What's the best animal? Ok, I mean, we know it's the polar bear. But beyond that. What's the next-best animal? Well, in The Champion of the Wild, you take on the role of an animal trainer that can com
What's the best animal? Ok, I mean, we know it's the polar bear. But beyond that. What's the next-best animal? Well, in The Champion of the Wild, you take on the role of an animal trainer that can communicate directly with the animals in your care, and you're looking to train them to be the best that they can be before entering them in various events. The game is up on Kickstarter now.
From the campaign:
The Champion of the Wild is a social card game for 3-6 players in which you take on the role of an animal trainer born with the innate ability to communicate with all animals. It takes about 20-30 minutes to play.
You'll need to choose one animal (and ONLY one animal) to compete on your behalf in 3 different physical events. As the animal's coach, you will come up with your strategy for each event and explain to your competitors, before going on to analyse the likely performance of yours and the other animals by way of a conversational thought experiment.
How will you choose to stack your anacondas...? Where can your eagle hide in the stately home? How will you joust on your killer whale?
Once most of the players have made up their minds on the likely rankings, you move on to a blind voting system where you rank all the OTHER animals as to how you think they'd finish.
A great quick social game with a unique theme - The Champion of the Wild has already funded on Kickstarter after just over 24 hours and once you've backed the project there's a chance to be involved in the art direction and get your name on a card by suggesting new events for the animals to compete in.
So put on your armour, saddle up on your lion and come and join the fun!
The campaign is already over its funding goal, so it's on to stretch goals for the next 29 days.
Hey everyone. We've made it around to another weekend. I said I was going to probably be doing some baking. Well, I've got some magic cookie bars cooling right now. I love these things... probably too
Hey everyone. We've made it around to another weekend. I said I was going to probably be doing some baking. Well, I've got some magic cookie bars cooling right now. I love these things... probably too much... *looks at my stomach* ... definitely too much. But issues with my waistline aside, I hope you're having a good weekend so far. I'm sure many of you are out gaming, which is awesome. But if you're stopping by here, I know it's because you want to check out those gaming reviews I know you all so desperately desire.
So, as I sip on a Pineapple Crush and wait for these bars to finish cooling, today we have: The Walking Dead: All Out War, Exit the Game, Legendary: X-Men Expansion, Orleans, Quantum, Race for the Galaxy App, First Martians: Adventures on the Red Planet, Serengeti, Stone Age, Maze Racers, Purrrlock Holmes: Furriarty's Trail, Memoarrr!, The Goonies Adventure Card Game, Photosynthesis, Incantris, Hafid's Grand Bazaar, Ascension X: War of Shadows, Fate of the Elder Gods, and The Champion of the Wild.
The Walking Dead: All Out War is a skirmish game that pits your survivors against your opponent’s and you both must deal with hordes of zombies. It can be played as a cooperative or solo board game too.
X-Men is a big box expansion for Marvel Legendary the Deckbuilding Game. It features heroes and villains from the X-Men comics and adds some new mechanics to the Marvel Legendary series.
Orleans is a bag-building and worker placement board game. You must increase your followers to take more actions, get board position and gain more VPs.
Frankly, this section is almost unnecessary for Maze Racers. You can probably figure out what you need to do by looking at the back of the box, which is one reason why Maze Racers works so well. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
A starting block is placed in one agreed upon quadrant of the board, while the goal is placed in another. Say go and each player tries to build a maze as quickly and creatively as possible. The walls are rigid foam with a magnet on the bottom. As everyone should be familiar with what a maze is, teaching the game takes seconds. The only rule is that the maze has to be possible to complete. A spacer stick is included for checking your work.
In Purrrlock Holmes, each player will have a suspect card in front of them that displays the suspect and time of the crime they are trying to solve. You cannot see your own suspect card and must perform investigation actions to solve the crime.
When you investigate, you play one of the 4 suspect cards in your hand. Other players will tell you if it is a lead or a dead end. If the suspect on the card matches your suspect, it is always a lead. Alternately, if the time on the card is within an hour of the time your crime was committed it is also a lead. Everything else is a dead end.
