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 »

Yggdrasil is a co-operative game where the players are Norse gods trying to stop the evil ones causing the end of the world.  The first thing that strikes you is the artwork which is colour-rich, polished and seems almost backlit – which will be familiar to you if you’ve played or seen Ghost Stories as it’s by the same artist.  The board shows the great cosmic tree that supports the nine worlds.

THE GAME
During the game, the 6 evil ones advance across the 8 spaces towards Asgard.  Each turn, the current player draws an evil one card and then takes 3 actions.  Each evil one card shows which evil one advances 1 space towards Asgard and each evil one has a power too which get stronger as they advance.  The players lose if 5 evil ones go past the 3rd space, 3 evil ones go past the 5th space, or 1 evil one reaches the final 8th space (Asgard).  The players win if they can exhaust the evil one deck without losing, so they need to force the evil ones back and this is done through combat and the Norse gods will need the support of Viking spirits to stand a chance of beating them. Read the rest of this entry »

New reviews will be online next week.  I’m about to launch the new boardgames community site I’ve been working on – hopefully tomorrow – so that will give me an opportunity to write-up some new reviews.

I had a day off from coding yesterday to attend the games day at Eclectic Games shop in Reading (UK) yesterday which featured games from Z-Man Games.  It was a day tournament where you get assigned to random games against random mixtures of players. I played Grimoire, Bridge Troll, Troyes and Skyline 3000.

I shall add reviews of Grimoire, Cave Troll and Skyline 3000 soon. I really enjoyed Skyline as it felt like Manhattan (one of my favourite games with 4 players) but with different challenges.  Bridge Troll was very interesting and I liked it although it took a while to get my head around how to get what I wanted.  Read the rest of this entry »