board games

Greetings! A few nuggets of Tabletop news this week. Hope you are all keeping safe and getting some gaming done! Let’s crack on…

Free Games!

Stuck at home with nothing to do? Well, various publishers have banded together to offer free versions of their games, including the wonderful Corinth!

Check out the list HERE, courtesy of Board Game Geek!

Abandon All Artichokes

A very silly looking deck builder!

From the publisher:

Abandon All Artichokes isn’t your garden-variety card game!

A bumper-crop of prickly produce has overtaken your patch, and there’s only one choice: abandon all artichokes! Prune your deck by harvesting fresh vegetables, each with a special power that lets you swap, discard, or compost cards. You need luck, strategy, and a green thumb to grow a winning hand!

Shadows Over Brooklyn

Shadows Over Camelot is the classic co-op game with a hidden traitor and is a bonafide masterpiece if played with the Merlin expansion and there is a new version on the way! Gone is the medieval theme and in comes an 19th century Brooklyn setting. Very interesting!

From the publisher:

The action takes place at the end of the 19th century, in a Brooklyn where players are the descendants of the Knights of the Round Table. A secret society that hides the Grail in the depths of the city to protect it from the assaults of the super-villains of that time (such as Moriarty, Frankenstein, etc.).

The game is dynamic, and you can always move around and play — no more chances of getting stuck for hours in the same place as before for the grail. There is special steampunk equipment made by M, which when used in combos, allows for very powerful effects and puts a tactical spin on the game.

More news in the summer for this one!

Abyssal Line

This looks interesting (as most Japanese games do!) and was meant to be released at the now postponed Tokyo Game Market in June. The publisher is now looking at other options.

From the designer:

In Abyssal Line, you are an oceanographer seeking to cultivate an interest in the wonders of the ocean’s depths while studying its creatures. To better pursue these goals, you have become the captain of a deep-sea sightseeing vessel. Your passengers expect exciting encounters with mysterious creatures at the bottom of the sea; ensure they have an enjoyable trip, and their satisfaction will increase.

However, navigating the darkest depths of the ocean is no easy feat. You need to seek inspiration from the creatures that dwell there in order to upgrade your ship’s equipment. Doing so will make it easier for you to sail your plotted course.

You also want to publish your findings as you expand your knowledge of deep-sea creatures while piloting your vessel.

Will you be able to overcome the adversities of the abyss and gain prestige as both deep-sea captain and oceanographer?

Ankh: Gods of Egypt

Eric Lang is back with his latest ‘dudes on a map’ game. It’s on Kickstarter right now. You can check the campaign out HERE.

From the publisher:

Play as a god of ancient Egypt, competing to survive as society begins to forget the old ways so that only you and your followers remain.

Build caravans, summon monsters, and convert followers in your quest to reign supreme in Ankh: Gods of Egypt. Deities, monsters, and the people of ancient Egypt have been lovingly reimagined and interpreted in beautiful illustrations and detailed miniatures, and players will truly feel like gods as they shake the very foundations of Egypt. All gameplay in Ankh, including combat, is streamlined and non-random. Compete and win solely on your godly wits alone.

That’s all for this week!

With the COVID-19 situation happening worldwide, news from the Tabletop world has crawled to a virtual standstill. However, we have a few nuggets for you. Stay safe and social distance!

Welcome To New Las Vegas

Big fan of Welcome To…? Well, there is a sequel on the way. New theme. New mechanics.

From the publisher:

Rediscover the joy of Welcome To… with a new theme and new mechanisms in Welcome To New Las Vegas!

The game plays with a set of two different sheets — one dedicated to the map, the other used to keep track of the score and objectives — where you have to build and open casinos in the streets, hotels in avenues, create golf courses, give performances to the tourists, and move limousines for VIPs in order to build the greatest and most entertaining city and win the game!

Welcome To New Las Vegas keeps the same roll-and-write with dice-without-dice mechanism from Welcome to… Your Perfect Home: you flip cards from three piles to make three different sets with both a casino number and a corresponding action from which everyone chooses one. You use the number to fill in a casino on your street in numerical order. And everyone is racing to be the first to complete public goals. There’s lots to do and many paths to becoming the best resort architect in Welcome To New Las Vegas!

Because of the communal actions, game play is simultaneous and thus supports large groups of players. With many varying strategies and completely randomized action sets, no two games will feel the same!

Robinson Crusoe – Treasure Chest

Missed out on all the promos that were released for Robinson Crusoe? Fear not! They are all being collected in one box for your playing pleasure. Out at the end of the year.

From the publisher:

Treasure Chest is a special expansion including a complete set of Robinson Crusoe promos that have been released up to 2020, thereby giving players an enormous amount of content and variability to the game.

Inside the box players will find extra Characters (Gamer and Sailor), a set of Crewmen, Hunting Dog, Character Trait cards, additional Mystery cards, Event cards, Discovery Tokens, Searching the Beach cards, Volcano tile, and even an epic Spyglass. Hunting will also get more exciting with new Beast cards and Hunting Adventures cards. Robinson’s shelter will get an option of upgrading and adding a Garden and Pen. Treasure Chest will also include four additional scenarios: Tracing Dr. Livingstone, Treasure Island, Poachers, and Time Travel.

