Bleh! Bleh! I vant to suck your blood! Bleh! Bleh!
While it might be New Year's, that doesn't mean we can't get a little Halloween up in here. Wizkids has released their 4th edition box of Fury of Dr
Bleh! Bleh! I vant to suck your blood! Bleh! Bleh!
While it might be New Year's, that doesn't mean we can't get a little Halloween up in here. Wizkids has released their 4th edition box of Fury of Dracula. Chase the titular count all accross Europe, or play as them and try and expand your power all across the continent.
From the release:
WizKids is excited to announce that the 4th Edition of iconic asymmetrical horror game Fury of Dracula is now available in North American game stores!
In Fury of Dracula, inspired by Bram Stoker’s classic novel, one player becomes the titular vampire while the remaining players take on the roles of hunters Dr. Abraham Van Helsing, Lord Godalming, Dr. John Seward, and Mina Harker, each of whom has a unique ability that serves to aid the group in capturing Dracula.
Each round is broken into two phases: day and night. During both phases, hunters may perform one of many actions such as travelling throughout the map or investigating their present location. Dracula, however, is only able to act at night, when he can lay traps for the hunters, create new servants, or secretly move to a new location. Players continue to traverse the map, featuring a variety of European countries, until either Dracula gains enough influence, or the hunters defeat him.
This new edition of the popular game includes larger cards, a refreshed rulebook, and all-new pre-painted miniatures to create a more immersive experience for players as they travel the European continent. Will the Hunters take down Dracula before his undead thralls overwhelm Europe, or will he succeed in his insidious mission? Pick up Fury of Dracula at your Friendly Local Game Store or Online today and find out!
In this Year of New Editions, it's all sorts of games that're getting an update. In this case, it's a pretty classic title. WizKids is bringing us the 3rd edition of Fury of Dracula. They've posted up
In this Year of New Editions, it's all sorts of games that're getting an update. In this case, it's a pretty classic title. WizKids is bringing us the 3rd edition of Fury of Dracula. They've posted up a small preview, including looks at the minis that will be coming in the game.
From the website:
It is 1898. London has returned to peace for eight years following Count Dracula’s thwarted plans, or so they thought…
In Fury of Dracula, one player is Count Dracula secretly traveling the European countries, turning humans into vampires with his gruesome bite, and laying deadly traps for those hunting him. The Count’s opponents are the Hunters who must find the bloodthirsty villain and destroy him before his undead thralls claim the night as their own.
This WizKids print of the classic hidden movement vampire hunt includes a new and improved rule book; larger, poker-sized cards; and fully painted figures for Dracula and each of the Hunters. This updated and improved version of this thematic classic is a perfect addition to any board gamer’s shelf!
So, since I spend all my regular workdays gaming, I will often step away from it on my time off. You know, you don't want to get burned out on a thing. However, last weekend and this, I've been all-ou
So, since I spend all my regular workdays gaming, I will often step away from it on my time off. You know, you don't want to get burned out on a thing. However, last weekend and this, I've been all-out gaming just about every chance I can! Last week was game day at the Milton, GA. library. Yesterday a friend came over for some Guild Ball. Today I'm headed to another friend's (and co-worker) house for more gaming, along with Italian beef and fresh-baked cookies.
So that's what I'm doing. How about you (besides reading this article)?
Speaking of this article, this week we have: Deadzone 2nd Edition, Manhattan Project: Chain Reaction, Mission to Mars, Tumult Royale, Expo 1906, The Cohort, MODX, The Siblings Trouble, Super Motherload, 13 Days: The Cuban Missile Crisis, Fury Of Dracula, Dead of Winter, Potion Explosion, Dastardly Dirigibles, Apollo XIII, Snow Tails, Kune v Lakia, Deathbot Derby, Game of Train, and Ice Cool.
Mission to Mars 2049 is a light weight strategic family board game that keeps a dynamic game pace from the beginning till the very end. You start with a single base on the outside of the map and gradually build you colony larger one base at a time until you reach the North Pole of Mars and build a road through the polar ice cap. The player who builds the water extraction station on the center of the map first, wins the game. In order to do that you will need lots of resources (air, food and minerals) which you can acquire by building resource stations. Each time someone rolls that station on the game die, you get one card for each of the stations you have built for that resource.
In Tumult Royale, you play the royals. Round after round, you collect taxes from your subjects in order to build statues of yourself across the country, thereby securing your rank. If you leave enough commodities for the people after taxation, all is well and you can continue to build monuments to your own vanity. But if you take too much, the greediest of you will be punished. Who will build the most statues and win the game? Remember: the greedy shall rule, but the greediest is a fool!
