Evil Hat Productions
We told you a fair bit about the Dresden Files Cooperative Card Game already. How you play five characters from the Dresden Files books, including the only wizard listed in the yellow pages himself. How you will go up against his first five cases and the random side jobs in the game. How you will have to overcome different kinds of challenges before your hand cards run out. What we didn’t tell you yet is that you can back it on Kickstarter now.
Space Cowboys
They had me at the title, I didn’t have to read anything else. The newest Martin Wallace game, to be published by Space Cowboys, will be called Route 666. It’s a game about a road trip from Chicago to Los Angeles. In the middle of the zombie apocalypse. Fun times! Along the way to LA, you will have encounters where you find fuel, bullets, other survivors and lots and lots of zombies. As you get closer to your destination, outrunning the zombies becomes harder and harder, but it might be enough to outrun your friends and get away while the undead eat them. Route 666 is one of Wallace’s light games, but theme and name look like a fun ride.
Steamforged Games
The Dark Souls series has a justified reputation to have some of the hardest video games out there. If that difficulty translates to Dark Souls – The Board Game, which you can now kickstart, then you’ll be playing for a while before you beat this coop game. Your goal is to explore the surroundings and kill monsters. The second part we all know will be hard. But the first part won’t be easy, either, because you only set up the terrain when you reach it, not at the start of the game – and when you die or return to your bonfire to rest all the progress you already made is reset. Dark Souls will be miniature game with figures for different player classes, regular monsters, mini-bosses and bosses, all of the latter ones with their own patterns of behavior that you must learn if you want to win. On a side note, Dark Souls also has a reasonable chance to become the highest funded Kickstarter game to date, with almost $700.000 already pledged at the time of writing.
Cheapass Games
The Kickstarter campaign for Tak, an abstract strategy game based on the description in Patrick Rothfuss’s The Wise Man’s Fear, has finally begun. The goal in Tak is deceptively simple, all you have to do is connect two sides of the board with your own stones. That is much harder than it sounds, though. To make your road you can stack your pieces on top of other pieces – unless those have been played upright, then you can’t stack on them, but they also can’t be a part of their owner’s own road. And stacks of pieces can be moved by picking them up and dropping one piece on each square it passes. And those very few option taken together create a deep and strategic game that I have been waiting for ever since I first read The Wise Man’s Fear.
Avalon Hill / Wizards of the Coast
I didn’t see this one coming. 12 years after the original release of Betrayal at House on the Hill the cult haunted house game will have its first expansion this fall. If you don’t know Betrayal, it’s a game that starts as a coop, with the players’ characters exploring a mysterious mansion. At some point in the middle of the game, they discover that the house is haunted and one of them becomes a pawn of the mysterious forces in the house and from then one opposes the other players. The fun part is that you never know what is going to happen because there are fifty different haunts, and which you get is decided randomly during the game. With the expansion Widow’s Walk you’ll get new rooms to add to the house, new item and event cards and another 50 haunts that might happen, as many again as the base game had. Being a huge fan of the haunted house genre, Widow’s Walk will be a must-have for me.
This week’s beautiful photo of the week, taken by Ken Marshall, shows a building in the ancient settlement of Vat Phou, a World Heritage site in Champasak Province, Lao. Ken kindly shared this photo with a CC-BY license. Thank you, Ken!