Archive for the 'Content Type' Category

Triassic Terror is by the designer of Francis Drake as well as the very good War of the Roses.  It is an area control game with some interesting game mechanics.

During the game, players place dinosaurs (meeple) of their colour in different areas on the board.  A group of dinos of one colour is called a ‘herd’.  Players with the largest (and second largest) herds in each of the 12 areas during the 2 or 3 scoring rounds score points, and the player with the most points at the end of a fixed number of rounds wins.

Each area contains 3 spaces called ‘habitats’.  The biggest herd in an area occupies the primary habitat (scoring the most points), the next largest herd occupies the secondary habitat (scoring fewer points than the primary), and the next largest herd occupies the tertiary habitat (which scores no points but, hey, it’s better than being any smaller as herds not in the 3 largest instantly die).  Whenever herds grow or shrink, the habitats are re-assessed; for example, if there’s a herd of 3 blue dinosaurs in the primary habitat and a herd of 2 red in the secondary habitat grows to 4, then the red herd would move into the primary habitat and the blue herd would move down to the secondary. Read the rest of this entry »

Luchador Mexican Wrestling Dice is a game by Mark Rivera who write the Boardgames in Blighty blog.  I was fortunate to get to try out Luchador a few months ago.  The game can be played one-on-one or played as a 2-v-2 tag team.

Both wrestlers roll their dice simultaneously and compare.  Some results reduce their opponent’s energy, some block incoming blows, some counter (reverse incoming blows), and some results are attempts to pin the opponent.  If a player does enough hits  they can choose to roll the Luchador dice and perform one of their signature moves (unique to each wrestler) for a more impressive and damaging result; however, using the Luchador dice  is a risk and could go wrong.

If an opponent has lost enough energy, pin results let you roll the special pin dice.  If this is successful, the pinned opponent has 3 rolls of their dice (a count of three) with which to escape the pin.  If they fail, they lose the match and it’s game over. Read the rest of this entry »

Mount Everest is a new game by the designer of K2 which is a great game and you can read my review of K2 for more details.

The rules of Mount Everest are very similar to K2 with some additions.  Rather than moving your 2 mountaineers up and down the mountain, you move 2 guides who are taking mountaineers and tourists up and down the mountain.

Your guides can carry equipment with them like a camp and/or oxygen, but this comes at the cost of taking more mountaineers and tourists with them (and it’s those that can earn you points).  Players score points for the clients (mountaineers and tourists) they manage to get to the top (but lose points if they die anywhere on the way up or down).  The tourists are worth more points, if they make it to the summit, but are less acclimatised so are more difficult to get there.  The player with most points after 18 days wins.

As in K2, players have a hand of 6 cards and they get to select 3 cards to use each round.  Players simultaneously reveal their cards and the player who is moving furthest must take one of the 3 face-up risk tokens (which can reduce what you can do in a round).

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21 Mutinies is an intriguing, pirate-themed game.  Each turn, one player is the captain and they declare which of the various actions they are going to carry out.  Then, in order, players choose whether to do the action the captain is doing or they can perform the cabin action or mutiny.

The actions the captain can pick from are:

• Boarding (trade routes) – Buy one of the jewels currently on display in this area with doubloons and rum
• Boarding (non-trade routes) – As trade routes above but jewels are drawn randomly after choosing the action
• Shipwrecks – Take one unseen treasure token (various benefits) if you roll dice high-enough. (Chances reduce after each player.)
• Tavern – Receive a share of rum but the amount to be shared is randomised after picking the action – first-come, first-served.
• Black market – Sell combinations of jewels for doubloons and prestige points.
• Town – Gain one of various benefits like gain rum, buy prestige points, etc.

Many of the actions have slightly different effects and/or pay-offs depending upon which space within that action that the player places their action disc. So, whilst some actions are what you want to do, the remaining options when it is your turn to choose your action, may not be very useful or as good as others. Read the rest of this entry »

During Russian Railroads, players compete to construct the best railroads in Russia.  Whilst there is no map to build across like many railway games, Russian Railroads is a meaty, worker-placement eurogame.

Each round, players take turns allocating their workers (cool-looking meeple with Russian hats) to various actions on the main game board.   For example, a player can lay track along their 3 different rail routes which advances the relevant matching colour marker along any route(s).  There are 5 colours of track marker in the game (each route requiring a different mixture of track marker colours) but these colour markers are not allowed to pass one another or occupy the same space, so this means you’ll need to consider the order in which you advance the track markers too.

Players can also use workers to build and upgrade locomotives that are placed on the rail routes.  At the end of each round, players score the track spaces their locomotives can reach, plus there are some other bonuses when locomotives reach certain spaces too.  Players usually have to take the lowest numbered locomotive available so the timing of building these is important.

