Alderac
After we saw the Fighter class of Guildhall: Fantasy last week, this new preview presents the Bard. The Bard is one of the support classes, with the special ability to exchange cards from your guildhall with the discard pile. Very useful to get back those cards you just scored – or to get your opponents’ cards you just killed. And because Alderac are doing previews more frequently than once a week, we get to see the Sorcerer, too. His ability sends cards back from your Guildhall to your hand and gives you another action, so you can play the same card every round while keeping that guild leveled up. And look, here’s yet another preview. The Druid is not as complex as some of the characters we saw already, she lets you draw cards. Simple, but oh so useful.
Cryptozoic
Cryptozoic are presenting some new games at Origins Game Fair next week, and they make us sad we can’t be there to try them. The first is the Rick and Morty game Total Rickall. I’m usually suspicious of games based on TV series or movies, but this one sounds pretty cool. A bunch of characters not usually featured in the cartoon series have appeared, and while some of them are indeed old friends we just haven’t seen on-screen before, others are parasites that created fake memories of their friendship. You want to shoot those, but leave the others alive. The basic game is fully cooperative and only non-players can be parasites, but in the advanced game some of your fellow players are parasites as well and you have to figure out who they are. With a typical “play a card and take its action” structure, Total Rickall is not going to be a complex game, but mechanics and theme sound entertaining.
The second new Cryptozoic game is much more serious. In Internal Affairs (previously available from Capstone Hong Kong) the Hong Kong Police and Triads each have infiltrated the other side, and both sides are trying to uncover the traitors in their ranks. To accomplish that they have to crack the other players’ codes in a process that is part elimination and part deduction. If it looks like your side is losing, you don’t have to die with loyalty, there are ways to switch sides and join the winning team before it’s over.
The final new Cryptozoic game to be presented is Mad Science Foundation, an extra mean drafting game where mad scientists compete for world domination. Doing mad science right requires special resources, namely Lasers, Dark Matter, Cryptomium and Sharks. Of course you need sharks! These resources are available from the Foundation through a drafting mechanic, but the cards to be drafted don’t just randomly come from a stack. Each round, one player controls the Foundation’s director. He splits the available cards into piles that are then passed around the table to draft. The director gets last pick on each pile, so to get the cards he wants he has to cleverly split the cards and offer something to everyone that they’ll be more interested in. This combination of “I cut you choose” and drafting sounds so obvious now that I hear about it, I wonder why it’s not everywhere.
Plaid Hat Games
We’re getting to the meat of the game now in Rob Daviau’s SeaFall previews. The latest one talks about the round structure: each round has a Winter phase where you do housekeeping and, somewhat counter-intuitively, harvest. Then you have six rounds of actions before the year ends. Most games should last around two years, that’s not a lot of time to get everything done. Also in this preview are first looks at some other game elements like random events and trade goods. And if you don’t want to wait for more preview posts to finally know everything, you can download the rules now as well.
A second preview post shines a light on the Merchant Guild of SeaFall, the guild that helps you make money. Taking actions from this guild lets you do trade: buy goods, sell goods, move your ships, and presto, you made money. And like everything in SeaFall, you have many ways to improve these actions: merchant advisors and upgrades to your ships and home province. The preview tells you what exactly they do for you.
Cool Mini Or Not
Massive Darkness is a new dungeon crawler on Kickstarter by Cool Mini Or Not. Of course Massive Darkness has everything you’ve come to expect from all CMOM games, namely good-looking, high quality components and scarily detailed miniatures. What is special about this new game is that it’s a dungeon crawler without a game master, the monsters are controlled by the simple rule “try to attack the hero with the most XP”. Experience Points are also special in Massive Darkness because it has a two-tiered level system. Over a whole campaign, you level up your hero to learn new skills. In each scenario, you level up your hero to be able to use those skills. So your hero gets better the longer you play, but you never start a scenario with your kill-everything ability. Beyond that, Massive Darkness is what you want from a dungeon crawler: slaughtering hordes of monsters with dice rolls sounding like thunder.
The photo of the week was taken by Jean-Pierre Dalbéra and kindly shared with a CC-BY license. It shows the patio of the palace Dar Hussein in the Medina of Tunis, Tunisia. Thank you for sharing, Jean-Pierre!