Mysterium Park

We are big fans of Mysterium here and this has us excited!

From the publisher:

Welcome to Mysterium Park! Its cotton candies, its circus, its dark secrets…

The park’s former director has disappeared, but the investigation came to nothing. Since that night, weird things are happening on the fairground. As psychics, you’re convinced that a ghost haunts this carnival… You’re now intent on giving it a chance to reveal the truth.
In this cooperative stand-alone game, the ghost sends visions with illustrated cards. The psychics try to interpret them in order to rule out certain suspects and locations. Then, they’ll seize their only chance to piece together what happened to the director. You have only six nights before the carnival leaves town… Open your minds and find the truth!

Set in the lights of a 1950’s US fairground, Mysterium Park shares the same core mechanism with the famous award-winning game it reimplements, though bringing a different approach: it is smaller and faster, thanks to very quick setup and simplified rules.

Due at the end of 2020.

Merchants of the Dark Road

Loving the art on this one. Elf Creek Games are always easy on the eye and this is no different. Hitting Kickstarter in April.

From the designer:

After half a year of daylight, we must now prepare for the dark season. The roads will be treacherous but they will still need to be braved by a select few in order to keep our cities thriving. In Merchants of the Dark Road, you are one of these brave few merchants that travel the dangerous paths between cities. While the job is perilous, fame and fortune await.

Discover the capital city where most of your actions will take place using a rondel action system. Collect and produce items to add to your caravan, or sell these items to local heroes and hire them to travel with you. Manipulate the market price of items, visit the back alley sellers, or delve a nearby dungeon for magical items to gain the potential for even more coin and notoriety.

Gather lanterns to ease your passage along the dark roads as you guide your caravan to distant villages. Deliver goods and heroes to the best destinations and gain fame for your bravery! Balance the money you earn with the height of your fame because your final score after a number of game rounds will reflect the lowest of these two values.

After all, what good is a purse full of the coin if the people don’t sing songs about you, and what good is a song with an empty mug of ale?

Frosthaven

The sequel to Gloomhaven has just hit Kickstarter and it took $4 million USD in 24 hours. Let’s just say its popular. All the issues of Gloomhaven have been fixed and gameplay has been expanded. We were on the fence about the original game but this one has us interested. You can check out the Kickstarter campaign HERE.

From the designer:

Frosthaven is the story of a small outpost far to the north of the capital city of White Oak, an outpost barely surviving the harsh weather as well as invasions from forces both known and unknown. There, a group of mercenaries at the end of their rope will help bring back this settlement from the edge of destruction.

Not only will they have to deal with the harsh elements, but there are other, far more dangerous threats out in the unforgiving cold as well. There are Algox, the bigger, more yeti-like cousins of the Inox, attacking from the mountains; Lurkers flooding in from the northern sea; and rumours of machines that wander the frozen wastes of their own free will. The party of mercenaries must face all of these perils, and perhaps in doing so, make peace with these new races so they can work together against even more sinister forces.

Frosthaven is a standalone adventure from the designer and publisher of Gloomhaven that features sixteen new characters, three new races, more than twenty new enemies, more than one hundred new items, and a new, 100-scenario campaign.

In addition to having the well-known combat mechanisms of Gloomhaven, Frosthaven will feature much more to do outside of combat, such as numerous mysteries to solve, a seasonal event system to live through, and player control over how this ramshackle village expands, with each new building offering new ways to progress.

Characters and items from Gloomhaven will be usable in Frosthaven, and vice versa:

As revealed during PAX 2020, Frosthaven will be interchangeable with the original Gloomhaven board game. To an extent, anyway. Namely, you can use Gloomhaven’s characters in Frosthaven and vice versa. What’s more, some of the first game’s items will become available throughout the sequel.

Frosthaven has a whole new set of items but there is a mechanic for bringing items over from Gloomhaven. However, as it is a remote location, these products get imported and are not there as standard. Resources are much more valuable and you have to build items through a crafting system rather than just buy them.

Backed!

New Year. New Games. We are only halfway through January and there are already some amazing games on the horizon. Let’s have a look!

Return to The Dark Tower

Who remembers the original Dark Tower game? You always had a friend who had it and was immensely jealous of them because of: 1. you couldn’t afford it and 2. it was very hard to find even if you could afford it! Well, Rob Daviau and Isaac Childres are bringing it back! Hope your wallet is ok…

From the publisher:

For an age, the tower lay in ruins. Unbeknownst to the people of the realm, a great evil stirred in its bowels. It started with strange sightings: a flock of crows flying in circles until they dropped from the sky, the lake frozen solid in the height of summer. In time, they could not deny that which they most feared.

The evil had not been vanquished. The darkness would soon fall again. The tower will rise.