In Expo 1906, players will win by totaling more prestige points at the end of the game than their opponents. Points are awarded for completing Projects which represent historical inventions of the period. To complete a Project, a player must purchase Resources and place them in a proper combinations together with a Project in his Laboratory. This is a challenging task as Projects come in many different shapes and must fit together with their resources in an already tight space. Soon the available room in the Laboratory will reduce and players will face the puzzle solving aspect of the game.
The Cohort is a fast-paced card game for 2-6 players in a race to be the first to assemble a Legion and show Caesar you are the greatest of his commanders.
In the abstract strategy game MOD X, each player has 14 game pieces and 18 score markers, with the goal being to reach an established number of points (determined by the number of players). Players take turns placing a game piece on the board and trying to create scoring patterns – an “X”, a “+”, or a line, with each pattern requiring five pieces – while simultaneously trying to block their opponents from scoring with these same patterns.
The Siblings Trouble is a card-driven, cooperative, storytelling game inspired by finding the mysterious places in your backyard.
The Siblings Trouble boils down all the core elements of an RPG (storytelling, exploration, discover, treasure, encounters, etc) into a fun-to-play narrative romp with your family or friends.
Super Motherload is a tile-laying deck-building game, which means that you have your own deck of cards from which you draw each turn. The cards in your deck start out very basic, but over the course of the game you add new and more powerful cards to it. You use these cards to bomb and drill minerals and other bonuses from the game board. You then use the minerals you’ve collected as money to purchase better cards for your deck. Some cards give you an immediate bonus when you purchase them, and some give you other bonuses when you use them to drill. Each card you purchase from your library is worth victory points (VPs). You can also gain VPs from achievement cards that become available throughout the game. Whoever has the most VPs at the end of the game wins.
13 Days: The Cuban Missile Crisis is a nail-biting, theme saturated two-player strategy game about the Cuban Missile Crisis. Your fate is determined by how well you deal with the inherent dilemmas of the game, and the conflict.
For those of you who are familiar with the Bram Stoker classic, Fury is pretty close to the book’s canon in terms of characters. Aside from the big D, the hunters consist of John Seward, Lord Godalming, Lady Harker and of course, Van Helsing. Although this time, he’s not an Aussie with a penchant for bearing his claws whilst riding a Harley.
Picture the scene; it's the middle of both a post-apocalyptic zombie invasion and the worst winter in recorded history, you're running low on everything from food to medicine and you come across a horse. A horse would be very useful for getting around town quickly, it's a majestic beast and for one to have survived this far into a zombie outbreak means it's a fighter, but it also represents a significant quantity of fresh protein and there's plenty of starving mouths to feed back at the colony. So what do you do?
This kind of decision is at the very heart of Dead of Winter, it's the crossroads element that turns it from a mechanical cooperative game of survival into a story. These difficult, morally ambiguous decisions don't come up as often as they should, but when they do they're often agonising. What did we do? Let's just say it was Findus Lasagne all round.
Try not to lose your marbles as you make spells in the great all-ages game, Potion Explosion! CMON Games and Horrible Games deliver a 30-minute light strategy board game that is fun, funny, and easy to learn.
You are an inventive engineer competing with other great tinkerers to create the world’s most Dastardly Dirigibles. The victor wins Hornswoggle’s factory – gears, cogs and clockwork casings! To stand out amongst your competitors you’ll build your airship using the most perfidious means you know – set collecting! Okay, so maybe that doesn’t sound terribly devious, but worry not. There are still ways to mag your foes and leave them bellows to mend as you snidely grin, wheezingly snicker and twirl your mustache!
Apollo XIII is, naturally, a cooperative game. Players represent mission control, and they must do everything they can to get the crew of Apollo XIII back home safely.
The game is divided up into 7 different historical stages, representing the various key events of the mission. You start before the launch, carrying through events including the explosion that started the crisis, failing to land on the moon, and the desperate crawl back home. (Spoiler alert: you can’t land on the moon).
Snow Tails overall theme and objective is straight-forward and unique. You lead a dog sled against other dog sled racers and see who the best is. Unfortunately, the race is set in the Arctic Circle and so your course is made of some unforgiving snow. Racers will be drifting back and forth, trying to stay on the course while avoiding other racers and obstacles to the finish line.
It's time once again for Saturday.I think that's really all that needs to be said about it.This Roundup we have: Camel Cup, Dead of Winter, Tash-Kalar, Ryu, Through The Ages, Mombasa, Raptor, Fury of
It's time once again for Saturday.
I think that's really all that needs to be said about it.
This Roundup we have: Camel Cup, Dead of Winter, Tash-Kalar, Ryu, Through The Ages, Mombasa, Raptor, Fury of Dracula, Monster My Neighbor, Grand Austria Hotel, Neue Heimat, Pi mal Pflaumen, Modern Art: The Card Game, Fog of Love, and Pew Pew.
