Kickstart Your Week! Tiny Manhattan Bazaar
Tiny Epic Western
“Let’s play a game! It’s tiny! And it’s epic! And it’s western!”
“Yar! Let’s go rustle some cattle and rob some trains!”
“No, Matt, calm down, we aren’t doing that.”
“What are yer!? Yeller!?”
“Yes!”
“What?”
“And you’re green! It’s a board game Matt!”
“Oh…”
Tiny Epic Western is the new tiny game in the ever-expanding series of Tiny Epic games designed by Scott Almes. This one transports us to a frontier town of the Wild West, a lawless land of bandits and bounty hunters, ranchers and gamblers, where anything is possible for the determined soul with a dream and a posse of men to back it up. Even combining poker and worker placement into a single game. Somebody call the sheriff!
Each of the town’s major locations can be visited by your workers to gain influence or to construct buildings, the route to victory points and gaining control of the town’s industries that will help you to win the game. But each location is also a seedy den of gambling in which the players will compete to form the best poker hand and win that location’s bonus “pot”. You’ll be balancing your desire for a location’s opportunities with your chances of winning the bonus pot this round.
But you also have to worry about getting in each other’s way, because you can kick out each other’s workers by declaring a duel for that space. If you’re willing to roll the dice, and to have a bounty on your head, that is. This game features some lovely thematic twists on the worker placement genre, then adds in Poker to the mix too! It’s crazy, but also very intriguing! And if there is one thing you can say about a Tiny Epic Western, it’s that this town definitely isn’t big enough for the 4 of us!
The Tiny Epic showdown is set for February 6th.
The Manhattan Project: Chain Reaction
“No! Don’t read about this game! It’s monstrous government propaganda! Here, take this tin foil hat, it will prevent the spies from reading your cards. The powering up of our industries to crank out nuclear weapons is not a game! It’s inexcusable, pandering to the belief that the only thing that might help us win is having the most kilotons of nuclear weapons. They’re throwing our men, good men, into universities to train them into scientists, pawns in a game of global warmongering on a terrifying (though conveniently quick playing) scale! It’s MAD I tell you! What? Wait, who are you?”
We’re here to help you, sir. You’ve lost all perspective. Why don’t you take a seat?
“No! Let go of me! I will not be silenc-”
Ah! That’s better. Here in the world of the Manhattan Project we know that only by meeting foreign aggression with the threat of total annihilation can we hope to secure a glorious future –
“Help! Hel-”
A GLORIOUS FUTURE for our fair nation. The Manhattan Project: Chain Reaction is a slick, quick playing card game in which you’ll be chaining together the multi-use cards to try and construct bombs before your rivals do. Each card can be used either as the building it depicts, or to supply the workers illustrated on the side to power other buildings and gain their output. This output can then be fed into yet more buildings until you are able to put together the uranium you need for the bombs.
Buildings come in several types: universities that retrain your workers into engineers or scientists, mines that produce the delicious sounding yellow cake, factories for hand manipulation and finally the enrichment plants for producing uranium. And of course there are spies for stealing from your opponents. Everyone will be drawing from a shared deck of cards, and it is a race to test who is the most efficient at combining their cards over the course of a 20-30 minute game. Frankly, you’d be MAD not to give this game a look!
The Chain Reaction completes on February 4th.
Dice Bazaar
“Ah! Welcome to my Dice Bazaar! Home to fabulous items, such as this vase! Won’t it look lovely in your home? And only…”
Dice clatter across the counter top.
“2 4 3 5! A true bargain!”
This is Dice Bazaar, although perhaps that should be Dice Bizarre (yeah? Yeah? Anyone…?) for the proprietor of this stall is not interested in money so much as… people matching what he rolled? Still, what emerges looks to be a quick, fun game! The price for each of the merchant’s goods is set by rolling dice and to obtain an item, a player need only match the merchant’s dice with their own. However, each item requires more dice to match than the last, making it harder to obtain the more valuable items. And in a neat trick that is sure to have you cursing each other and your luck, as soon as a player takes an item the merchant changes his prices! Immediately screwing anyone who had been trying to match that item but wasn’t fast enough. I can only see that being hilarious and adding real tension to your dice rolls!
The items you collect have a value that determines your standing at the end of the game, but they can also be trashed to let you change the value on one dice if you contribute it to the next most valuable item. You are therefore offered the choice of chasing after the more valuable items, or building up a collection of cheap items that can be used to accelerate your acquisition of the better goods later. All in all, the game is hardly ground breaking, but it sounds like a very entertaining filler!
The Dice Bazaar closes down February 3rd.
Other Great Games
Chicago Shootout – A 2 player card game seeing you and your gang of mobsters battling for control of Chicago. Each round sees three locations revealed into which you’ll commit forces followed by the bloody gun battle resolution. Careful placement is key as units can fire in different directions in each of the three combat phases and only the player with the strongest surviving force in each location will get to keep it. Its got a lovely art style too! Ends Feb 1st.
Dragon Keeper: The Dungeon – In theory you’ll be cooperatively fighting off adventurers by directing the dungeon’s dragon to deal with the apparent horde assailing you. But really you’re facing a puzzle of manipulation and deceit as you try and obtain points by collecting all but one type of tile, while not revealing to your opponents which tile you don’t want. The restrictive movement combined with the requirement to “pay tribute” for every uncollected tile at the end of a round is sure to make this a challenging little game! Ends Feb 3rd.
Venom Assault – A co-operative deck building game with the feel of a G. I. Joe comic, sees you and the rest of Team Ameri – wait – Freedom Squadron going after the evil Venom. Featuring dice based combat and a selection of different scenarios to play, this certainly offers some differences to the Legendary Marvel Deckbuilder to which it draws closest comparison, but whether it is different enough I must leave up to you. Ends Feb 4th.
e-SOLO-e – I might call this “Connect 4” extreme: as we’ve seen before you’re aiming to create a row of four from a steadily growing pile of coloured wooden cubes. However, these cubes also have symbols and either colour or symbol can be used to make a set of 4. Plus the set can be formed when viewed from any of the structure’s 5 sides creating some really difficult decisions to be made. Ends Feb 6th.
Special Mention – The Dice Tower Season 12
Finally we wanted to mention a Kickstarter for a little board game news and review site that goes by the name of the Dice Tower. This hard working crew put out the occasional video and while they are sometimes a little clumsy with their components, they produce some excellent material. They’ve even managed to get hold of some nice promos for various games as rewards for backers! So you should totally think about giving them a hand for this coming year, you know, even if you’ve not come across them before… ;D
Image credit belongs to Board Game Geek users W Eric Martin, mgcoe, RPGShop, Battle of Durak, boardgames.dk, Nono, and spyglassgames, as well as the relevant Kickstarter projects.
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