WIN a copy of Dark Minions in this year’s Spiel competition

Posted by James (admin) on 30th September 2011

Each year, I have run a competition to win a copy of one of the latest games released at Spiel in Essen. As always the competition will be open to anyone so you don’t need to be at Spiel itself.

I am very pleased to announce that this year, I shall be doing the same.  However, I am also very excited to announce that I am running the competition in association with Z-Man Games who will be providing a copy of Dark Minions as the prize (which they are releasing at Spiel).

This competition has now closed.  You can still read my preview of Dark Minions for details on the game.

James.

http://bdg.ms/afe4

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Posted in Board Games, Dark Minions, Essen Spiel 11 | No Comments »

On the Radar: Dark Minions

Posted by James (admin) on 29th September 2011

I read the rules to Dark Minion recently and it sounds really promising.  The players are all dark hordes descending upon towns to attack and loot them, which I already liked the sound of, but it contains some interesting game mechanics delivering a mix of meeple allocation, area control and dice.

On their turn, a player rolls 3 dice which they use to either attack towns, respawn minions from the graveyard, or capture towers.  Attacking towns is the core of the game where a player can allocates dice to the towns (a maximum of one dice per town) allowing them to place that many minions next to the town.  When there are enough total minions from all players next to a town to exceed its defense number, the town falls and the player who allocated the most minions gets the tile, the victory points (VPs) and the skulls printed on the tile.  Also, the player who allocated the second most minions gets 2 VPs, and the player triggering the event gets 1 VP.

One aspect I really like the sound of is that the 1’s on the dice are actually +1’s which can be added other dice results.  I like this because rolling low in games usually penalises a player through sheer bad luck but, in this case, rolling +1 allows a player to make other dice stronger.  This sounds like a subtle but clever mechanic to balance up the luck of the roll.  Also, this idea is taken further by the white dice – a player can choose to roll a white dice instead of their usual dice which can add +1 or +2 (or a skull) which is also a nice idea. Read the rest of this entry »

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Posted in Board Games, Dark Minions, Essen Spiel 11, On the Radar | 40 Comments »