Fantasy Flight Games
We don’t usually report on the expansions for Living Card Games, mostly because there’s a new card pack every other week or so and it would just take up too much space. But Terminal Directive, an expansion for Fantasy Flight’s Android: Netrunner is different. This is not a pack of new cards to add to your game between dozens of others. Terminal Directive is announced as a campaign expansion, a tense story for megacorps and runners to play through over the course of multiple games. For obvious reasons there aren’t many details about the story. Just this much: it’s going to be a race between the two parties to find a heavily augmented serial killer before the other side does. The story is told with two sealed packs of cards that you reveal little by little, depending on your success in the game. The revealing more cards as you play mechanic sounds like a Legacy style thing. That would be pretty awesome, first because Legacy games are great at telling stories, second because it would be the first Legacy expansion to a non-Legacy game. Something like that would make an amazing addition to almost any game I can think of.
After detailed preview posts for DOOM looked at the Marines and Invaders turn already, we’re still missing the bigger picture. That’s what this new preview post delivers. It explains how scenarios work and, more interestingly, the intricacies of player order. In what order players take their turns is controlled by the Initiative Deck in DOOM, a deck of cards where each Space Marine has a card, the Invader has several, and the player who’s card comes up has the next turn. But there are abilities to manipulate this deck, especially on the Marine’s side, making initiative an important part of tactics.
Eagle-Gryphon Games
You can now back Lisboa, the next game by Vital Lacerda (CO2, The Gallerist,…) on different crowdfunding platforms (Kickstarter, Spieleschmiede, Giochistarter, and more, all linked on the Kickstarter page). This is a game about rebuilding Lisbon, Lacerda’s home city, after it was struck by a series of disasters in 1755: an earthquake, followed by a tsunami, followed by the city burning for three days. Like all Vital Lacerda games, Lisboa will be a very complex game with many different aspects to consider in your strategy, and all of them are somehow connected. Your main objective is to rebuild the city, placing shops in the appropriate districts as assigned on the plan. To profit from them you need public building in their vicinity. For that, in turn, you need plans and you need state officials. You need to meet with nobles, participate in sea trade and do a bunch of other things. Even the church gets involved. You see what I mean by complex. Needless to say that Lisboa will be another visually beautiful game as well, thanks to illustrator Ian O’Toole. That and the amount of material in the box justify the rather high price. If you know any of Lacerda’s other games you know they are worth it.
NSKN Games
NSKN Games return once more to the world of Mistfall, but with a slightly different type of game. Shadowscape, currently kickstarting, is a dungeon crawl game, but more tactical than most. There is not a dice in sight, nor will you draw cards to determine victory in combat. There are a lot of cards, though. Each of the playable characters has a set of double-sided action cards. You use two of them on your turn to explore the dungeon and fight monsters, but after using them you flip them over to reveal different actions on the back to use on your next turn. There are also cards with gear to improve your actions, there are fate cards that move dungeon denizens or, again, improve your actions. But none of those randomly determine the outcome of your actions, that’s all good planning. At an estimated one hour playing time, Shadowscape is also one of the quicker dungeon crawls. Looks like a good pick if you like killing monsters but hate dice – or the dice hate you.
This week’s featured photo was taken by Flickr user Ahia. It shows the Doan Gate of the Thang Long Citadel in Hanoi, Viet Nam. Ahia kindly shared the photo with a CC-BY license. Thank you for sharing!