Kickstart Your Week! Gloomy Yeti Factory
Gloomhaven
Gloomhaven is humanity’s farthest outpost, a city of adventure on the edge of the known world. Gloomhaven is also our furthest outpost in the world of board gaming, opening up a gaming experience that goes far beyond anything we’ve seen before!
That’s a big claim… Especially for a cooperative fantasy dungeon crawl skirmish, a genre that is hardly short on games. Firstly, Gloomhaven has a revolutionary combat system to take you through its dungeons. Each player has a set of unique action cards, from which they chose two each round. Each of these cards then has two different actions that must be chosen between, which are revealed simultaneously. This can leave players high and dry but perfectly captures the chaos of battle. There are also no dice, attacks being determined by drawing cards from a player’s attack deck, a deck that changes as they level up by the removal of weaker cards and the addition of stronger cards. As ability cards are played they are used up, restricting players actions as they progress through the dungeon and providing a timer for the game that drives the heroes forwards through the dungeon.
This exceptional combat system is just one part of the game though. The other is the shear quantity of game that is squeezed into this box. Gloomhaven features well over 50 scenarios to play through that will take you through a branching campaign driven by your own choices. These choices not only affect the next dungeon you’ll play through though, they will permanently affect the game world in a legacy style system a la Risk Legacy. This will affect everything, even down to the items available in stores for you to buy.
In yet another diversion from the classic tropes of fantasy games, you are not a regular band of heroes. Indeed, each player will have a secret career objective to complete over the course of the campaign. Once that is done, your character retires. They’re done! There’s nothing you can do about this, you just pick up a new character and continue the story. So you’ll be following the tales of characters, of your band of mercenaries and of the world of Gloomhaven. While this may be shocking, the game rewards you with at least 10 unlockable character classes in hidden envelopes to open for achieving these career goals.
The designer, Isaac Childres, has seemingly twisted every element of a fantasy dungeon crawler to create something utterly unique. In a time of huge excitement for the upcoming Pandemic Legacy, we have here a legacy system that, on the face of it, has taken those ideas introduced by Rob Daviau (designer of the aforementioned Risk and Pandemic Legacy games) and ran with them. I for one am completely enamoured with this game!
Gloomhaven retires September 30th.
Avalanche At Yeti Mountain
You know what’s not a good idea? Rocket powered skis. I mean, there are other bad ideas, like testing them on Yeti Mountain, but still, I think we can all that if there is going to be one superfluous invention, it’d be rocket powered skis.
That’s not stopped the gang of engineering students you’ll be controlling in Avalanche at Yeti Mountain, however! And what better way to test your invention than with a race down the mountain? The game features a deck of multipurpose cards, that are both used to create the mountain slope, and also feature speed values that when played determine how quickly players will move. In this way, there are a huge variety of courses available, and is a very nice way of saving on components for this filler game!
Gameplay progresses through simultaneously playing these cards for their speed value, which determines how far down the slope players will move, but there is a speed limit in force that if breached by the total of all cards played that round result in the fastest player crashing. So there is a constant push your luck element to the game, driven to even greater heights by the avalanche and yeti that are both chasing you down the mountain. Match the card you play to the tile you are on, and you’ll activate your rocket skis (so long as the yeti hasn’t damaged them), shooting you forward but accelerating the avalanche behind you! Get caught by the avalanche and you’ll be out.
This is a very entertaining concept for both a race game and as a filler. And after our previous game recommendation you might need something lighter! It features lots of clever mechanisms and a suitably daft theme. Check it out!
The Avalanche at Yeti Mountain will be rolling downhill until October 1st.
Factory Funner
Ah factories! Those crazy places where vats of random chemicals are mixed up in clever machines to make other random chemicals that can be collected and sold for profit. At least that’s what I assume is happening based on Factory Funner, the sort of sequel, sort of re-release of 2005’s Factory Fun.
Each player will be building their own factory that takes and combines red, green, blue and yellow liquids together using the machines you’ll be adding each round. It is a tile laying game, with each machine requiring a certain set of chemicals to function, and producing another that needs to either feed into another machine or into an empty vat. This starts off easy, but you are limited to only a few empty vats, and the further apart things get, the more pipes you need to add, costing you money. Building efficiently is key, but the real rewards come from chaining together your machines so that one machine feeds the next.
This turns the game into an utterly compelling puzzle. Added to this is the chaotic nature of how machines are obtained: a machine per player is dealt to a central market and players grab machines simultaneously. There is a cost to grabbing the first machine, and a bonus for taking the last one, but this has got to be either the craziest or most elegant auction mechanic I’ve ever seen. I suppose this is the one game for which Kickstarter Early Bird rewards are thematic!
The Factory Funner ends October 2nd.
Worth a Look
Virgin Seas – A race to capture islands in the virgin seas! Players have an identical set of ship and island tiles that are played into a grid, with the aim of having more of your ships around an island than anyone else in order to capture it. Not all islands are created equal of course, and special actions trigger when placed on the board. Ends Sep 28th.
Star Patrol: Carrier Commander – A simple 2-player space combat game that is being shipped, internationally, for $3. Seriously. For that alone this game deserves a recommendation! But the on rails shooter he has created looks like a solid tactical challenge, as players attempt to wipe out their opponent’s fleet of fighters before they themselves run out of ships. Ends Sep 28th.
Garbage Day – No one likes garbage day. Especially not the lazy students in this game, where the aim of this dexterity based game is to be the last person to have their room overflowing with waste. Players take it in turns to balance cards on the bin shaped box, with the clever restriction that the two holes punched into each card show clean air, forcing the cards to hang ever more precariously over the edge of the bin! Ends Sep 29th.
The Networks – Run your TV network in a simpler example of the genre. There is the usual buying shows, gaining viewers, hiring stars and getting bonus actions but features a nice twist in terms of timing. Each show will typically grow in popularity over the seasons, but end up crashing into obscurity by the end of its possible run: make sure you dump it before it does! Ends Sep 30th.
Heroes’ Gold – Ever wondered where all those fantasy monsters get their gold? Well they steal it off the King in Heroes’ Gold! Each player leads a band of monsters, aiming to cooperatively defeat a set of guards over a series of rounds. However, any undefeated guard ends a round early, and players are competing to gather the most gold from the guards they beat, immediately suggesting some rather dirty and underhand strategies! Ends Sep 30th.
Honourable Mentions
It has been a crazy week for Kickstarters this week! I’ve not come across a week with such a number of quality games before. Most of my “Worth a Look” games would have been worthy of a full recommendation on a different week, and that has pushed out a number of other games that are totally worth your time to check out. While they might not be up to this week’s standard, they certainly deserve an honourable mention: Feline Fortunes, Awesome Bots, Latice, Mech Deck and Rome: Rise to Power. Go have a look if you have time!
Image credit goes to board game geek users: Cephalofair, W Eric Martin, jguitarstring, cwali, GreyGnome, csferguson, maydaygames, IngredientX and Chilibean
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