Kickstart Your Week! Great Exposed Aeons
Great Scott!
Bees. Bees are responsible for pollinating a huge proportion of plants including all of our crops. Were they to die out we would follow almost immediately! Truly, bees are mans real best friend. Yet under threat they are, which is why the world needs, nay the world deserves, the Colossal Cactus Burning Bee Booster! Capable of exponentially multiplying bee promiscuity, the threat to our stripy brethren will soon be bred into the history books. How does this wonder work you ask? Why by the controlled combustion of cacti, long known to contain a potent bee aphrodisiac, and a renewable resource that enables us to turn over wasted desert landscape to this grand project, not cutting in to the valuable farming land that is in ever shorter supply. This is an environmental and technological marvel! Governments of the world! Order your Colossal Cactus Burning Bee Booster, today!
Great Scott! It’s a card game about inventing things! Hardly revolutionary you might think, but this has some wonderfully silly elements that elevate it faster than Thompson & Cos Terrific Time Travelling Vertical Traction Engine (It’s already gotten you where you need to go!) Just like real inventors, you’ll first draft cards making up the elements of your invention and, once everyone’s mind boggling construction is complete, you’ll have to pitch it to the group! Nervous? Don’t worry, with our Powerful Perspiration Purifiers those unsightly nervous sweat marks will be a thing of the past!
You have one minute to craft the best sales pitch possible and at the end of the round everyone will pass out their commendation tiles, one point to each player and a 2 point tile to your favourite pitch, so no one knows who has scored what until final scoring after a few rounds. The other way to get points though is, of course, from the actual cards you play and (brilliantly!) from alliteration in the invention’s name! This is not a complicated game but the story telling, particularly with the utterly ridiculous names you’ll be coming up with, just sounds like great fun. Especially if you’ve got some imaginative friends. Great Scott! A terrific invention.
Get inventive before May 4th.
Full disclosure: I chose this game as my top pick because I like the look of it, but I have been offered a copy for review and I wanted to be open about that! 🙂
Aeon’s End
The survivors of a long ago invasion have taken refuge in the forgotten seaside town of Gravesend. Here, amongst the discarded fish and chip wrappings and long broken arcade machines they learnt that the energy of the beaches the monstrous beings used to launch their invasion could be repurposed through various kitzy trinkets the locals claimed were gems… You know this doesn’t sound right – oh! Gravehold. And Breaches. Yes. I didn’t think the defence of a small British town would have raised over $100k.
Although maybe it would have, because Aeon’s End features some extremely cool twists on the fantasy themed cooperative deck builder it is claiming to be. In the biggest shake up of deck builders since… well maybe since deck builders existed, you will no longer be shuffling your deck. Talk about messing with fundamental assumptions! Instead randomness is introduced through a random turn order, and the mechanics of the game feed into this. Spells need to be prepped, so rather than just playing them you need to set them up for future turns… but you don’t know for sure when your turn will come. Importantly, this system really allows you to plan your deck, optimising it for future rounds, which sounds like a fascinating puzzle!
That puzzle will change every single game too. In fact, the potential variability in this game is pretty ludicrous! The game uses a static card market like Dominion that changes every game, meaning the strategies you took last time just won’t be available anymore. But that probably wouldn’t have helped anyway as the nemesis you are defending Gravesend from has a varying deck of its own with its own win condition, assuming you are even fighting the same nemesis! Plus the game encourages each player to specialise in a different element of the gameplay giving you different ways to play. There is so many interesting elements to this game, I’ve only mentioned my personal highlights here! You should definitely check out the rest.
Aeon’s Ends May 5th.
Exposed
“Can I see your ticket please?”
“Oh yes of course. Let me just find my wallet… no not this one, hang on, this is – no, no, wrong one – here we go!”
“Why exactly do you have so many wallets?”
“Oh – er for security! Those are – er – dummy wallets. So if, say, a pickpocket came along they wouldn’t get my actual wallet. Can never be too careful nowadays!”
“I see…”
Not, in fact, a game about a nudist cruise (mostly), Exposed is actually a game of theft and trying to out the criminals in your midst, or rather, all the other criminals save yourself! You’ll be presented with a grand grid of characters in what must be the most regimented boat of all time, but only you know which of them is your character. You can steal the wallet of any character surrounding yours, and the first player to get their greedy mits on 7 wallets will win. But doing so obviously gives the rest of the group a strong clue as to who you are. To get close to people you’ll swap adjacent characters to move them around, but again be careful! You see your friends can accuse any character in their row or column of being a thief. If you’re caught, you lose some wallets and they gain 2! Eeek. If you’re the last unexposed player you’ll automatically win.
Another nice easy to understand game with what I’m sure will be a lot of tension and decision-making. How do you manoeuvre yourself into positions to get wallets without giving away too much information to your opponents? How do you bluff with your movement and actions to cause as much confusion as possible? All while worrying that you’ve accidentally wandered into your opponents’ rows. It sounds really neat!
The Exposed cruise ends May 8th.
Other Great Games
Expedition – An app integrated, card based, RPG system that aims to be as easy to pick up and as streamlined as possible. You can create your own stories as usual, but the app includes a selection of predesigned stories. As a quick example of gameplay, combat is timed, with players choosing an action or skill to use from a hand of cards in real time. The longer they wait, the more damage the team takes! Loot and skills you develop during the game get added to your deck for future encounters. Ends May 3rd.
Made From Scratch – A cooking-themed card game, Made From Scratch has you drafting ingredients to put into (hopefully) delicious recipes. This is kind of an area control element as the recipes are shared and whoever contributes the most to a given recipe takes that recipe to be prepared, and then puts it into the oven, or on to the stove, to cook, but only if there is space available, adding a layer of careful timing to the proceedings! Ends May 4th.
Pyramid Arcade – Woah this is a bit of an odd one! A collection of 22 games, all kind of abstract, featuring a multitude of plastic pyramids, wrapped up into a beautiful art deco box. This represents the culmination of decades of small games that have been released separately over the years, sort of a Greatest Hits of the Pyramid game system. Ends May 4th.
Helionox: Mercury Protocol – An expansion to the deck building game Helionox, Set in our solar system where the sun is on the verge of death, your aim is to manage the terrible events that are plaguing humanity, and being rewarded points for so doing. This expansion adds pick up and deliver mechanics as well as advancing the universe’s story. Ends May 6th.
Cat Box – As we all know, all cats (except Schrödinger’s) love boxes so this game features lots of cats in boxes. Each card is broken up into 4 separate boxes which may or may not feature a cat of a certain colour, which will be placed down on the board by covering one or two quadrants of previously placed cards. You’ll be aiming to get as many cats of your preferred colour (decided in secret at the start of the game) as possible. Ends May 7th.
Xibalba – A King of Tokyo style dice game set in a diesel punk world invaded by aliens, featuring the surviving factions battles for resources, particularly the all important alien resource victory points – I mean Paragon. Lots of development options and you can stack your dice according to your preferred actions in a particular round. Ends May 8th.
Image credit belongs to board game geek users DaveClarke, Action Phase, forbiddenlimb, toddmedema, rule42, W Eric Martin, taranlewis,
Leave a Reply