The original Dice Town is a great little dice-rolling game of second-guessing your opponents.  Desperados of Dice Town is set in the same setting but is a completely different game.  Players each have 5 desperados (each a different type) who begin locked up in jail.  During the game, players will free their desperados and start gaining money (and make other players lose money).

On their turn, a player rolls the 4 dice (with up to 2 re-rolls of any of the dice).  Each dice has an ‘Action’ icon on 1 side and a character icon for each of the 5 different desperado character types (bad, ugly, brains, lady and boss) on the other 5 sides.  Once they’ve finished rolling the dice, a player then chooses which action to take.

For each action icon rolled, the player can have any character who’s icon was also rolled take an action.  For example, a player rolls 2 action icons, 1 bad character icon and 1 lady character icon – the player could either have the bad character act twice, the lady character act twice, or have both the bad and the lady characters act once each.  If a character is in jail, an action moves them one step closer to escaping.  If a character is free, an action makes all players lose money if their character of the same type are still in jail.  Alternatively, instead of actions, a player can use 3 or 4 matching icons to draw cards which have special powers.  Players also get a card if they roll rubbish too (4 different character icons and no action icon).

A player wins as soon as they have freed all of their desperados and has the most money. Read the rest of this entry »

Expedition: Northwest Passage looks like a very interesting game.  Players each have a ship, a sled and some crew and are trying to explore the unknown, find the Northwest Passage and return back to Greenland (from where they start).  Players score victory points (VPs) for finding the Northwest Passage, returning to Greenland, and for finding evidence of the (real-life) expedition that disappeared in a previous attempt.

Two key things make this task tricky.  First, the landscape of land and sea is only revealed by the players placing tiles as they cross into the unknown territory.  Second, and more unusually, the position of the sun (which moves predictably each round) makes a massive difference because any tiles that are north of the sun’s position are frozen – this means ship’s on frozen tiles can not move across the frozen sea, but sleds can.  Of course, you need to be careful not to trap your sled on the frozen sea when it melts too or it will be lost. Read the rest of this entry »