Stranded here on Earth, the aliens are slowly trying to get fuel for their ship. In the meantime, tensions are high as they're restricted to a certain area. But how will humans and aliens continue to
Stranded here on Earth, the aliens are slowly trying to get fuel for their ship. In the meantime, tensions are high as they're restricted to a certain area. But how will humans and aliens continue to get along? That's for you to figure out in the District 9 board game from Weta Workshop that's up on Kickstarter now.
From the campaign:
From Weta Workshop and Trishula Entertainment comes District 9: The Boardgame, a competitive 2-4 player game based on the classic sci-fi film. Return to District 9 and relive the three days of the film from a whole new perspective. Lead your Faction through the alien slum in a search for the tech that will give you the edge. Salvage the most technology, take control of the district, and claim your victory!
District 9: The Boardgame is a Kickstarter EXCLUSIVE!
The campaign's closing in on 2x funded with 12 days left to go.
It's Saturday and I'm finally playing in our second session of a D&D campaign that had its first one over a month ago. Tom Petty was right, the waiting is the hardest part. Anyway, while I pretend tha
It's Saturday and I'm finally playing in our second session of a D&D campaign that had its first one over a month ago. Tom Petty was right, the waiting is the hardest part. Anyway, while I pretend that I'm a magical music-man, you can read about all the games that people wanted to talk extra about.
This week we have: Fate of the Elder Gods, Posthuman Saga, Alien Artifacts: Discovery, Warfighter, Karuba, GKR Heavy Hitters, Vampires vs Unicorns: Floor Wars, Skyward, Dispatch: On the Run, Darwin's Choice, and Villagers.
The biggest addition is the new card type, Alien Resource. This is the only new mechanic added to the game by this expansion. The rest of the cards can be shuffled into their corresponding decks from the base game.
The concept and gameplay of Warfighter is not complex. Players select a location and an objective. They then prepare for the mission by selecting characters, gear, and skills. Actions, dice rolls, and card draws during the mission determine the outcome as well as the randomized enemies. Of course, as a card game, almost everything is represented by a card.
Much like with its big brother, the goal in Karuba: The Card Game (TCG) is to get all four of your explorers to their respective temples. To accomplish this, you will be building routes from your deck of cards in a 4×4 grid.
Each player starts the game with an identical deck of 16 cards. From there, players draw a hand of three cards. Each round, they will then attempt to play 2 of those cards. However, each card has a number in the corner, which are added together and the player with the lowest sum must discard one of their chosen cards. Each player then plays the cards into their tableau. Players then draw back up to three cards and the process is repeated.
Each player in GKR: Heavy Hitters controls a giant robot and 3 drones (combat, repair, and recon). Before the game, each player will build a deck of 25 cards consisting of primary and secondary weapons, deploy, movement, reaction, and orbital strike cards. Players also get to choose a unique pilot card that will grant them a special ability.
Players choose their side, either as leader of the Vampires or commander of the Unicorn army. Tiles are arranged about 5 feet apart in pyramid configurations with low level minions in front and the factions stronghold in back.
Using their faction’s card deck, players take turns standing behind their stronghold and throwing cards at the tiles of their opponent in an attempt to destroy their stronghold. Cards that land on the first line of defense, the basic minions, kill them outright. Stronger minions on the second row require two cards to land on them before they are KO’d. While a side has defenders, it takes landing a card entirely on a base to destroy it, but once all the other tiles have been taken out, it only takes a card landing anywhere on the tower to finish it off.
Your goal in Skyward is to build a model capital city to unite a fractured land. Except you’re not on the land! And while everyone’s efforts give new meaning to the term skyline, the whole affair isn’t nearly as harmonious as it sounds. Each player heads a faction endeavoring to outdo the others with more impressive additions so that the city ends up with divided sectors like Cold War Berlin sans wall, barbed wire and machine gun towers. Instead you’ll have airships, pigeons and rocket cat. Yes. Rocket cat.
