Kickstart Your Week! Pack O Love
My goodness, this week an extra game has sneaked into our top Kickstarter recommendations! In fact, given Pack O Games is one of them… I suppose it’s more like 9 extra games? Chaos! Even while retreating in an orderly fashion and giving chase to the flag in a fog… of love! Bemused? Fear not! All will be explained…
Pack O Game Set 2
Some Kickstarters let you get as many as 2, even 3 games at once. Often you can buy games from a publishers catalogue as add-ons. Pack O Game set 2 offers you 9 games. 9! For the ludicrous price of $24! What the hell!? Have we been being ripped off for all these years!? Well, no, you see each Pack O Games game is a tiny stick of gum sized treat containing only 30 cards and a concertinaed rules sheet. They are so small that the 3 letter game titles are literally as many letters as can fit on the box.
Of course, being small and cheap is no reason for you to pick them up if they’re no fun to play with. While I’m not going to run through them all here (seriously, this article will be long enough as it is!) I did have the pleasure of receiving review copies of 4 of the titles: Gym, Orc, Rum and Sow. You can read my overall review here (and find links to more detailed discussion of each of the games I received). All were good fun, especially Orc and Gym, and all were amazingly different in feel and gameplay. Personally, I’d almost say those 4 games by themselves would be worth $24, let alone another 6 games!
Pack O Games ends April 3rd.
Fog of Love
Fog of Love… Fog of Love… my feelings towards this game are a struggle to make out clearly, shifting, changing. On the one hand, it represents one of the most innovative and interesting ideas for a game I’ve seen. You and a partner will take on characters in a relationship, taking them through numerous events and difficulties the relationship faces. Your character is given certain traits at the start of the game that guide you on your objectives when approaching the stories and a set of possible game end cards that you slowly discard throughout the game, restricting your options as you figure out the likely outcome of you and your partners relationship. The events too often require simultaneous choices to be made, requiring you to consider the needs of your partner as much as your own needs. I love the power of board games to explore complex issues, games that let as learn about ourselves and the people we play with and this certainly delivers that in spades. But I’m not sure I want to play it…
It feels to me like a game you would play with your partner, yet I don’t feel comfortable with the idea of simulating the (possible) failure of a relationship together. Some of the situations, like getting another woman pregnant say, are not things I want to explore. The idea is, of course, that these are characters you are roleplaying, not yourselves, but this can only work if you are able to fully separate your relationship from the in-game scenarios. Is how you (or your partner) respond a reflection on how you would respond in real life? And what might your partner think of these responses? I’m sure you could approach this more abstractly, but would that not mean missing out on what this game has to offer?
The fact is I do not feel nearly confident enough in my roleplaying to take on a game like this. Of course, you could play it with a friend, but then so much of the power of this game could be lost. I won’t be backing Fog of Love, but I absolutely think this is a game you need to check out. You might be like me, but if you’re not you shouldn’t miss out on such a fascinating game!
The Fog of Love clears on April 3rd.
Retreat To Darkmoor
There have been no end of games featuring fantasy monsters attacking a city defended by heroes in one way or another. Maybe you’re the monsters sacking the city or maybe you’re the hard-pressed heroes. But we never see what happens next when the big head monster has been slain, the army is broken and the monster flee back to their homes, hounded by the so-called heroes. Things aren’t always black and white you know.
Fortunately, you don’t need to run faster than the heroes (indeed, you can’t) you only need to run faster than your friends on this Retreat to Darkmoor! But maybe it’s not so bad if some of your friends don’t make it back, I mean, with all the monsters on campaign, the lands back home are ripe for new leadership: your leadership! Not only will you be trying to make sure your troops aren’t at the back, you’ll also be trying to win an area control battle over the lands back home.
The interplay between these two core problems along with the plethora of special abilities on the cards makes for exactly the kind of cool puzzle I enjoy. Designers Matt Loomis and Isaac Shalev have done it again, only two weeks after their last game featured in one of our articles!
Retreat to Darkmoor before April 3rd.
Flag Dash
Ever feel like you’d love to play capture the flag again but every time someone brings it up the weather just isn’t right or you don’t feel like running around (or, maybe, you know, you’re an adult). Don’t you just wish you there was someway of doing it from the comfort of your tabletop? Well wish no longer because Flag Dash is the answer to your prayers!
Flag Dash uses a very neat movement/action selection system that should be a lot of fun. Firstly, you choose an action from a hand of cards (revolutionary) in secret, so a kind of programmed movement. These will be revealed simultaneously. Resolution proceeds according to the bid token you also play (before cards are revealed). These vary from 1 to 7(9?) but once played cannot be played again until the 7/9th is chosen letting you pick up everything. Naturally, the lower the value, the earlier in the turn you get to play, but the higher valued tokens let you take more powerful moves.
Programmed movement makes for wonderfully tense decisions and the hilarity of everything going wrong. To take some of the edge off, each team has a shared defender character that either player can move with their cards after they are revealed. The theme of this game may be a little bland for my taste but the gameplay sounds like a lot of fun. Plus the wooden meeples have special holes to carry the flags!
Flag Dash-es off March 31st.
Other Great Games
Villains & Henchmen! – It’s never a Batman story without all the villains being busted out of Arkham Asylum (I know, I’m generalising), but isn’t a prison break cool? Villains & Henchmen is a cooperative game in which you’ll be trying to bust your allies out of prison, dealing with the super heroes and guards that are trying to stop you. Ends Mar 28th.
Darklight: Memento Mori – A miniatures dungeon crawl game featuring some great looking daemonic monsters. This is built in a similar vein to the old classic Warhammer Quest and, if you are familiar with that old game and check out the room tiles here I think you’ll find some very strong similarities! Ends Mar 28th.
Hyperspace Smuggler – A bit of tile laying, a bit of pick up and deliver, and a bit of shooting each other out of the stars makes this an interesting possibility for fans of games like Merchants & Marauders or Xia: Legends of Drift System, but want that in a smaller, cheaper package. It also features a nice hyperspace movement system that will create some fun decisions and lovely artwork. Ends Mar 31st.
Honey Wars – A rare opportunity to celebrate having hives! Race to collect the most honey or to build 3 hives while screwing over your opponents as much as possible. Honey Wars was a recent winner of the Game Crafter take that card game awards, so expect things to get pretty vicious! Ends Mar 31st.
The Red Dragon Inn: Battle for Greyport – I mentioned earlier the number of games that have you protecting a fantasy city from invaders! Battle for Greyport is a cooperative deck builder where you’ll be sending out heroes and equipping them with weapons to face the enemy. Ends Apr 1st.
We would like to thank baord game geek users JDKJ, henk.rolleman, Action Phase, sydstar, kirklandsigs, Darth_cauthon, Koralk, MauroP, plainsight, ajsg8r and Sam Waller for the images used in this article.
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