Players are tasked with moving the three potion ingredients necessary to the bubbling cauldron at the center of the circular game board. The issue is that you don’t know which ingredient is in each of the potion bottles at the start of the game. Each turn, players will roll the set action dice to determine what they will do on their turn.
Players may be able to move one of the potion bottles closer to the center, move the Wizard looking to block your path or send bottles back, place a path blocker on one of the six paths, or roll the magic dice.
Being a family weight game, Memoarrr! is about as easy to learn as you might expect. The deck of cards in Memoarrr! is comprised of 25 cards, each card containing one of 5 different backgrounds and one of 5 different characters. The 25 cards are randomly laid out in a face down grid, and the center card is replaced with the scoring cards.
Each player gets to look at 3 cards before the game begins. The first player then randomly flips over a card. The next player clockwise must then flip over a card that matches either the background or the character on the card the first player flipped.
As The Goonies is a family weight game, learning to play is fairly easy. Each player will control one of the famous Goonies characters, each of which has 2 special abilities.
Incantris is a wizard dueling/skirmish game that uses dice to settle the score. Unlike some games of this type, you are not required to build a deck or otherwise create your army/team in order to play. Simply choose your team of three wizards from the pre-made teams and start attacking each other! Each team has their own unique abilities and things they do “best,” so each one plays a little differently.
Merchants enter Hafid’s Grand Bazaar hoping to emerge from their commercial haggling the wealthiest trader. And a grand bazaar indeed it is. With five unique goods each in five different commodity types – from cut gems to goats to ore to carpets to olive oil – it’s a veritable medieval Wal-Mart! You accumulate goods through bidding for caravan loads, negotiating with your competitors and with just a little outright luck. Okay, maybe more than a little.
In Ascension X, like previous games, you can play your entire hand without limitation, buying cards and fighting monsters in any order. Runes are used to buy cards, Strength to fight monsters, and you accrue Honor tokens to score points. A pool of 6 cards in the center of the table contains the monsters you’ll be fighting along with the heroes and constructs you’ll be adding to your deck.
In Fate of the Elder Gods, players take on the ever-maddening role of cults trying to summon ancient evil and herald the fall of mankind! Each cult is in competition to be first to summon their god, but they all must also repel intrepid investigators working to seal off the gate to beyond with Elder signs. Gather arcane artifacts, cast powerful spells, embrace the Dark Gift of your Elder God, and be first to hasten doom…before it’s too late!
It's a board game review cliché to say "if you like this kind of game, you'll like this game". It's a tired and lazy get-out clause for a reviewer, they can thoroughly dislike a game and then issue this kind of statement completely admonishing any form of reviewer responsibility while remaining pretty, positive and ever so cuddly. It is a phrase I detest, but trying to write a review of The Champion of the Wild while avoiding this statement is turning into the literal equivalent of a daytime charge across the minefield.
Hey everyone. We've made it around to another weekend. I said I was going to probably be doing some baking. Well, I've got some magic cookie bars cooling right now. I love these things... probably too
Hey everyone. We've made it around to another weekend. I said I was going to probably be doing some baking. Well, I've got some magic cookie bars cooling right now. I love these things... probably too much... *looks at my stomach* ... definitely too much. But issues with my waistline aside, I hope you're having a good weekend so far. I'm sure many of you are out gaming, which is awesome. But if you're stopping by here, I know it's because you want to check out those gaming reviews I know you all so desperately desire.
So, as I sip on a Pineapple Crush and wait for these bars to finish cooling, today we have: The Walking Dead: All Out War, Exit the Game, Legendary: X-Men Expansion, Orleans, Quantum, Race for the Galaxy App, First Martians: Adventures on the Red Planet, Serengeti, Stone Age, Maze Racers, Purrrlock Holmes: Furriarty's Trail, Memoarrr!, The Goonies Adventure Card Game, Photosynthesis, Incantris, Hafid's Grand Bazaar, Ascension X: War of Shadows, Fate of the Elder Gods, and The Champion of the Wild.
The Walking Dead: All Out War is a skirmish game that pits your survivors against your opponent’s and you both must deal with hordes of zombies. It can be played as a cooperative or solo board game too.
