Grey Fox Games
The time of Champions is over. Bring in the Reavers. Reavers of Midgard is Grey Fox Games’s stand-alone sequel to Champions of Midgard and is a single worker placement game. You have one worker. You place it. It’s never quite that simple, of course. When you place your worker, you take that action. Then everyone else benefits from your choice as well, more the closer their worker is to yours. And what about those Reavers? They are mighty warriors that will join your viking crew. Each of them brings a few fighters with them in the form of different dice. Then you get to chose if you want them to bring even more fighters, or if you want them to lead your crew, or if you want them to specialize in something else and boost your benefits from specific actions. Then you go out to plunder, pillage, raid, and kill the occasional monster. You know, the simple viking life.
NSKN Games
New on Kickstarter from NSKN Games is Imperium, a deck-building civilization game. Five great cultures of the ancient world start with different decks, each emphasizing that culture’s individual strengths. You expand that deck with vassal states, innovations, and other things that make a nation great. Take care which cards are in your deck, which are in your tableau, and adapt to the changing conditions every game, and you might just forge the greatest civilization on Earth. Imperium will play more quickly than your typical civilization game, but it certainly won’t lack depth.
Games Workshop
Warhammer 40.000 goes dungeon crawling. In the far reaches of the human empire of grimdarkness a new Blackstone Fortress has appeared, a citadel left behind by some unknown precursor species. It is a powerful weapon, but it is also much more. A repository of pre-human artifacts and vast knowledge. It is the players’ job in Blackstone Fortress, a stand-alone dungeon crawler, to discover and secure its secrets. Blackstone Fortress has many classic RPG elements, for instance your characters will level up and be rewarded with new gear between missions. It combines that with interesting new ways to generate random dungeon layouts for you to explore, possibly even to change said layouts as you get lost in them. You can’t trust this ancient xeno tech.
Fantasy Flight Games
When you have a large number of different factions in a game, there’s often one that is composed of outsiders, people (in the loosest sense) that didn’t fit in anywhere else. In Fantasy Flight’s KeyForge this faction is House Untamed. I hereby declare for House Untamed. Why? Because they have a creature called the Snufflegator. Case closed.
For adventurers in fantasy games anywhere there’s a good chance they got their start killing rats in the cellar of an inn somewhere. The heroes in Heroes of Terrinoth, Fantasy Flight’s cooperative card game (and re-skin of Warhammer Quest) have skipped this traditional first step and proceed to killing goblins in their very first quest. Three locations, tons of goblins, and their oversized king Splig.
This week’s beautiful panorama was taken at the Simien Mountains National Park in Ethiopia. It was taken and kindly shared by Jasmine Halki. Thanks a lot, Jasmine! (Panorama of Semien Mountains, Ethiopia, Jasmine Halki, CC-BY, resized and cropped)