Kickstart Your Week! The Medici Fleet Experience
Fleet Commander: Genesis
“Set course to port Lieutenant!”
“Aye ayyyee-er sir? Can’t do sideways, sir. Is diagonally any good to you?”
“No diagonally is not any good to me Lieutenant, the enemy ships are in that quadrant!”
“Right… well I’m afraid that’s all engineering has got for us sir.”
“Gaaraghfagringth!”
“Someone call a medic, Fleet Commander is having a break down!”
Lots of miniatures games use dice, but instead of controlling the vagaries of damage or even hitting, Fleet Commander uses dice to control direction.
You’ll be commanding your fleet of spaceships across a vast, randomly tiled, grid representing space and the weird terrain within. Terrain like asteroid fields and warp gates and gravity distortions. And to do so you’ll be choosing three of your dice to roll each turn. Blue dice determine your movement options, red dice your possible attack vectors, and green the orientation of your shields. In each case, you might be able to affect orthogonal directions, diagonal directions, or if you’re lucky, both. You could also be able to trigger the special abilities of your ships.
What initially sounds like horrible randomisation actually offers you plenty of control. For starters, you roll dice before selecting which ship to activate, so you’ll always be able to do something, and hope your opponent can’t extract your target from your trap during his turn if it does go wrong. Secondly, you can always roll all the same colour if you really need to get the right attack vector, or really need to manoeuvre yourself out of a sticky situation. And useful rolls can be saved between turns, offering the promise of an awesome round further down the line.
And there is definitely the potential for awesome turns! When attacking an enemy sector, one red dice on one ship also brings in all the friendly ships in zones neighbouring the target, rewarding you for manoeuvring your fleet to surround an enemy. But, shields are extremely powerful, flat out ignoring attacks from the directions indicated on the dice, and useable in reaction to an opponents attack. So saving up some multidirectional shields could be extremely effective! Charge the shields!
This sounds like quite the awesome combat system, and the rest of the package is intriguing too: decent artwork, lots of ships, talk of numerous scenarios and campaigns to play through and a couple of expansions available right off the bat. Fleet Commander is a great looking game.
Fleet Commander to the bridge! By February 10th.
Medici
“Spices! Spices! Get your spices! Rare, exotic spices from the far east! Ah! Sir! You are back from another successful trading voyage, I presume. Perhaps you’d like to take back some more of my spices… now! There’s no need to pull that face I know they aren’t as good as my previous load but we are at the whims of the ocean, are we not? Besides… perhaps it is more valuable to be seen as the premier importer of spices, I’m sure there are others around this port who would be all to happy to challenge that claim of yours. Now I see you’re feeling enthusiastic! Good! I’m sure with your good name you could always market it as having a unique flavour. Perhaps you could call it turmeric.”
Medici is one of Reiner Knizia’s famous auction games, heralding from a time beyond all board gaming memory… 1995. That it is being brought back for a new edition is a clue as to the high esteem with which it is regarded. But why not let the rules convince you! Each turn a player will draw a number of items from the deck to put up for auction, for which players will bid using their victory points. These cards have a face value, but they must also fit into the hold of your ship (meaning you can chose to block out a player with too few spaces in their hold). The trader with the highest value load will earn a bonus!
But wait. Because there different types of good, and whoever has traded in the most of a particular good, cumulatively over each round, will also get a bonus. BUT WAIT. Because if you can trade in enough of each good you’ll also get a bonus, making snapping up those low value cards worthwhile in the long run… maybe! And all this will be mixed up each turn by the first player choosing to draw 1, 2 or 3 cards. It is quite possible for the deck to run out before all the holds are filled. Ever more layers, yet perfectly simple to grasp. The new edition even features gorgeous art from Vincent Dutrait. Definitely one to check out.
Medici sets sail February 12th.
Club Zen & Don’t Get Eated: The T.C. Petty Experience
It was an interesting decision by Dice Hate Me Games to make their Kickstarter page a celebrity joke about designer T. C. Petty. It kind of feels like a big in joke for a small section of the board game media/design community, and when I first saw the page I felt a bit unsure about it all; I’m sure I wasn’t alone. Regardless I feel it is important enough to mention it here because people should definitely get past it and on to the games!
That’s right, games, plural. One a semi-cooperative, quick playing, card game, the other a full bodied worker placement game. Why together? Well, aside from sharing their designer, both games are built around the principle of positive player interaction: that by sharing space with other players, your actions a stronger than they would be alone. That’s a fascinating idea that I’ve not seen before – and quite the antithesis of the entire worker placement genre!
So, Club Zen sees you trying to have the most pleasant holiday at the nicely illustrated resort. As usual for worker placement games you can spend your time by visiting different locations to accrue VPs, but doing things together is always preferable. However, as with any holiday you need to make sure work and life stress doesn’t get in your way of a good time.
Don’t Get Eated, meanwhile, sees you and your fellow animals escaping the farm in pursuit of life in the great outdoors… except it seems the wild only wants to eat you all. Whoever can survive the longest will win. Each round see’s a different attack coming your way, and you must all simultaneously play a card to try and beat it’s value. But, if you’re able to match what someone else has played you’ll band together and be more able to defend yourselves.
The T.C. Petty Experience will be over February 12th.
Other Great Games
Biergarten – Ja! Bier! Mien favourite topic (save board games). In this card laying game you’ll each be building your very own Bier garden, trying to match the numerous colours between tiles while also collecting all the different colours and making sure your garden is fully walled in. So not much Bier then? Still looks like a very nice tile laying game! Ends Feb 10th.
Dirigible Disaster – A cooperative race against time to get your dirigible back to ground before your passengers burn to death in fires, succumb to plague or your ship quite literally runs out of steam. To make things worse, this really is a race as the game must be played in real time and each player can only do one action before passing on to the next player. Hectic chaos I’m sure! Ends Feb 11th.
The Pursuit of Happiness – It’s the Game of Life, turned into a full Euro game! It’s a worker placement game, in which your workers are actually time, and time is always against you as you try and live the most fulfilling life. Nothing really revolutionary mechanics wise but it is full of great thematic touches, from stress inevitably killing your character (possibly in an earlier round than the other players) to having to fulfil specific requirements to be able to form a relationship. Ends Feb 11th.
Thief’s Market – It’s been another successful raid but now you’ve got to divide up the loot and try and spend it as best you can to gain the edge overall and in future rounds. You can take any amount of loot from the centre, but the following players can take your pile as their own (discarding one gem to the pot) so don’t take too much! Ends Feb 13th.
Vasty Wilds – Players are expanding a beautifully illustrated forest as they try and find their objective tokens, while screwing their opponents as much as possible as they go. Each card played expands the play area while also giving you an amount of movement and/or bonus, and letting you affect your opponents. Not one for haters of take that mechanisms, but one to check out otherwise, particularly with the lovely custom animal playing pieces. Ends Feb 14th.
Images from Board Game Geek users CorumJha, W Eric Martin, vdutrait, ckirkman, steamboatgothic, Leitmangames, xodroolis and Ceramicwombat, as well as the relevant Kickstarter pages.
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