Meople News: Planetary Legacy

Avalon Hill

We’ve had the discussion what other games might make awesome Legacy games more than once here in the Meeple Cave. One of the games that kept coming up will now become a reality: Betrayal Legacy. A game as focused on narrative as Betrayal at House on the Hill is an ideal candidate, and the story in the Legacy variant will be a real epic. It’s going to span decades, with descendants of the earlier characters joining later games. If that will do anything for Betrayal‘s notorious game balance is a different question, at least we can expect the story to be amazing.

Fantasy Flight Games

Who needs military power or genius scientists when you can just buy all those things? The new Civilization: A New Dawn preview is all about the economy. When you resolve your Economy Focus card you move your trade caravan on the game board. Once it reaches a rival city or one of the independent city states you do trade there. We don’t know yet how trade with another player is going to work, but trading with one of the city states is really helpful: it adds tokens to one of your focus cards that will boost the cards power the next time you resolve it. If you’re the first player to visit, you also take the city state’s diplomacy card. But that is as far as peaceful conflict resolution goes. If another player wants the benefits of a city state they can attempt to conquer or liberate it with military power. Trade and diplomacy are all nice and well, but only until someone decides they’ve had enough of it.

Violence is never a pretty solution to anything, but in the nuclear wastelands of Fallout there are plenty of things, people, things that used to be people, and people that look like things, that might all do bad things to you unless you do them to them first. This preview shows the different types of enemies you might encounter, and how exactly they will shred you to pieces.

Honor is important in Rokugan. But caring about it too much also holds you back. In this week’s preview for Battle for Rokugan you see the power you can gain from going to the Shadowlands. So what if you lose your honor if you win the battle with an army of the dead?

Lumberjacks Studio

In every piece of fiction where humans go to other planets it’s always with the goal to exploit them. But what if the planet itself were to fight back? That might or might not be what is happening in Living Planet, the new game by Christophe Boelinger (Illegal,…) and Lumberjacks Studio. On their way to explore and exploit the planet the players use dice, but instead of rolling them they each select a value for this turn. Then the Leader for this round chooses the player order – no messing with start player tokens here, they boss says how it goes. In that order all players first trigger production of matching factories, then take two actions with their selected number. After every player’s actions there is a chance the planet tries to shake off those parasites: the dice may trigger a cataclysm that will devastate one hex of the map. Players have great control over what is happening with their dice selection, but the Leader even more so with his ability to choose the player order. That’s why every player gets to be Leader twice before the game ends. A very cool, interactive idea for player order and strategy – just don’t play with people who compulsive overanalyze the situation before they pick an order.

Beautiful nature doesn’t always have to be green. Take this week’s featured photo of the Ténéré Desert in Niger as an example. The photo was taken and shared by Dan Lundberg. Thank you, Dan! (1997 #278-7 Sahara, Dan Lundberg, CC-BY-SA, cropped and resized)

 

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