Kickstart Your Week! Marshland Busters
Dungeon Busters
Time to bust a move down to the dungeon, guys! We’ve got some gems to earn. We can beat those monsters, and we’ll come out rich! So long as we work together! But I can count on you guys. Right? I mean, I can count on you… right? Guys? Why… why have you ran off with all the loot…? Damnit.
You and your unscrupulous bunch of thieving friends are raiding a classic cavern of monsters in Dungeon Busters, trying to get as much loot for yourself as you can. You’ll face a series of monsters, and each player will commit a certain amount of energy (value of card) to that fight. If the combined total is greater than the value on the card, you’ll win, lower and you’ll lose. The trick here is that everyone choses their card simultaneously. If you lose, the player who commits lowest will lose all their gems of a specific colour, but if you win the player who committed lowest gets the rewards first, as they sneak around grabbing the loot!
This is the kind of game that really let’s you get inside the head of your opponents. You want to play low, but you want to be the only player to play low! There’s the added twist that if another player uses the same card as you, both of your cards are discounted, adding an even greater element of tension, a sure fire win can turn into a rout or an easy money grab can be blocked, both of you wasting those low value cards! The game is all about how well you can judge your friends, it’s about the people around the table, and that’s what makes it exciting.
Dungeon Busting ends January 2nd.
Kingdom Builder: Marshlands
Ah! Kingdom Builder! A game of expanding your territory across the board, a colourful hex based quilt of possibility creating terrible restrictions to challenge you at every turn. The arbitrariness of the game’s abstract mechanics does nothing to diminish the games brilliance, at least in my eyes. Check back this Friday for a proper review of the base game! Now, new, unexplored lands have been discovered, and they’re a little bit sodden. Watch your foot.
Kingdom Builder: Marshlands is the third big expansion and adds a whole new terrain type and some more bonus action tiles and scoring opportunities as usual. The added twist is from the bonus actions you may unlock by taking control of two identical action spaces. So not only can you perform that action twice in one turn, you get an upgraded version of it to use, the effects of which can be very powerful!
If you’re already a fan, note that this is also a great chance to pick up the smaller promo expansions that are pretty difficult to get hold of elsewhere. If you’ve not had the pleasure, then now is a great chance to pick up a fantastic entry-level game, with enough depth to keep more experienced gamers interested. So long as you don’t mind a complete lack of theme…
Build your Marshland Kingdom by January 7th.
Other Great Games
Jail Break – A race to escape the prison before your fellow inmates. You’ll be moving around the prison to collect the equipment you’ll need for the escape and then reaching the room marked on your blueprint, just be sure to avoid the guards. There is a lot of randomness to this game, but the game is very thematic and has great art so if randomness isn’t an issue, check it out. Ends Jan 1st.
Empires: Galactic Rebellion – It’s Star Wars! But not. Despite some very strong homages in the card art… It is a game about rebellion against the galactic empire, but in this universe, there are multiple rebel factions squabbling over influence on the various planets and within the galactic senate. Beware though, the empire will not go down without a fight and if you rebels spend too much time fighting amongst yourselves, the empire will crush you all in the final all out offensive at the game’s end! Ends Jan 6th.
GG – A card game in a similar style to Stratego, driven by Rock Paper Scissors. Each player receives 32 cards with rocks, papers and scissors of varying strengths, plus a few special cards, that they divide into 4 piles. They proceed to challenge each other, revealing a single card of their own and one of the top cards of their opponent’s piles. There’s a bit of luck, a bit of bluffing and a bit of memory mixed together. Ends Jan 10th.
Image credit belongs to Board Game Geek users Korea Boardgames Dev, W Eric Martin and chilibean, as well as the relevant Kickstarter projects.
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