Kickstart Your Week! Scythes, Mechs and Meteors


Scythe

 

Scythe

Sometimes games come along that stop you dead in your tracks. They make you re-evaluate all the previous games you’ve played and you find your hand reaching for your wallet of its own accord! (I swear that’s how it happened, dear!) One of those games is Scythe.

Scythe Combat

War is brewing between the weary nations of a steampunk Europe over the mysterious Factory, source of the gargantuan mechs that haunt the backgrounds of the game’s jaw-droppingly good art. Blending the dice rolling combat of classic Ameritrash games with the farming and resource management so beloved of Eurogames, Scythe has built bridges between these disparate gaming landscapes at the perfect time.

And doesn’t the box do a magnificent job of conveying this blending? Does anything scream Eurogame more than farmers tending wheat in a field? Does anything shout Ameritrash more than giant mechs marching against one another? What a phenomenal piece of art for a box cover, and this magnificent artwork is all over this game, from the player boards for each faction and each play style (creating a variety of assymetric combinations) to the highly thematic encounter cards that present players with important choices over the course of the game.

Scythe Player Boards

Scythe is the most recent Kickstarter from Stonemaier Games, publishers of the excellent Viticulture and the very hotly anticipated Between Two Cities (it was very high in my Essen list, here). Plus Jamey Stegmaier, head of Stonemaier Games, literally wrote the book on how to run a Kickstarter. Well, he wrote a book anyway. This game is in very safe hands indeed!

It will be time to reap the harvest on November 5th.

 

SrcCard

 

Src:Card

Games of giant robot mech combat are pretty common on Kickstarter. We’ve got two in our top picks this week! Crazy! Sadly, they all too often seem to be focussed on shooting missiles at one another. Now, don’t get me wrong, I like exploding mechs as much as the next geek, but what is more unique is Src:Card’s approach, focussing on hacking! No, not with axes, with computer code. In fact you should probably forget about the mechs altogether because they are completely superfluous to this game.

Srccard Game

Ah, hacking! As we know from Hollywood, hacking is a super fast process of typing until your opponent capitulates. Typically under ridiculous pressure of global nuclear war or similar. And Src:Card captures that fast based exchange of code with a neat card game. You’ll be playing network cards to defend your machine core from attack, while preparing your sequence of attack commands to try and break through your opponent’s defence once their mech activates.

What’s really intriguing about this game is how the preparation of attacks might actually help teach you some basic principles of computer coding. From getting your cards in the right order to attack the weak points of your opponents defence, to the addition of conditional statements and repeating loops. Even the game’s name is a coding pun! You can’t beat a game for learning!

 

The firewall collapses November 6th.

 

Meteor

Meteor

 

My God! Meteors! A whole swarm of them, coming this way! Someone call Bruce Willis! And where’s Billy Bob Thornton to coordinate things? Ok, don’t panic. Let’s just fuel up the rockets and take aim. What do you mean we don’t have any red fuel!?

There’s nothing like the threat of impending global annihilation to get the blood pumping and the terrifyingly hilarious situations that Meteor is going to create will test the hearts of any healthy board gamer. Not only are you all desperately scrabbling for fuel to power your rockets, you only have 5 real time minutes in which to destroy the swarm. Plus you only have an estimate of how big they are: hit a meteor with too small a rocket and you’ll hardly scratch it, but worse, hit with too large a rocket and the ensuing explosion will accelerate the rest of the swarm!

MeteorMeteors

Ready to find a nice deep cave to hide in? I don’t blame you because the situation is only going to seem worse when I tell you most the meteors do strange things like breaking into 2 smaller meteors or needing two players to fire a rocket simultaneously (by shouting ‘FIRE!’ together). That task will at least be made easier once someone unlocks the technology that lets you talk to one another. Oh, I didn’t mention that before did I?

Meteor looks like a huge amount of fun! This Kickstarter is actually to fund the second edition, featuring improved graphic design and a smaller box. Although that smaller box has come at the price of the original edition’s sandtimers (everyone has a phone timer nowadays anyway), and some of the cards. These are being added back in via the stretch goals but… it’s a strange way of doing things that might have harmed the projects total. Still it’s an awesome game so why not help the project get all it’s original cards back?

 

Lift off on November 6th.

 

Best of the Rest

 

[row][one_third]Exceed[/one_third][two_third]Exceed – A card based fighting game reminiscent of Street Fighter and other classic video games of that ilk. Exceed is from the same guys that brought you the Battlecon games, but Exceed stripes out the deck construction and card collecting by offering character specific decks of cards to experiment with. Ends Nov 1st.[/two_third][/row]

 

 

[row][one_third]Privateers[/one_third][two_third]Privateers! – Containing hundreds of cards, a pile of hexagonal tiles and a small pile of ship and sea monster miniatures, Privateers does an impressive job of cramming in all the elements you could want from a pirate themed game. Explore the Carribean, transport cargo, even bury treasure if your hold is full to bursting. There are strange mystical goings on and enemy fleets on patrol, so expect ship to ship combat a plenty! Ends Nov 4th.[/two_third][/row]

 

[row][one_third]Magecraft[/one_third][two_third]MageCraft – A battle between mages erupts! Because why not? Arm your mage with spells and let rip at your opponent, all driven by a gem drawing/payment mechanism. The spells you buy must be placed in stacks that can be consecutively cast, offering a lot of possible combinations if you can get the right gem combinations together to cast them. Nice artwork too! Ends Nov 5th.[/two_third][/row]

 

[row][one_third]Covalence[/one_third][two_third]Covalence – A cooperative puzzle game that will act as a great chemistry teaching tool. Players will be trying to build organic molecules from their atomic components based on the clues given by a single player who has seen the objective cards. Sadly that “knower” will only have access to a limited selection of cards so will have to construct their clues carefully! Ends Nov 5th.[/two_third][/row]

 

[row][one_third]Wolf & Hound[/one_third][two_third]Wolf & Hound – A fun 2v2 game of erm… sheep management? You’ll be playing cards to move the wolf and hound between the players’ paddocks. The wolf will scare a sheep away, but the hound will bring them back safely. If either player on a team lose all 3 of their sheep they lose the game. A nice light game for families to play together! Ends Nov 6th.[/two_third][/row]

 

 

[row][one_third]Don't Die[/one_third][two_third]Don’t Die! – A very silly game this one. Very simply you’re trying to not die… the most! You’ll be challenged by various fatal circumstances and you’ll play cards to try and dodge it, or if you can’t, roll the die (of the 6 sided variety this time) to escape, adding some light push your luck, as anyone can play cards to try and modify your roll. Without any doubt you will die lots in this game but whoever dies the least will be the winner! Ends Nov 7th.[/two_third][/row]

 


 

Image credit goes to Board Game Geek users jameystegmaier, joakim589, srccard, cirixus, Asynja, percycpcpc, Ravachol, SgtMaster, AbraxusGames, and the relevant Kickstarter project pages. 

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