Meople News: Cake and Dinosaurs

Mindclash Games

Between Trickerion and Cerebria we’ve learned to really pay attention when Mindclash Games have a new game coming. Everything about Perseverance: Castaway Chronicles says that is the right policy. This new game is about a group of people who’s cruise ship was lost in a storm and who then find themselves on a strange island inhabited by dinosaurs. Or should I say “these games”? Perseverance is one Kickstarter and will deliver one box, but inside are two episodes of the game. They share core game mechanism, both are dice drafting and placement games, but in the details the two episodes do their own thing. You can play either of them as a standalone game, or you can play the Chronicle mode where you chain the two together and events from the first episode have an impact on the second. Like Mindclash’s other games, Perseverance looks like a game you can really sink your teeth into. Or the dinosaurs sink their teeth into you. It could go either way, really.

Geek Attitude Games / Stronghold Games

It’s shipwreck week on Kickstarter! But the players in Not Alone didn’t just wreck a cruise ship, they went and crashed their spaceship into an uncharted planet where they’re now being hunted by an unknown creature. Well… most of the players crashed their spaceship. One player is the creature. On Kickstarter right now is Not Alone: Sanctuary, the latest expansion to the 2016 game. The basics of the asymmetric card game stay the same, but there are interesting changes for both sides. The human survivors can now visit the titular flying fortress, a location that becomes stronger but also harder to reach as the game progresses. To even the odds, the Creature now evolves at the end of each round and becomes a more and more dangerous opponent.

Daily Magic Games

Shadow Kingdoms of Valeria
(Daily Magic Games)

For thousands upon thousands of games, so-called monsters have been slaughtered by self-proclaimed heroes. Really, they are imperialists who oppose other ways of life and fight to expand their lands. The monsters had enough. In Shadow Kingdoms of Valeria the monsters fight back. As a Warden of monsters you’ll travel around and recruit different types of monster dice to your army, which you’ll then use to execute battle plans in your fight for freedom. Recruiting the right troops to your army is at the core of Shadow Kingdoms of Valeria, especially since they not only fight your battles but also offer discounts on other actions. However, it’s also an engine building games where you unlock bonuses and abilities in different ways to help you win battles faster than your opponents. It’s not enough to defeat those pesky humans, dwarfs, and elves, after all. You want to be the first to defeat them.

Fantasy Flight Games

Interestingly, the first official announcement we can find for a new Fantasy Flight Games expansion comes from the German Asmodee website. Excuse the German behind the link, I’m sure English language details will be available soon. The expansion in question, and I’m only going to write the full name once, is Sid Meier’s Civilization: A New Dawn – Terra Incognita. Has to be a pretty big box to fit that title. Inside, you’ll find a different way to play Civilization. Gone are the days when the board is laid out at the start of the game. True to the name Terra Incognita, you’ll now start with a small part of the world set up, and you’ll have to discover more of it to expand your empire. (That was always my favorite game mode in Catan: Seafarers, so I’m extra excited about it here.) The other big change happens inside your capital. You can now expand it with up to five boroughs that give you different boosts and bonuses. More options and complexity in all the right places.

Gold Seal Games

Most tile laying games don’t last long enough for plate tectonics to have any effect. Meteor strikes tend to not be an issue, either. That all changes with Cracked Earth: Pangea in Pieces. The simple goal is to have the dinosaur majority on a continent when a meteor strikes. Two difficulties with that. Getting more dinosaurs on the board works in the natural way, meaning you need to dinosaurs on the same tile to get a third. Also, continents don’t stay in the shape they are, as part of your turn you may shift a tile to somewhere else, thus changing the continents and the majorities on them. That sounds great, but let us be honest here: you had me at dinosaur meeples.

WizKids

I often skip the ultralight and silly games for our news, mostly because there are too many games to pay attention to already. However, even I can’t resist a game that is played on a 3D three-tiered layer cake as a sort of board. In The Great Cake Escape you want to break a friend out of prison by the proven method of hiding tools in a cake. Whoever hides their tools best, wins. To make sure that is you, when you push your own tools in you might dislodge other players’ tools – entirely by accident, of course – and make them more visible or even push them out of the cake entirely. So yeah, it’s light and silly, but that cake is special.

This week’s featured photo shows the Mosque of Ibn Tulun in Cairo, Egypt. Built and consecrated in the ninth century, it’s the oldest mosque in Africa to survive in its original form. It’s also part of the Historic Cairo World Heritage Site. The photo was taken and kindly shared by Flickr user south. Thanks a lot, south! (Ibn Tulun Mosque, Cairo, south, CC-BY-SA, resized and cropped)

Leave a Reply