Dispatch is a monthly subscription mystery in the vein of the modern escape room. Each month a new box is sent to players, and players must solve the mysteries in it. One story is told over seven boxes, and each box contains most of what players need to solve it. However, clues and information available on the web are necessary to successfully navigate each box, and information from one box affects the next. The introductory card in each box gives a hint to players of when the box is considered “solved.”
And so, plays Darwin's Choice, a game of creating and adapting species to their environment by cobbling together bits of other animals like a disturbed taxidermist. Over several rounds you will build new species, move them to better environments and evolve them in the hopes that they both survive and become the top of the food chain.
Darwin’s Choice is played by combining various animal body parts, each one with its own characteristics that help it survive and its own connection points that allow you to add more parts to your weird and wonderful creations. At the end of each round every creature is evaluated against its environment, food is divvied out and points are awarded for the creatures that survive, are best adapted to their environment and are just plain awesome.
Villagers is a smooth, uncomplicated engine builder. Your goal is simple; become the most prosperous village, achieved by attracting the most skilled and industrious villagers who in turn will generate the most gold. You need to not only feed and house them but you’ve got to be able to supply them with the materials and tools they need to do their job also. Not forgetting that you need to draft them into your own personal pool of villagers before any of your neighbours do so; which is the first phase of the game:
Hello Saturday! How are you? Is everything going well? Of course it is! It's Saturday!So, let's not wait around. Let's get right to the reviews so we can get back to it being Saturday. Personally, I'm
Hello Saturday! How are you? Is everything going well? Of course it is! It's Saturday!
So, let's not wait around. Let's get right to the reviews so we can get back to it being Saturday. Personally, I'm thinking of watching a movie and questioning Netflix's algorithms in what "more like this" really means...
Today we have: The Pirate Republic, Kingdomino, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Board Game - Shadows of the Past, Adrenaline, Ave Roma, Hero Realms, Food Truck Champion, Sorcerers' Skirmish, Carcassonne: Amazonas, Oceanos, The Flow of History, Citadels, Broken Legions, Haspelknecht, and GKR: Heavy Hitters.
theMCGuiRE review takes a look at the new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Board Game - Shadows of the Past from IDW Publishing and Kevin Wilson. Man Kevin really made a fun game here and how could you go wrong with the TMNT theme! When I first heard this was coming and Kevin was the designer, I was instantly "in". This is the EPIC Works edition and is packed to the brim with everything you could want. I cant wait to see what they add to this system. I also have the new April O'Neil Hero pack coming out soon to retail.
this is the first in a two part series to unbox this massive game and then play through a few turns. So strap in and get ready to open up this epic game with Part I: The Opening!
Adrenaline is a first-person shooter in board game form. It is action-packed but requires good area control and resource management to win.
Adrenaline does a good job of mixing theme with tactics. On the surface it might look like a random shoot-em-up, but it has a solid Eurogame foundation.
I received Ave Roma in 2016 following the successful Kickstarter campaign and straight away I was impressed. It arrived promptly and looks great straight out of the box. Due to the Kickstarter, it includes a bunch of expansions which really do make the game very good value. A few nice touches to make the workers pillars instead of discs all adds to the appearance. But this is all so much finery – but very much keeping with the theme. Ave Roma is a victory points game based on a complex worker placement mechanism. Euro games have weights, and I’m not going to lie, Ave Roma is so heavy it could well have its own gravitational pull. There are upsides and downsides to this – the upside is that there’s lots of ways to win so it’s never too clear who’s in the best position at any one time. The downside is that learning the game is an absolute bitch.
Each player starts the game with an identical 10 card deck (unless you are playing with the hero packs) and share an 80 card market deck. During a player’s turn, they will be playing cards from their hand to either attack their opponent or purchase cards from the central market. If you’ve ever played a deck building game before (and especially if you’ve played Star Realms), the mechanics will be quite familiar. The goal in Hero Realms is to reduce your opponent’s life to zero.
