get of the ground. Now it’s back on Kickstarter with a new campaign. Just to remind you, here’s what we had to say about the game:
Pseudo-CCGs, games that use the mechanics of collectible card games but don’t require you to buy ridiculous amounts of booster packs to get the cards you want, are popular right now. And why not, I always liked games like Magic: The Gathering but didn’t want to spend the money. The latest game of this type to hit Kickstarter isCabals: The Board Game. It’s based on the online game Cabals – which is a regular collectible game – and just like it is set in an alternate 1930s era where witches, wizards and other occultists want to control the world. What sets Cabals apart from other games of this kind is that it actually has a board on which your unit cards move and control space to collect resources that you need to play more cards. It sounds like a fun mix, and as far as I can tell it’s close to the digital version, so you could even try if you like it first.
Splotter Spellen
Fans of long, deep games will rejoice: Splotter Spellen, publisher of games like Roads & Boats and The Great Zimbabwe have a new one coming for Essen this year. The latest design by Jeroen Doumen and Joris Wiersinga is very different again from everything they have created before: in Food Chain Magnate you’re running a fast food chain on its way to outgrow its competition. You compete with other players for the best spots on a variable city map, but the focus of the game will be on human resources, you’ll have to hire the best people to be successful. Food Chain Magnate will keep up to five players busy for two to four hours, and if you know Splotter games you know those hours will give the strategy part of your brain a real workout.
Pegasus Spiele / 999 Games
Do you often find yourself thinking that all your games are too small, too short and simply not epic enough? There may be a solution for you, and it’s called Mega Civilization . It’s a classic civilization game where each players leads one civilization, controls their technological and cultural advancement, sends them to war against the others and hopes to build the mightiest empire. Nothing new there, but Mega Civilizations impresses with size: the game is designed for five to eighteen players to play in six to twelve hours. It comes with a game board more than two meters wide, more than 2.000 tokens and more than 1.500 cards. Tempted a I may be, I think they have finally created a game to big for me to even try. Mega Civilization will be available at the Essen fair and afterwards from 999 Games in Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg and from Pegasus Spiele in the rest of the world.
This week’s featured photo was taken by Dennis Jarvis and kindly shared with a CC-BY-SA license. Shown is Suomenlinna, a naval fortress on Kustaanmiekka Island guarding the harbor of Helsinki, Finland. Thank you for sharing this photo, Dennis!