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Ogonek (which means ‘Line’) is the expansion for one of my favourite games Kolejka (meaning ‘Queue).  Kolejka is a game where players are queuing for goods at shops in 1980’s Poland.  As crazy as it sounds, it’s a superb game and a very historical theme.  For more details on Kolejka see my full review.

Ogonek adds a few new elements to the game.  One item is that it adds the potential for a 6th player (as Kolejka is 2-5 players) which is a welcome addition.  Having 6 players adds a bit more chaos into proceedings than with fewer players as more things can happen to your plans between your turns.

Ogonek adds alcohol as a new item.  Rather than having to queue at shops for this, players can place one of their queuers on one of the available alcohol goods cards at the side of the board.  At the end of the round, the player receives the alcohol (so it’s not usable in the round they obtain it).  Alcohol can be used to bribe the speculators (the neutral queuers that get in the way) which allows the player to swap places with them in the same queue.  Alcohol can also be used as a substitute item when swapping goods at the market.  So, alcohol is useful but too powerful.
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Like many gamers, I’m always looking for the grail of wargames – an epic-feeling, tactical game with detail, potential for real strategy, limited luck-based elements, and that plays in just a few hours with simple rules.  Admiral’s Order may not tick all those boxes, but the grand scale of it makes me want to find the time to be able to play it.

The part that appeals to me is the tactical play of creating lines of ships, and turning and positioning them to attack the enemy – the sort of thing you see in historical documentaries (and what I was so bad at doing when I played Battlefleet Gothic many years ago).  As you would expect, the wind direction plays an important role in your manoeuvres too.

Players take control of dozens of ships of the line in different naval battles from 1775 – 1815.  The base game contains 74 hand-made ships which do look very cool.  There is a lot of detail in the game including each ship’s status being tracked individually.  The game’s web site says a battle between two frigates may take a couple of hours so playing time seems to be quite long.  The expansion that is available adds a further 60 ships so you can play out the whole Battle of Trafalgar, although it does say that would take an entire weekend!  Totally bonkers, but it’s the kind of crazy I admire.

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Freedom is a co-operative game of freeing slaves in 19th Century America which I think is a great concept.  The board shows the Eastern United States with routes between cities and cubes to represent the slaves.

Each turn is broken into several phases.  First, the slave catchers move along their paths based on a dice roll.  Next, each player chooses which 2 tokens to take and, once all players have selected theirs, they take turns using the tokens.  Some tokens earn income based on where slave cubes are located, some tokens move slave cubes (must be purchased), and the final token type (which also must be purchased) moves the abolitionist movement ahead.  This last token type has game effects plus players must have bought all 8 by the end of the game to fulfil one of the conditions required to win. Read the rest of this entry »

1911 Amundsen vs Scott is a simple 2-player race to the South Pole (and back to the boats if you play the extra advanced variant).  The game is based on the real events where Amundsen beat Scott to the Pole and Scott didn’t return.

Players each have their own path of coloured spaces to move along.  On a player’s turn, they first draw cards which has a nice, simple game mechanic/decision.  There are 3 face-up cards and the player can take the right-most (oldest) 1, 2 or 3 cards, and any remaining cards get moved to the right.  Each cards show one of 4 colours as well as various special actions – some are used when the player draws the card, and some when a player plays the card.

After drawing cards, the player can either (a) play cards to move, or (b) play cards for their special effect (one of which makes the opponent lose their way or move backwards), or (c) play cards to find their route again (due to their opponent making them lose their way).  The first player to move onto the South Pole wins.

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Nosferatu is a group game for 5 to 8 players in the same sort of category as Resistance, Avalon and Werewolf.

One player is Nosferatu’s help Renfield and the other players are vampire hunters.  Well, all apart from one who is actually Nosferatu.  The vampire hunters are trying to kill Nosferatu before the game ends; however, if they stake a legitimate vampire hunter (who is not Nosferatu) then they lose.  So, the vampire hunters have to work out which if them is Nosferatu.

The Renfield player hands out the cards that say who is Nosferatu and who is not so Renfield knows Nosferatu’s identity.  Rather than just leaving it down to talking, the players have cards they must play too.

At the start of a round, each player (except Renfield) draws 2 library cards into their hand.  They then discard 1 from their hand (face-up) and give 1 card from their hand to Renfield (face-down).   Then, they reveal a clock card (the clock deck consists of one night card per player plus one dawn card).  If the clock card is dawn, this phase ends so some players may miss their chance to draw cards. Read the rest of this entry »