Meople News: Captain Cthulhu is quite a handful

Fantasy Flight Games

With The Corellian Conflict you’ll be able to connect games of Star Wars: Armada into a campaign. But not everything that is new in the expansion will be about campaign play. You can use many of the new things to spice up plain, old Armada games as well. One such thing are the new objectives and the components that come with them. There were always varied objectives in Armada, but new ones are always a good thing. Trying to break through an enemy barrier with your fleet is an entirely new challenge. And having a Planetary Ion Cannon on your side sounds like fun, too.

Even by the standards of H.P. Lovecraft the Dreamlands are a weird and disturbing place. Not only are the rules of the world different here, they may also change at any moment. Just like in any dream. When Eldritch Horror players enter The Dreamlands in the expansion of that name, they will have to deal with the weirdness of the place. Their bigger problem will be fighting the new Old Ones tied to the Dreamlands. Neither Atlach-Nacha, the spider-like dreamweaver, nor Hypnos, God of Sleep, seem especially friendly in this preview.

Alderac

I’m a sucker for cooperative games, and Alderac’s The Captain is Dead looks like it could be great. The setting is your favorite sci-fi TV show, any show revolving around a cool ship boldly going to alien places. It’s ten minutes before the end of the episode, the ship is coming apart at the seams, hostile aliens are waiting at the airlocks … and then you find the Captain dead. Up to seven players must work together to hold the ship together and fight off the aliens until the end of the episode. That’s not going to be an easy job. There’s a lot to do, and you’ll have to come up with a good, new  plan in every game. One thing guaranteeing a different game every time are the 18 playable characters, from Admiral down to Space Janitor. Since each has their own strengths, every combination will require a different approach.

Iello

It’s a widely accepted piece of wisdom in boardgames that everything is flat out better when you add Cthulhu. It is thus surprising that the big guy has so far been absent from two games dealing exclusively in giant monsters: King of Tokyo and King of New York. But Iello are about to fix that with the first ever Monster Pack for their two Kings games. The Cthulhu pack will be compatible with pretty much everything: King of Tokyo, King of New York, their respective Power Up! expansions and, probably, metric and imperial units: he’s huge either way.

Kingdom Death

Kingdom Death: Monster 1.5 is on Kickstarter, a new edition of last year’s Kingdom Death: Monster. I will talk about the game in a second, but the first thing I noticed on the Kickstarter page was not the game content but some Kickstarter superlatives. The cheapest regular backer to get the game is at $250. The most expensive level, with all sorts of extras, is at $1.666 and all 666 copies are gone. With 43 days still to go the Kickstarter stands at more than $3.700.000 collected. Wow. So what is this game? Kingdom Death: Monster is a cooperative horror survival game. In a world of horrible creatures the players control a settlement that develops over the course of the game’s campaign. To survive, the inhabitants hunt monsters, each of which has an AI deck controlling it. From defeated monsters they craft gear, at the same time they also develop their settlement with the scarce resources and progress through a series of story events. This new edition doesn’t change much about the base game, but the Kickstarter does have the option of getting various yet to be revealed expansion modules. People who played the old edition are mostly singing praise for it, and the game does weigh in at 17 pounds of components, including some terrifying miniatures. But daaaaaamn, that’s a big price tag.

Treefrog Games

There will be good news here, but first you have to get through the bad news: A Handful of Stars is going to be the last game published by Treefrog Games. Martin Wallace decided to close the doors on his own small publishing company. The good news is that this does not mean the end of his career as a game designer. In fact, he wants to design games but not deal with the hassles of production and marketing and the like, so he might end up being more productive this way. The final Treefrog game A Handful of Stars is going to be a sort of sequel to one of Treefrog’s greatest hits: A Few Acres of Snow. Just like that game, A Handful of Stars is going to be a deck building sort of wargame where players use their decks to fight over locations on the game board. Those locations are stars, the two to four players are remnants of space empires fighting to regain their glory days. The one and only print run by Treefrog will only have 2.500 copies, so you might want to pre-order if you’re interested. The rights for future editions have been sold to Fantasy Flight Games, but it’s open if and when they will print a new edition.

This week’s featured photo shows the ruins of Tipasa, originally a Punic trading post in the area that today is Algeria that was then conquered by the Romans who built it up into a strategic base in Africa. They sure knew to pick a location, just look at that view over the Mediterranean. The photo was taken by Jean-Pierre Dalbéra and shared with a CC-BY license. Thank you very much for sharing, Jean-Pierre!