Kickstart Your Week! Twist Quest

 

Twist Of Fate

 

A good pun is a good start to a game. It shows a light-hearted awareness of what you’ve created. It suggests a sense of playfulness, of fun. Undeniably valuable qualities for board game designers. Twist of Fate is a game about Oliver Twist, about, indeed, deciding his fate! See what they’ve done there? And the game itself involves twisting cards. It works on multiple levels! Is there anything better than a joke explained in painful depth?

I’ve not read Oliver Twist, but from what little I can remember of the film, everyone seems to be trying to help him (for one purpose or another) and so it is here, but only one of you gets the self-satisfaction of helping him reach a real sanctuary! He’s a lucky kid that Oliver. However, raising a kid from the streets requires either lots of money, or lots of luck, and either can be collected by playing cards, though typically at the expense of the other. Interestingly though, to affect yourself you must also affect the other players around the table: you play a card on an opponent, giving them something, and gain the effect of the side facing you.

Twist of Fate is only a micro game, featuring a handful of cards and a folding score tracker, all decked in some lovely artwork. Even cooler though is the game’s unique packaging! A book! Hidden in its box, I’ll hide it on my bookshelf. “Oh, what’s this?” my mum will say when she comes round to visit, “Oliver Twist!” Off the shelf she’ll lift it and notice the strange lightness and texture, but by then it’ll be too late! “Oh that!” I’ll say, “It’s a game! Why don’t we play?”

 

Oliver Twist will ask for more until May 14^th.

 

 

Quests of Valeria

“Oh brave citizens of Valeria! Marvelous patrons of this fine establishment…”

“Yeah!? Wot!?”

“I have a quest! And need to hire you to complete it.”

“Ohhh, I see! What is this Quest, then?”

“Oh… probably go train the owlbears or something”

Another Valeria game!? It feels like only last month I was excitedly recommending the Villages of Valeria and now we’ve got Quests! How on Earth their artist Mihajlo Dimitrievski can produce such a volume of such incredible art is a mystery to me! But produce it he has! Another 110 cards of Valerian goodness. Now, we are in a tavern, home of course, to all good questers.

You’ll be hiring these brave adventurers (by discarding other cards) and sending them out to complete Quest cards. It is all eerily familiar to fans of Lords of Waterdeep (like us), even down to how you can reserve or reset & reserve the quests. However, you will also be building a tableau of adventurers whose abilities can combo together making this a race to completion! This is all packaged into a far more thematic, ultra-fast playing set, for a mere $20. Definitely one to check out.

 

Questing through Valeria until May 6^th.

 

 

Other Great Games

Aether Captains – A 1 vs many miniatures game set in world of flying steampunk airships, in which the 1 is playing the “good guys” for a change defending the empire from pirates. Pirates have their own secret objective, goody just has to kill the enemy. It features airship minis and piles of custom dice for the components fans! Ends May 9^th.

 

 

Shenanigans: The Musical – It’s a dark day in the orchestra. Someone isn’t playing to the right tune and it’s ruining the performance! The manager needs to find them, this slovenly artist doesn’t want to get caught but everyone else wants something else to happen! A hidden role game with a neat sense of humour and lots of shenanigans going down! This Kickstarter is also in support of a friendly local orchestra, so its a good cause too! Ends May 11^th.

 

 

Landed – Tile laying game in which you are attempting to terraform a new world according to the whims of Earth’s corporations, offering lucrative contracts for building regions of certain sizes, the bigger the better, but anyone can claim a region from under you if they have the right contract. How far do you push your plans? Ends May 12^th.

 

 

En Route – You’re trying to get the right goods to the right cities… but so is everyone else and there’s probably not enough to go round. Play city cards to either move goods from adjacent cities to that city, or to produce that good in that city. A simple rule set and wonderful graphical style makes this one to check out for sure! Ends May 12^th.

 

 

Bottom of the 9th: Clubhouse – A big box expansion to the quick but deep baseball simulator Bottom of the 9^th, with big box referring to it being able to fit in all the previous material for the game too. This adds new players, equipment that can be attached to your players and a token activation system for certain new abilities. Ends May 13^th.

 

 

Rushi – A pure abstract this one. You each have a set of tiles with directions inscribed on them, set up along the base line of a grid board. With your remaining tile in hand, you place it in one of the adjacent spaces that the tiles point to, then pick up the tile that pointed to that space. Doing this, you’ll steadily move across the board with the aim of filling your opponent’s starting row with your set of tiles first. Ends May 14^th.

 

Dark Souls™ – See that trademark symbol there? Oh yes. This spin off from the hit video game series is sure to draw vast piles of money with it’s incredibly nice minis and claims of recreating the video games nightmarish difficulty and fluid fighting. But the lack of any true details on that front is just a little bit off putting for me so approach with caution. Ends May 16^th.

 

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Images are from Board Game Geek users shulman24, isaiasvallejo42, exa1zar2ius3, x_equals_speed, 6e38, getlouder, dzondervan, vcrproszek as well as the relevant Kickstarter pages.