Meople News: The Destiny of the House of Kepler

Alderac

Why don’t we kick off this weeks news with another preview of Alderac’s Guildhall: Fantasy? The latest card we meet is the Monk, a master of moving cards around. One of them only lets you place an additional card in your guildhall without using its effect. But once you have more than one Monk in play they let you place multiple cards and take back some others. You rapidly grow your guildhall while also taking your best cards back and reusing them. How convenient is that?

Placentia Games

A new Kickstarter project by Placentia Games goes by the name Kepler-3042. If the name sounds like the designation of some outer space object, then you’re on the right track: Kepler-3042 is a game about space exploration. I would really prefer if I could read in detail how it’s played somewhere, but that’s not how most Kickstarter projects do things any more, I guess. What I can see of the mechanics, however, sounds good. The main point of the game is managing your resources, both currently available and total. You will produce resources to pay for your actions, that’s nothing new. But the total amount of each resource in your pool is limited as well, and you can burn resources from your pool for extra actions. But if you do that, you will never be able to have more of that resource again. You use those resources to explore the galaxy and upgrade your technology, with many different approaches to score but none of the conflict found in many other space exploration games.

Corax Games

The young German publisher Corax Games is the publishing branch of Spiele-Offensive, the online game shop that runs the Spieleschmiede. As such, it’s not far-fetched that they launch their own projects on Spieleschmiede as well. One such project is the German edition of Labyrinth: Paths of Destiny, a tile-laying adventure game already available in Polish and English by Let’s Play. Two to six players are trapped in an underground maze that they themselves create from hexagonal tiles while looking for a way out. They have to find a key, reach the exit, avoid the golems guarding the labyrinth and fight other players or lay traps for them. All that is made more difficult because the maze has two floors and you’ll have to take the occasional dangerous jump to get anywhere.

Game Salute

Game Salute have launched a Kickstarter campaign that lets you live out your delusions of grandeur: your objective in Planetarium is to create a solar system, complete with planets. Planetarium‘s approach to planet building is scientific. Four proto-planets orbit the central star and collect matter in their gravity. A player may control any of the planets on their turn and collect matter tokens that he can use to develop the planet with Evolution Cards, adding features like volcanic vents and meteorite impacts. Those things shape the planet, and having shaped a planet to your specification lets you play a point-scoring Final Evolution card on it on the last round. The most points will go to the player who used his influence on the system best. A very cool concept for sure.

Plaid Hat Games

More about SeaFall! In this week’s preview, Rob Daviau talks about the Builder’s Guild, the second guild where you can spend your actions. Where last week’s Merchant’s were all about trade, the Builders create, fix and upgrade. You hire them to build structures in your home province, attach a wide variety of upgrades to your ships and, if your plans didn’t quite work out the way you wanted, repair your ships. And with SeaFall being a Legacy game, it seems reasonable that you can keep some of the things you build for the next game. Talk about decisions shaping the fate of the world.  SeaFall preview day is becoming my favorite day of the week…

Crafty Games

Two old pros of their respective arts have come together to create a game, which is now on Kickstarter by Crafty Games. The two people I speak of are Kevin Wilson, designer of games like Arkham Horror, and Brandon Sanderson, one of the great modern fantasy authors. The game is Mistborn: House War, obviously set in Sanderson’s Mistborn universe. Players control the noble houses, each working hard to deal with problems facing the Empire while garnering favor with the Lord Ruler. Mistborn: House War is a somewhat cooperative game. The houses have to work together to deal with problems facing the Empire. Should they manage to avert complete disaster, the house with the most favor wins. But if they fail that doesn’t mean all players lose. Should the Empire slide into chaos the house with the least favor wins the game since they were obviously opposed to the failing policies from the start. Will you work for the Empire or against it, or maybe hedge your bets until the last moment?

The photo of the week was taken by Andrew Smith who kindly shared it with a CC-BY-SA license. It shows Beaumaris Castle which is part of the world heritage site of Gwynedd, Wales, United Kingdom. Thank you for sharing this photo, Andrew!

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