Kickstart Your Week! Malfunctioning Pig Vikings
Spaceteam
Welcome to the world’s most incompetent space agencyTM! We’ve built a brand new rocket and it’s up to you to pilot it! Well, we’ve stuck some bits together into the shape of a rocket but it works… mostly! So things break – space is hard! But while malfunctions may happen, from time to time, rest assured we have stocked the ship with all the tools you’ll need to fix everything. Now, hurry along, your Spaceteam journey awaits!
*Crackling over the radio* oh no, things aren’t malfunctioning already are they? Well not to worry, everyone has their list of tasks to sort out and a handful of tools with which to solve them. Now, I’m afraid you can’t all use the same tools at once, but I’m sure you can organise passing things to the people who need them. No, you cant throw things across the centre console! Those tools are fragile: pass them around carefully. Oh, did I mention you only have 5 minutes to put your ship back together? Thank goodness the radio’s still wor-brzssht-ishbufftft…
Hello? Ah, good you got it working again! Well done, hope it didn’t get too hectic! No issues with the wormholes moving everyone around? Well it seems like you’ve got everything under control. Perhaps you’d like to support the training deck for people back on Earth to prepare them for future missions? It’s got some very nice graphics and even a NSFS edition to keep everyone entertained! What? Why didn’t we put as much effort into our space ships…? The nerve!
Spaceteam will be hammering away until October 23rd.
Little Pig
“Little pig, little pig, let me come in!”
“No! Fu- I mean, not on the hair of my chinny chin chin.”
“Then I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll blow your house in!”
What if the three little pigs was less a tale of porcine victimisation and in fact a malicious advertising stunt by the pig brick industry? It certainly seems possible if the manipulations represented by the new game, Little Pig, are anything to go by! Transporting us back to before the folk tale, as 2-3 enterprising pig businessmen are competing to build 3 delightful residences made from straw, wood or brick.
Each round, players will secretly chose to gather resources from either the straw fields, the forest or the brick mine, which can later be turned into house parts. If you go somewhere alone, you’ll get all the resources from that area, but if two or more people end up in the same place, you’ll have to share resources. So straight away you’re trying to figure out where other players will be trying to go. But then it goes further, because then everyone can play a special “guess” card, such as releasing the wolf, or finding your secret stash, that might boost your play or harm your opponents, but requires you to have accurately guessed where they’ve gone! Then there are friend cards, that might help out your strategy but could end up being signposts for what you’re planning on doing!
So what starts out as a very simple resource gathering game, rapidly turns into a game of bluffing and double-think. If you want it to, that is. Because this is a kiddy friendly game too if you step back from the mind-bending player reading and go for luck. The game is only for 2-3 players, which is a bit of a shame, but there is going to be a 4th player expansion if they can reach the stretch goal. I love these kind of tense mind games! This Kickstarter has a great video that really captures the spirit of these games!
Little Pig will be bacon on October 22nd.
Bardagi – The Claim for Gold
No! I don’t know how to pronounce Bardagi either. But fortunately my medium of choice is text so I can get away with – damnit! Bardagi sees you and your Viking fellows competing for control over a new group of resource rich islands. The locals may need dealing with but fortunately you each have your merchant for trading, your priest for converting and your berserker for encouragement of a pointier kind.
Each player has 6 cards for each unit that allows them to activate that corresponding unit once, and they can play any 6 in a turn. Chances are, you won’t be able to do everything you want to in a single turn! So you’ll have to play smart and make the most of what you have available. Most interesting in a game like this is how each player has only a single combat unit, the berserker, making it very hard to defend your entire border from marauding friends.
The player who best exploits this impressively beautiful land (what a game board! Seriously…) will win, but the large array of options combined with the tight action choosing system will make it a challenge to find the best route to achieve that victory. Go check out the rich territory of Bardagi!
Bardagi will be plundered by October 24th.
Worth a Look
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[/one_third][two_third]Innovation Deluxe – An enhanced edition of the card game Innovation, featuring updated artwork and graphic design and all the expansions. Innovation is a civilisation building card game focussed on ideas and technological inventions, where clever card play will allow you to utilise these new technologies to the max. This won the Golden Geek award when it was released back in 2010 so this is well worth a look, if you’re in the US or Canada at least. Ends Oct 21st.[/two_third][/row]
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[/one_third][two_third]Looting Atlantis – More technology gathering, now in a race to gather the secrets of Atlantis before the erupting volcano destroys everything… in your flying car. I’ll admit the very high tech theme is not to my taste, but I’m very intrigued by the gameplay. Every technology you gather offers you victory points or an ability you can use to accelerate your search, but not both. Players also decide the flow of lava from the volcano and where it hits, offering some fun tactical decisions. Ends Oct 22nd.[/two_third][/row]
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[/one_third][two_third]8 Kingdoms – A set of 4 new card games introducing strategic gameplay elements like card drafting, bluffing and simultaneous bidding in a set up much closer to a traditional deck of cards than typical modern games. The 8, 21-card, suits included in the game might also be of interest to game designers looking for prototype materials. Ends Oct 23rd.[/two_third][/row]
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[/one_third][two_third]Agility – Dog training! In particular, choosing and training dogs for completing agility courses. The gameplay is card driven, in which the cards gather “resources” (more akin to training time than a physical resource) and decide your main board action for the turn. Requires careful timing to ensure you have the right resources available to complete the action chosen! Ends Oct 25th.[/two_third][/row]
Thanks to Board Game Geek users timeisner1, Gamia, Angelkurisu, diane1962, talusproteus, Bpovis, as well as the relevant Kickstarter pages, for the images.
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