Keymaster Games
Space. The most amazing travel destination. This is your chance to visits its sights and at the same time earn badges that will make you win the game. Space Park is a simple game in theory. There are three rockets moving around a ring of seven destinations. When it’s your turn you pick one rocket, move it to the next unoccupied destination, and take the action of that tile. It’s easy enough to collect the three kinds of crystals you need to pay for badges. It’s easy to get the badges, even. Getting badges with perks that work together and let you acquire more badges faster than your opponents? Now things get tricky. Space Park is not a complex game, but not too simple to play, either. Quick and fun.
Fantasy Flight Games
Geez, wasn’t fighting off one Great Old One enough? Did Eldritch Horror really need a campaign mode where six of those uncaring gods from outer space come after you, one after the other? The obvious answer is yes, everything can be improved by a campaign mode. Except maybe your chances of survival. When you play an Eldritch Horror: Masks of Nyarlathotep campaign you still only fight one GOO at a time – but the one that comes next already has a malign influence. A campaign is going to be the hardest test yet for Eldritch Horror players.
Giochix.it
A new Vital Lacerda fix is on Kickstarter. Well, mostly new. CO2: Second Chance is a revised edition of CO2 (see our review here) but it’s so revised that everything changed. The primary game mode is now a new, cooperative rule set. The players have enironmental goals to meet, some of them public, others only known to one player. To win the game, all those secret goals have to be met, but you can’t talk about them. A good idea to avoid “quarterbacking”. But the original, semi-cooperative rules are still there as well, so you can have the original CO2 experience with some balance changes and really neat, new pieces.
Renegade Game Studios
There are many things that are fun in games but that you should avoid in real life. Today we talk about thievery. It’s bad enough when one notorious thief is haunting your city. Two of them trying to outdo each other are a different level of problem. At least in Prowler’s Passage you’re on the fun side of that deal. The two players are the thieves in the new game by J. Alex Kevern (World’s Fair 1893,…). Their mode of operation is to build a network of tunnels unter the city and plunder what they can from below.
Hobby World / Mayday Games
Viceroy is a popular game in its original Russian edition as well as in all the languages it’s been translated to. And what do popular games get? That’s right, expansions. Viceroy: Times of Darkness comes with three expansion modules that all bring their own, new twists. The most interesting one for me, however, is the Underworld module. The most recognizable thing about Viceroy is it’s pyramid-shaped play area where cards are more powerful when played on a higher level, but the cards below have to be there to hold them up. Underword changes that shape into a diamond. You play the new cards below your baseline, as befits their shady status. They’ll have some especially powerful effects, but to play them you must take an unpleasant range of penalties. The Aristrocrats module adds new characters on the proper side of the pyramid. In the Invasion module monsters attack your little kingdom and you have to fight them off. The three very different modules will create very different game experiences.
A-games
You probably know some of those people that talk about the past as “simpler times”. Everyone knows at least one. Those people don’t know Prehistory, the new game on Kickstarter by Ave Roma designer Attila Sz?gyi. It would be wrong to say that Prehistory is very complex, the rulebook only has twelve pages and that’s enough space to explain things in great detail. But there is a lot of detail there, and that applies to the strategy as well. How resource cubes become action cubes from one season to the next, how you get those cubes, what you do with those actions that work differently depending on the season, and what you do in autum that takes place on a different game board – all those things need proper consideration. Doesn’t sound like simpler times to me, but the rulebook sure sounds like playing Prehistory will be fun times.
This week’s featured photo, taken by Flickr user b k, shows the Sixty Dome Mosque in the Mosque City of Bagerhat, Bangladesh. Fun fact about it, it doesn’t have 60 domes but 77. Or 81, if you count the four corner domes. It does, however, have sixty pillars. Either way it’s a beautiful piece of architecture. Thank you for sharing this photo, b k! (60 Dome Mosque, b k, CC-BY-SA, resized and cropped)