Kickstart Your Week! Northmen Spirits
Saga of the Northmen
Lock up your womenfolk because the Northmen are here, marching across Europe stealing plunder and generally causing a nuisance. Classic Saga holiday. Fortunately, you’ll be one of them, but you won’t be alone. Only the richest faction will be declared the winner, in this intriguingly simple area control/war game.
Each round starts with a card drafting phase in which players establish influence over the 7 major kingdoms of Europe, during this dark ages period. Each card you play will let you drop your cubes into the corresponding region, but some will also result in plunder marks being placed in the neutral territories of the board. The round ends once all the plunder is placed, so there is an interesting trade off between controlling where plunder is located (preferably close to regions you expect to control) and actually getting enough influence in those key regions.
Once complete, the game moves into a war phase, in which the now rulers of each of the 7 nations are able to move their forces about the map according to the type (sea or land) of cards they played in the previous rounds. It’s about this point, with already 4 uses per card, that my brain starts to quiver with the possible decisions to be made. This movement lets you seize plunder from the neutral regions, so long as you can fight off your opponents, as well as set up valuable trade routes that complete the secret objective cards each player has access to.
Saga of the Northmen blends elements of war and area control games, with some neat Euro game mechanisms that you wouldn’t normally expect to see in a war game. This is light enough rules wise to get most players interested yet full of interesting decisions.
The Saga comes to a bloody end on October 12th.
Spirit Island
The settlers have arrived but this time it’s not going to be such a walk in the park. In this cooperative game you’ll be fighting tooth and nail, or perhaps that should be pebble and spark… to rid the island of these invaders. Finally the land of Catan will get its revenge!
Not really, instead the setting is an alternate history 1700s, with the great colonial powers of Europe spreading their influence across the world, snatching up islands and resources and “bringing culture” to the indigenous populations. Those lucky fellows. But the peoples of Spirit Island have you onside, controlling one of the 4 elemental spirits that protect the island.
Initially the goal of the game is to simply obliterate the invaders, but this is immensely difficult. As the game goes on though, the condition for victory becomes steadily easier as the invaders begin to fear your powers. While the spirits will be quite weak at the start of the game, they will gain in power as the game goes on, driving the game towards its climax. This adjusting victory condition is very cool and gives a sense of the attrition affecting both sides in the conflict.
The game offers a number of different scenarios, rules for invaders from different nations, new spirits, as well as a variable map layout providing a very nice amount of replay. Plus the special way the game’s difficulty adjusts means there is always the challenge of seeing how quickly you can wipe out the invaders! I expect this game will offer plenty of replay potential!
Liberate Spirit Island before October 16th.
Worth a look
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[/one_third][two_third]Secrets of the Lost Tomb: The Elite Missions – An expansion to, and second chance to pick up, last year’s pulp adventure dungeon crawler Secrets of the Lost Tomb. Based around a set of story driven cooperative scenarios, Elite Missions ups the difficulty for experienced adventurers. The base game and previously released expansions also offers a ton of content for new players. Ends Oct 13th[/two_third][/row]
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[/one_third][two_third]The Guardians: Explore – A semi cooperative game of monster slaying as you and your friends fight to save your “real-world” town from the appearance of fantasy monsters. Players start the game by drafting a set of skill cards to make a deck of actions and abilities they can use to fight monsters. Defeat the most to be crowned champion. Ends Oct 15th[/two_third][/row]
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[/one_third][two_third]Dart through the Amazon – Take the role of researchers exploring the amazon trying to collect breeding pairs of the colourful dart frogs for scientific study. 4 location decks hide a selection of the different frog species, in addition to snakes and rocks that let you steal specimens or force you to discard them. A simple family game coated in beautiful watercolour illustrations. Ends Oct 16th.[/two_third][/row]
Image credit goes to Board Game Geek users: RPGShop, imprimis5, cbatarlis, Reihon, crausse.
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