Plaid Hat Games
Fans of Plaid Hat’s Dead of Winter will be happy to see all the new things stand-alone expansion The Long Night brings to the table. Your already suffering colony can now be attacked by bandits, but at least you can upgrade it with improvements to get you over the shock. The big new thing for the story will be the chance to explore the Raxxon Pharmaceuticals lab, the culprits of your unpleasant situation. But rumor has it the worst abominations never made it out of the lab. Dead of Winter: The Long Night will include everything to play on its own, but you can mix it up with all the parts from the original game as well.
Ares Games
Ares Games have presented four new games at the GAMA trade show. We already talked about the first one, Behind the Throne, last week. Here are the three others.
Dungeon Time is a cooperative card game played in real time. I’m glad to see another real time game, I was afraid the genre was dying out already after a brief blaze of popularity. The time limit in Dungeon Time is very tight, you have five minutes to collect your equipment, enter the dungeon and complete your quests there. Take care not to overburden yourself with gear, you can’t afford to be slowed down. If you succeed you level and and, presumably, do the same again only harder.
The hidden movement game Last Friday is a cooperation between Ares Games and Pendragon Game Studio where Ares produces the English edition of the game for worldwide distribution. All but one player are young campers, hunted by a psychopath controlled by the last player. The homicidal slasher hides in the forest and strikes when least expected. The other players may fight him off, but like any good slasher movie the bad guy in Last Friday comes back from the dead in the last chapter to enact his revenge. Sort of Scotland Yard with lots of bloodshed. I like it.
The last new product is another cooperation with Pendragon: a new edition of hidden identity card game Stay Away!. Players are the rescue team sent to retrieve the archaeologists that went to explore the resurfaces city of R’lyeh, home of Cthulhu. But once arrived, they are stalked by a creature that can imitate and possess humans and is out to destroy the team, and very soon no one is sure who is still human and who is secretly an alien killer.
WindRider Games
Reiner Knizia fans rejoice! The latest game by the prolific designer to receive a new edition is the auction game Ra, possibly his most popular game. Like many of Knizia’s game, the core concept of Ra is very simple. Sets of tiles are available in auctions, and you want the right tiles to maximize your score. But you can’t buy just one tile, you always have to take the set, and there may be bad things like droughts in the set that you have to accept if you want the good stuff. Getting the highest score out of the simple concept is much more challenging than it sounds. There is nothing in WindRider Games’s announcement about updating or streamlining the rules. Seems there just wasn’t anything to improve.
Lookout Spiele
Battle for Olympus (Kampf um den Olymp) is a new two player game by Matthias Cramer, to be released by Lookout Games this year. The two players send soldiers, heroes and demigods to three different fields of battle to gain the advantages each brings. To play a card in one of the battlefields, it has to be paid for with more cards of the right colors, so hand management seems important. Each card has combat values to fight other cards in the same battlefield, but also a special ability, giving you enough things to consider for a relatively small game.
The photo of the week shows a small part of the early Christian necropolis of Sopianae, today known as Pécs in Hungary. The photo was taken by Jan Mehlich and kindly shared with a CC-BY-SA license. Thank you, Jan!