Kickstart Your Week! Starving Bloc Space
Starving Artists
Delicately he dipped the brush into the paint and, with a flourish, signed the canvas. It was finished! At last, his greatest masterpiece yet! Hopefully someone might buy this one, he glanced guiltily at the half eaten slice of pizza he was saving for dinner. He almost didn’t hear the quiet dink as the cube peeled from the canvas and hit the floor. No!!! He rushed to the artwork and realised that all across it the glue was failing him, cubes dropping to the floor! He knew he should have gone for the stronger one! Damn, cubism is a difficult art style to get right.
As a content creator I have a great deal of sympathy for Starving Artists, a game about creating great masterpieces with little recognition… (pahahahaha! Masterpieces! Yeah…) But as a game player, I’m really interested in it’s wonderfully thematic “paint by cubes” mechanic, whereby each classical masterpiece depicted on the jumbo sized cards that come with this game is “painted” by placing coloured cubes onto the correspondingly coloured spaces on the painting. So simple, yet so neat!
You dream of becoming a famous painter, but keeping your belly full, and paint on your brush and canvases on your aisles, are more pressing concerns for now! You’ll spend your turns gathering paints, applying to the pictures you are working on, and hoping, desperately hoping! That you’ll manage to sell a finished work at the market this round because please God I need to eat! But of course the more artists trying to sell at the same time, the less everyone’s going to get! Yikes! A nice combination of resource management, timing and lovely sense of accomplishment just from putting cubes on a piece of card! Definitely one to check out!
Artists will starve on May 19th.
Bloc by Bloc
Ooo another game shamelessly embracing the classic power of the cube! Bloc by Bloc takes you into the wooden heart of modern urban revolutions, giving players 8 days to secure enough of the city to encourage a regime change before the military can be sent in to crush the rebellion. Given recent history in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, this is not a subject to be taken lightly. While here we have a game named for the pun, its cartoonish blocks do allow us to abstract away from localising to any particular conflict.
Together you will have to overcome an increasingly violent and desperate police force as you try to secure the city. Barricade the streets, loot shopping centres for supplies, occupy key locations and clash with riot police. The police will fight back each morning using an AI deck that will drive them into conflict with nearby rioters. However, everyone isn’t entirely playing on the same team. Each player controls a particular faction with their own supporters and agendas. Someone round the table might secretly want the regime to survive…
Bloc by Bloc presents a unique and interesting theme, but doesn’t let the harsh realities of that theme bog it down. I hope that it might allow players to learn something of the complexities of these anti-authoritarian issues, whilst enabling exciting semi-cooperative gameplay at the same time!
Taking it Bloc by Bloc before May 18th.
Space Race: The Card Game
But why, some say, play card games? Why choose this as our hobby? And they may well ask, why do anything?
We choose to play card games! We choose to play card games as often as we can, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because their goal serves to organise and measure the best of our energies and skills, because their challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win!
(with apologies to John F Kennedy and his speech writers)
The Space Race defined the world we live in today, gave us uncountable technologies we now take for granted, and created a cultural legacy that still reverberates through society. Space Race: The Card Game invites us to take command of a national space agency and explore the stars! A simple system of selecting and playing cards belies the powerful combos that can be built up over the course of the game. Each round you’ll be playing a new card, as well as activating previously played abilities, all with the aim of achieving the biggest milestones, the best laboratory or the most impressive breakthroughs.
While the vast hubbub of the moon landings has died down our achievements and discoveries in space continue and Space Race captures the most modern developments too, taking you through 70 amazing years of space exploration. The artwork and graphic design of the game is just fantastic too! A great little package you should totally be checking out!
Lift off on the Space Race is May 18th.
Other Great Games
Ameritocracy – Of all the countless card games about the American presidential elections I’ve seen over the last couple of months this is undoubtedly one of the best looking ones. Featuring nice art and multi-use cards that can either be used as a resource or activated for their benefit. Ends May 18th.
Noisy Person Cards – A game for helping you train your voice acting skills when playing D&D (style) characters… or just laughing at your friends silly voices! The task is to read phrases in the voice of various fantasy races, sometimes those suffering from stat-modifiers to boot. Ends May 18th.
Legends of the Mist – A dice based area control game. The dice decide your available actions each turn, but how you use them is on you! Controlling regions allow you to produce and collect new dice, as well as offering bonus actions. Secret objectives that are revealed immediately when achieved should hopefully keep things tense and exciting! Ends May 18th.
Blend Off! – It’s time for the age old favourite of competitive smoothie making! This is a real time dice rolling game, where the die lets you pick up the corresponding fruit you roll and add it to one of your blenders as you race to complete orders for points. Don’t get beaten to the punch! (Geddit!? Punch… cos fruit and drink and… nevermind). Ends May 19th.
Tak – A 2 player abstract game that has raised a staggering amount of money, perhaps because it is based on the game of the same name from the Wise Man’s Fear novel and co-designed by the book’s author! It certainly sounds interesting as players try to complete a line of pieces across the board by either placing in an empty space, or moving a stack, dropping pieces off from the stack in each space it moves through. Ends May 20th.
Cavern Tavern – A dice placement game set in a fantasy tavern where (I’m afraid) you’re just the serving staff! You’ll be running around trying to take and complete orders with the ingredients from the cellar. Maybe you’ll find time to complete those big chores and all the while try desperately to keep your grumpy dwarf boss from taking his ire out on you. Ends May 20th.
Image credit belongs to Board Game Geek users Fairway3Games, mimlee, drearem, jimmymacattack, cjpeach2004, kmatejka, Cassidy W, Corey Le Mesurier, Falco84, and the relevant Kickstarter projects.
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