A “sequel” to the 1981 grail game, Return to Dark Tower is a cooperative game for 1-4 players who take the role of heroes. Together, they gather resources, raise buildings, defeat monsters, and undertake quests to build up their strength and discern what foe ultimately awaits them. When the heroes face the tower, the game shifts into its dramatic second act, where the players have one chance to defeat the enemy once and for all.

The game features traditional game mechanisms, such as engine building and resource management, paired with a technological interface unlike any seen before in games, including the titular tower, which holds more than a few secrets.

We can’t wait for this one. It’s on Kickstarter right now and doing very, very well. Funded on Day 1. You can check the campaign HERE. the only downer to all this is, it’s not due in our hands until February 2021!

Cosmic Encounter: Duel

A two-player Cosmic Encounter? Hmmm. Not sure about this. As long as it’s not watered down from the original, it might be pretty good. Fingers crossed…

From the publisher:

The Cosmic Citizenship Council has announced it will allow two new alien species to join its ranks, but they forgot to make two copies of the filing form — which means that only one species can join! Now, the two candidates must battle for control of the planets to determine who deserves the right to become a Certified Civilization.

Cosmic Encounter Duel is a competitive standalone two-player game in the Cosmic Encounter universe in which you and your closest frenemy race to be the first to control five planets. Each of twenty-seven alien species comes equipped with its own unique abilities that play with the game mechanisms in some way, offering you an edge in the fight, e.g., the Cheater, who can reserve an additional tactic that they can put toward any fight in the game — as long as their opponent doesn’t call out how they’re trying to “cheat”. How your game of Cosmic Encounter Duel plays out will inevitably be affected by which powers each duelling species has and how they play off of one another.

This is due to hit shops in April of this year!

The Shining

Who would have thought The Shining would get a board game!? Certainly not us.

Not much is known at the moment apart from it’s a 3 to 5 player co-op and it’s from the makers of the Black Mirror: NOSEDIVE game and the upcoming Top Gun Strategy Game.

From the publisher:

All work and no play…

You’ve travelled into the heart of the Rocky Mountains to take charge of the Overlook Hotel while it is closed for the winter — except you aren’t alone. The Hotel’s bloody history has made some of its past guests a permanent addition to the building, and with them come terrifying visions that begin to corrupt your mind. Snowed in, you desperately explore the rooms of the Hotel, attempting to gain enough willpower to withstand the evil influence around you. Worse still, one of you has already succumbed to the terrible forces of the Hotel and secretly acts to keep you here forever and ever…

The Shining is a suspenseful game of co-operation, deception, and terror!

Cosmic Frog: World Eater from Dimension Zero

It’s only January and we possibly have the best title for a game and box art too. Fantastic!

From the designer:

Cosmic Frog is a game of collection, combat, and theft on a planetary scale. Each player controls a two-mile-tall, immortal, invulnerable frog-like creature that exists solely to gather terrain from the Shards of Aeth, the fragments of a long-ago shattered world. The First Ones seek to use the lands from the Shards to reconstruct the world of Aeth, and your frogs are their terrain harvesters.

At the start of the game, your frogs descend from the Aether, the cosmic sea between the worlds, onto a terrain-rich Shard of Aeth. Once on the Shard, you harvest the land and store it in your massive gullet. When your gullet is sufficiently full, you leap into the Aether and disgorge your gullet contents into your inter-dimensional vault for permanent storage, then return to the Shard to collect more land. Although your frogs’ collective mission is to gather as much land as possible for the First Ones, your private goal is to prove yourself to be the greatest of their harvesters by delivering to them the most valuable vault. To do this, you have to fill your vault strategically in a manner that both maximizes linear sets of identical lands and maximizes the diversity of lands in your vault at the end of the game.

Throughout the game, you’re free to keep to yourself and focus on harvesting at your own pace…or you may attack other frogs and try to take lands directly from their gullets. You may even raid another frog’s vault and steal the lands they have gathered if they have been knocked into the dreaded Outer Dimensions. As you are all immortal and invulnerable, no frog is ever wounded or killed — just irritated and inconvenienced.

Sounds interesting. It’s debuting at GenCon 2020 and will be for sale at the event also.

Mariposas

Elizabeth Hargrave is back with another beautiful design. After the massive success of Wingspan, we wondered what her next big box game was going to be and here it is. Mariposas. It’s all about butterflies.

From the publisher:

Every spring, millions of monarch butterflies leave Mexico to spread out across eastern North America. Every fall, millions fly back to Mexico. However, no single butterfly ever makes the round trip.

Mariposas is a game of movement and set collection that lets players be part of this amazing journey.

Mariposas is played in three seasons. In general, your butterflies try to head north in spring, spread out in summer, and return south in fall. The end of each season brings a scoring round, and at the end of fall, the player with the most successful family of butterflies — i.e., the most victory points — wins the game.

Set collection and grid movement. Our type of game.

Look for this at GenCon also.

Quick and easy this week. The news will only keep on rolling in as the days pass by. 2020 is going to be a great year for TableTop.