Kickstart Your Week! Vampire Dingo Patrol?
One Night Ultimate Vampire
On many a dark stormy night, or indeed perfectly respectable nights that don’t feel the need to kick up such a fuss, the werewolves would come to town. Brave souls would gather to face them but many would fall as werewolves are sneaky, and maintain the shapes of normal men and women during debates. And so battles could drag on, and those who died didn’t get to have as much fun, you know, being dead and all. Fortunately, Bezier Games found a way they could cram all the debate into a single speedy round with all the intrigue and non of the unfortunate player elimination. This was One Night Ultimate Werewolf, and it was a huge success. So much so, that now we have a new standalone expansion about Vampires!
Vampires are admittedly similar to Werewolves, but they have this annoying habit of multiplying. You see, during that fateful One Night, the vampire players will bite another player, leaving the mark of the vampire upon them, and from that point forward putting them on the vampire team. Sensible rule explainers will make clear that biting is a metaphor only and should be avoided during actual gameplay.
While vampires add a new twist to the One Night Ultimate gameplay, there are also a dozen completely new roles in there to make the game even more chaotic! All good fun! While players will know their role at the start, they probably won’t by the end. Yet they will need to discuss amongst themselves who the vampires are, and they have one chance to get it right. The free app keeps the game to a tight, quick time limit and ensures the villagers have an even harder time guessing right.
The new set of roles can be happily combined with the One Night Ultimate Werewolf games for maximum variety while playing. Fans of those games should certainly look at picking up this new edition! Anyone not drawn to the chaos and lying should stay away, and if you’ve not played the games before there’s probably no reason to chose this over any of the other One Night Ultimate games. But by the same token, there’s also no reason not to… except you can get the werewolf games now of course!
Get bit before August 31st.
Dingo’s Dreams
Lead the dingo and his friends home through a dream landscape of verdant grasslands, vast oceans, echoing caves, roaring waterfalls and tremendous mountains. Rearrange the dream tiles to show Dingo the way home, and see if you can’t do it faster than your friends. Something about the artwork to this beautiful game just gives me a sense of peace and relaxation, like something sculpted from clouds. It gives the game a quiet presence.
In Dingo’s Dream, each player has their own grid of tiles displaying the various terrains, and a random one will be flipped each turn to reveal their animal on the reverse. Players may then slide their spare tile into the grid, displacing a row or column so that the end tile falls out the end. Through these actions, the players will be aiming to organise the animal tiles into a pattern that matches the path home, illustrated on one of the victory cards. The first player to complete the path wins.
It’s a family friendly puzzle game where more experienced players can chose to ramp up the difficulty level if they wish. Hazards can be marked on the victory cards, so that not only must your animal pattern match the card, there must also be no animals on the hazard spaces. Given your very limited ability to manipulate the game state, this will offer a significant challenge, rewarding careful planning. I don’t suppose it’s a game for hardened gamers, but it will be great for families and while it may ultimately be a thin theme for an abstract game, with that beautiful artwork I don’t think you’ll mind.
The Dingo will be waking up on August 31st.
Star Patrol
“Ready missiles tactical officer.”
“Yes sir!”
“Squad Leader, is your team ready to launch the boarding action?”
“Once we’re in range, Captain.”
“Sir, the enemy is 3 hexes out.”
“Roger that. Helmsman! Adjust heading to intercept. Point 95”
“Er, sir? We’re -”
“There they are! God they’re approaching quickly. Prepare to launch everything!”
“Sorry sir, you see we’ve still – ”
“FIRE EVERYTHING!! SHIT! Where’d she go!? And what are you blabbering on about helmsman!?”
“I was trying to explain – we still have all our inertia!”
“Inertia!?”
“Yes sir, you see it’s… well, why don’t we let Star Patrol explain….”
Welcome to what is sure to feature the universes clumsiest space battles, as players learn they need to grapple with Newton’s First Law of Mechanics before they can even hope to begin grappling with their opponents. Remember: in space, no one can hear you scream as you go spinning wildly past your opponent’s ship, flinging missiles out of every orifice. Of your ship. Don’t be disgusting.
You see, those big engines on the back of your ship only point in one direction. So you need to rotate your ship before you can change direction, and since this is space, you won’t have lost any of the momentum you gained from the last time you fired your engines. What that means is that your ship will keep moving on that first heading until you swing your entire ship around 180° and fire them again. In this game you keep your inertia.
Then there are gravity wells. You see, big planets and asteroids have gravitational fields that will accelerate your ships if you move through them, always adding inertia towards the planet. Another thing to worry about as you tumble through the cosmos. Still, at least you have fuel to correct your trajectories! Oh no wait, this is a rocket ship, it can only hold so much fuel. And besides, you’ll need to have your crew in the right places first to activate the right systems. And at some point you’re actually going to want to try and fire a weapon at the other ship!
SHIPS! There are literally hundreds if not thousands of possible ships you can build in this game. Chose a chassis type, fill it with weaponry and systems, then pilot it boldly out into the void in a clumsy fight to the death. At least to begin with. But this is the kind of system you learn after playing. You get better at it. And where before those asteroids induced terror, now they are just building blocks in your grand elegant scheme.
If you can’t tell, I love the look of Star Patrol! It’s a complex game, a real child of the 70s/80s counter and hex games it wishes to recreate. But for that you get a fascinatingly unique challenge with a staggering amount of variety for its size. And for only $11 dollars (including world wide shipping) it is absolutely worth a look!
Try not to shoot past the Star Patrol kickstarter! Ends September 1st.
Worth a Look
Lobotomy – Massive miniatures game time! In the mostly cooperative game of Lobotomy you’re trying to escape the mental asylum and its terrifying inhabitants. Going deeper into your character’s psychosis unlocks more abilities, but underlying it all is the question of whether it’s really all in your head… Just kidding. It’s really not that deep no matter what the Kickstarter page is trying to say. In the end it’s a standard miniatures combat game with a heavy them, but any kind of deep comments on mental disorders? I’m afraid they’re all in your head. Ends Aug 31st.
Cultists of Cthulhu – A semi co-op featuring a band of academics from Arkham’s Miskatonic University attempting to prevent the eldritch horrors from invading. Except for the hidden cultist in your ranks, who knows when the stars will align and is trying to bring about your doom. The best semi co-ops require players to make bad decisions to give the traitor room to manoeuvre and Cultists of Cthulhu has some a couple of tasty options for traitors to utilise. Check it out. Ends Sept 3rd.
D6 Shooter – A push your luck dice game about capturing bandits. Match the symbols on the custom dice to capture a bandit, then decide whether to try and capture more or end your turn. The race is on to bring as many to justice as possible, but over reach and they’ll all get away! There is also the very similar Posse Wild West Justice running at the same time, but I felt this one looked a bit better, but feel free to decide for yourselves! Ends Sept 3rd.
Prime Time – Can you pull the prime time audiences in this heavyish eurogame of running your own TV network? Over two television seasons, players will bid for actions, hire and fire talent, play golf and most importantly decide their weeks schedule to get the maximum number of viewers according to the different demographics watching on a given night. Of course, some careful PR can always help adjust those demographics in your favour… Ends Sept 3rd.
Image credit goes to Board Game Geek users W Eric Martin, alfseegert, csferguson, Lopezzz, bgaesop, epicscalegames, eg1105.
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