X-Men is a big box expansion for Marvel Legendary the Deckbuilding Game. It features heroes and villains from the X-Men comics and adds some new mechanics to the Marvel Legendary series.
Orleans is a bag-building and worker placement board game. You must increase your followers to take more actions, get board position and gain more VPs.
Frankly, this section is almost unnecessary for Maze Racers. You can probably figure out what you need to do by looking at the back of the box, which is one reason why Maze Racers works so well. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
A starting block is placed in one agreed upon quadrant of the board, while the goal is placed in another. Say go and each player tries to build a maze as quickly and creatively as possible. The walls are rigid foam with a magnet on the bottom. As everyone should be familiar with what a maze is, teaching the game takes seconds. The only rule is that the maze has to be possible to complete. A spacer stick is included for checking your work.
In Purrrlock Holmes, each player will have a suspect card in front of them that displays the suspect and time of the crime they are trying to solve. You cannot see your own suspect card and must perform investigation actions to solve the crime.
When you investigate, you play one of the 4 suspect cards in your hand. Other players will tell you if it is a lead or a dead end. If the suspect on the card matches your suspect, it is always a lead. Alternately, if the time on the card is within an hour of the time your crime was committed it is also a lead. Everything else is a dead end.
Players are tasked with moving the three potion ingredients necessary to the bubbling cauldron at the center of the circular game board. The issue is that you don’t know which ingredient is in each of the potion bottles at the start of the game. Each turn, players will roll the set action dice to determine what they will do on their turn.
Players may be able to move one of the potion bottles closer to the center, move the Wizard looking to block your path or send bottles back, place a path blocker on one of the six paths, or roll the magic dice.
Being a family weight game, Memoarrr! is about as easy to learn as you might expect. The deck of cards in Memoarrr! is comprised of 25 cards, each card containing one of 5 different backgrounds and one of 5 different characters. The 25 cards are randomly laid out in a face down grid, and the center card is replaced with the scoring cards.
Each player gets to look at 3 cards before the game begins. The first player then randomly flips over a card. The next player clockwise must then flip over a card that matches either the background or the character on the card the first player flipped.
As The Goonies is a family weight game, learning to play is fairly easy. Each player will control one of the famous Goonies characters, each of which has 2 special abilities.
Incantris is a wizard dueling/skirmish game that uses dice to settle the score. Unlike some games of this type, you are not required to build a deck or otherwise create your army/team in order to play. Simply choose your team of three wizards from the pre-made teams and start attacking each other! Each team has their own unique abilities and things they do “best,” so each one plays a little differently.
Merchants enter Hafid’s Grand Bazaar hoping to emerge from their commercial haggling the wealthiest trader. And a grand bazaar indeed it is. With five unique goods each in five different commodity types – from cut gems to goats to ore to carpets to olive oil – it’s a veritable medieval Wal-Mart! You accumulate goods through bidding for caravan loads, negotiating with your competitors and with just a little outright luck. Okay, maybe more than a little.
In Ascension X, like previous games, you can play your entire hand without limitation, buying cards and fighting monsters in any order. Runes are used to buy cards, Strength to fight monsters, and you accrue Honor tokens to score points. A pool of 6 cards in the center of the table contains the monsters you’ll be fighting along with the heroes and constructs you’ll be adding to your deck.
In Fate of the Elder Gods, players take on the ever-maddening role of cults trying to summon ancient evil and herald the fall of mankind! Each cult is in competition to be first to summon their god, but they all must also repel intrepid investigators working to seal off the gate to beyond with Elder signs. Gather arcane artifacts, cast powerful spells, embrace the Dark Gift of your Elder God, and be first to hasten doom…before it’s too late!
It's a board game review cliché to say "if you like this kind of game, you'll like this game". It's a tired and lazy get-out clause for a reviewer, they can thoroughly dislike a game and then issue this kind of statement completely admonishing any form of reviewer responsibility while remaining pretty, positive and ever so cuddly. It is a phrase I detest, but trying to write a review of The Champion of the Wild while avoiding this statement is turning into the literal equivalent of a daytime charge across the minefield.