Kickstart Your Week! Ninja Toast Karma

 

Karmaka

 

Life sucks and then you die. Especially when you’re a dung beetle. Man you must have done something royally bad last lifetime! But the good thing about Karma is you can earn your way back up the ladder of life to achieve transcendence where you’ll finally develop that glowey blue translucent look you’ve been searching for.

Karmaka will take you on this journey, over a series of lives until you are able to build up sufficient positive Karma to transcend. Just as Buddhism teaches us, this requires the accumulation of points, but the clever part of this game is that your hand of cards will persist between rounds. This means you need to balance point scoring with maintaining a sufficiently good hand for your next life/round. Plus when you do play a card, your opponents get a chance to take that card into their next life. Do you really want to play an attack card now when you give that attack straight into the hand of your victim? As they say, what goes around comes around.

Karmaka is not just a really intriguing game, it is also covered in drop dead gorgeous art (pun absolutely intended)! Seriously, it is probably the most beautiful game of the year so far. I love how the card play feeds elegantly into the game’s theme, making for a unique game of hand management. And it’s so cheap! This is one you should definitely all be checking out!

 

Karmaka transcends February 18^th.

 

 

Toast!

 

“There you are! I’m so glad you could join us this little soiree this evening. Wait, what is that you’re drinking? It’s not the Riesling is it? Oh no! That isn’t worthy of you, here take mine. No, really I insist. You are my guest after all. Now, LADIES & GENTLEMEN! A TOAST! Wait, why are you smiling at me like that?”

In Toast! players are partaking in the world’s most dangerous dinner party. In this world of opulence and intrigue, the favoured past time appears to be trying to poison your fellow nobles’ drink during formal toasts, so much so that a bizarre etiquette has evolved around it. One may pour, something, into a goblet, test the bouquet, swap your goblet with another noble’s, or pass all the goblets around the table. Eventually though, a player will call the toast and all must drink deeply from their goblet. Almost literally too, for this game will come with the most wonderfully evocative and ostentatious components:

 

 

A full size plastic goblet and, brilliantly, “napkin” player screens to hide the wine/poison/antidote tokens you are sneaking into the goblets. This looks like a cool bluffing and manipulation game, somewhat reminiscent of Masquerade. You want, obviously, to survive, but each player also has a target they want to see dead, so you better believe this will be quite the fight. And with those goblets, I can totally see myself getting into character on this one!

 

A Toast! On February 17^th.

 

 

Ninja Silent but Deadly

 

Wait, what’s that out of the corner of your eye? Should you risk leaving the room? Is there something waiting for you in the fridge? Do you dare go to the bathroom? All these questions will be on your mind during a game of Ninja: Silent but Deadly, the latest in Button Shy’s wallet line.

Except this isn’t any normal game, as maybe you’re already guessing. This is a “meta-game”, a game that is played over a game night at the same time as your other games! Something to add a little bit of extra fun, and a whole lot of tension, to your game nights or, indeed, general social occasions. Each player receives a ninja card that they must try to conceal somewhere that another player will stumble upon. If they do, they lose and are out. Of course, if you are spotted placing your ninja, then your opponents can call you out and you’ll lose. You need to be both silent and deadly!

We printed off a copy of their print and play and gave it a spin this weekend. We’ll have a review article posted up in the next couple of days, but briefly, it’s a lot of fun and really challenges you to be imaginative. And it is hugely satisfying hearing the cry of dismay as a friend finds your card. However, the rules as written leave a lot up to your interpretation. It’s not hard to come up with a solution that works (and maybe different groups would prefer different ways of playing) but really a clearer rule set would be appreciated. Definitely still worthy of a recommendation, but it’s something to bear in mind.

 

You lose! On February 14^th.

 

 

Other Great Games

 

 

Scuba – An intriguing game, exploring the ocean bed as a scuba diver, racing to catalogue the most (nicely illustrated) sea creatures and generally getting in each others way. You’ll need to handle the deep-sea currents and make sure you don’t run out of air. Interestingly, the designer is an experienced diver, so expect some of that knowledge to come out in the finished game. Ends Feb 18^th.

 

 

Pocket N3on City Rumble – A Street Fighter style card fighting game for 2-6 players. Grab a team of fighters, charge their actions and knock the gems out of each other. Gems are used to both charge actions and track health, so that using more powerful attacks forces you to weaken your own characters. Ends Feb 18^th.

 

 

Adapt – More fish this week, but these crazy creations are evolving into terrifying monsters before your very eyes. A race of adaptation to assert your species and eat your opponent’s. Not as pretty as Evolution, but possibly having much greater variability. Ends Feb 19^th.