In Food Truck Champion, each player is the owner of a food truck out to make a name for themselves. As the owner, you will be hiring staff, taking orders and preparing meals… all with the goal of earning awards and increasing your popularity.
As you complete orders, you will earn the right to expand different areas of your food truck, giving you much more flexibility. At the end of the game, the truck owner with the most popularity is the winner.
In Sorcerers’ Skirmish, players will take turns drawing, declaring, casting and resolving spell cards. Each sorcerer’s deck has identical elemental spells but how each player uses their deck is key. Aside from their spells, players should also use any other means to win. Players can count cards, bluff, use logic and hopefully have some luck on their side to be crowned the winner!
A boat race along a pre-Columbian Amazon is the setting for this version of Carcassonne. As players place tiles and use meeples to claim locations, they will also be moving a boat down the great Amazon river with the aim of scoring enough points from villages, tributaries, jungles with animals, and maintaining a lead in a river race.
In Oceanos, you’ll play as a submarine captain rushing out to explore the ocean for fun and profit.
You start with a basic submarine – a single periscope to find your way, a small aquarium to store fish specimens, a diver for treasure collection, and a little extra fuel.
The Flow of History is a card based game that has players guiding their respective civilizations from the agrarian age to the modern. Whoever has accumulated the most culture by game’s end will be the winner. But before learning how the game plays, it’s important to know a couple of things about the cards themselves.
There are six types of cards categorized by color. Whenever you gain a card you will add it to a stack in front of you arranged by type/color. Each card will have at least one production symbol on it as well as an effect written out in the middle. When a new card is placed over an existing one, it will overwrite the previous effect, but leave the production symbols showing.
Every player starts with a single card in their civilization and 4 resource tokens. The rest of the cards are placed in a deck arranged by ages. Cards are drawn off the deck and placed in the middle of the table to comprise the market. Players take turns taking a single action until the deck is depleted. Whoever has accumulated the most culture at this time will be the winner.
Citadels is ostensibly a city-building game because you earn points by building city districts, represented by cards. The goal is to have the most points when you or someone else builds eight districts (seven with 4-8 players in the new edition), triggering the last round of the game. You start with four of these and a couple gold. Each turn you either take two gold or draw two district cards, adding one of them to your hand. Normally, you may build one district each turn by paying the cost indicated on the card, which is also its point value. You can nab bonus points by building the maximum number of districts, owning at least one of the five different kinds of districts (noble, religious, trade, military and unique) and finally with certain unique district cards.
Broken Legions is a ‘warband’ style of skirmish game, so players will each need a warband of between 7 and 12 models a side. Since the game is set in a mythical Ancient Rome timeline, warbands consist of miniatures from the armies of the time: Imperial Rome, Gladiators, Barbarians, Dacians, Parthians, Argonauts (Greeks) and Cult of Set (Egyptians). Most of these miniatures you will find in any 28mm Ancient army that you may have to hand, or maybe one that has been lying in a corner unloved since its days of playing WAB?
Long-time readers of TGN know that I love giant robots. At Gen Con this past year, one of the booths I came across was Weta Workshop and their GKR: Heavy Hitters game. The game really caught my attent
Long-time readers of TGN know that I love giant robots. At Gen Con this past year, one of the booths I came across was Weta Workshop and their GKR: Heavy Hitters game. The game really caught my attention, especially since GKR stands for "Giant Killer Robots" and all. They had said they were going to launch a Kickstarter to fund their game. Well, it's on now!
From the campaign:
GKR: Heavy Hitters is a standalone, deck-building tabletop game for 2-4 players, combining high-quality collectibles with dice-rolling, card-building and tactical play! Pilot your Heavy Hitter (the biggest, baddest robot on the board) and a squad of three Support Units through the ruins of an old city, competing to either wipe your opponent off the map or reduce four skyscrapers to rubble.
The Kickstarter is going now and is set to run for 30 days.
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