Tash-Kalar is an abstract game with some area control in it set in a battle arena. You place your pieces on the board in specific patterns to summon cards in your hand.
Through the Ages: A New Story of Civilization (TtA) is the newest implementation of the 2006 civilization building game Through the Ages: A Story of Civilization. I was excited to receive this game to review as it would be the first time playing a civ game in board game form.
There’s some irony in using a James Bond song to intro one of the least sexy games we’ve ever reviewed. Mombasa isn’t just a weighty, complex game with a fat manual. It’s a game of buying stocks in colonial-era Africa* where one of the areas of the board you’ll be battling is “The bookkeeping track”.
That’s right. Don’t all rush to throw your underwear at the box at once!
That said, if you won't have trouble inviting your friends over to play with stocks and books, we’re happy to tell you that Mombasa’s puzzle is strong and surprising, like a stinky hippo charging at you out of a river.
Imagine an island in the Pacific where not all dinosaurs are extinct. A mama raptor and her five babies are cavorting in the island sun. (Don’t ask me where daddy raptor is. That’s never addressed.) A team of scientists has arrived to capture the dinosaurs, presumably for legitimate preservation and study, not Jurassic Park-style weirdness. Of course, mama raptor is not in favor of this plan, so she will battle to eat those scientists and save her babies. Who will win?
There are two sides in Fury of Dracula: Dracula himself, and a team of four hunters which fans of the book will immediately recognize: Van Helsing, John Seward, Lord Godalming, and Mina Harker. The goal of the hunters is to find and eradicate Dracula, while Dracula must increase his influence on the world by maturing new vampires, defeat hunters in combat, or simply survive long enough for his power to be unstoppable.
Monster My Neighbor is a light, quick-playing card game where you’re either guessing who the monster is or hiding your fiendish nature. Then again, you might start out as a normal everyday villager doing your part to root out the creature only to discover you suddenly become the monstrous target yourself! Monsters are known to have identity crises like that.
Euro games are often derided for their dull themes and presentation, put down for being tedious exercises in efficiency. Cube pusher, point salad, multiplayer solitaire. All terms to describe yet another soulless euro game. There’s some truth to it all, but you know what? I love it! I love it all! Farmers and merchants win my favor over wizards and warriors any day of the week. The struggles of a business owner are more relatable to me than the trials of an adventurer. So the stakes of a business facing bankruptcy carry more weight with me than staring down a giant troll. When Grand Austria Hotel offered me the opportunity to run my own high end hotel, I was eager to jump in.
When a game debuts with a unique and fresh theme, it always catches my eye. We have countless zombie games, a billion trading games set in the Mediterranean Sea, and more fantasy games than one could play in a life time.
So when I was first asked to check out Fog of Love, my interest was immediately piqued. The theme is unusual for sure. In this 2 player only game, players take on the role of a couple and must make decisions over the course of their relationship. The game sprang from the mind of game designer Jacob Jaskov, who was trying to find a game to play with his wife, a romantic at heart. Decision making, role playing, and possibly some bluffing are what Fog of Love promises. Launching now on Kickstarter, we dive in to Fog of Love and see if it delivers on its promises.
I will confess that I grew up in the eighties at the height of arcade video-gaming (insert ageism joke here). The digital glow of those large boxes or table tops drew me in like nothing else. My all-time favorite arcade game was Galaxian (not to be confused with Galaga) which I likely spent a king ransom of quarters playing over the years.
So when I was offered the chance to review, Pew Pew!, a solo, “old-school” arcade space shooter strategy game from Victory Point Games, I jumped at the chance. Does Pew Pew! emulate the feel of my favorite eighties arcade game fun or does it end up missing the mark? Read on!
Pew Pew! is a solitaire game for 1 player that plays between 15-20 minutes.
Well, as I sit here, assembling The Horus Heresy set, working on articles related to it for next week and beyond, I think about other games and other review articles.Oh hey, here's a whole bunch of th
Well, as I sit here, assembling The Horus Heresy set, working on articles related to it for next week and beyond, I think about other games and other review articles.
Oh hey, here's a whole bunch of them in one, convenient spot for you. It's today's Review Roundup.
In this installment we have articles on: Age of Tyrants, Mansions of Madness, More Cash ‘n More Guns,DC Dice Masters: War of Light, The King is Dead, Fury of Dracula, Roll for the Galaxy: Ambition, Two Rooms and a Boom, Aura, T.I.M.E. Stories, WWE Superstar Showdown, and Pathfinder Adventure Card Game - Wrath of the Righteous.
Something stirs in the West ... Something huge ... I take my sauce to this sentence contained in Lord of the Rings (JRR Tolkien for the uneducated and NOT: the book is not released after the film but a good fifty years before thank you to revise your classics low floor moviegoers) who spoke of Mordor (well there is but it was not my fucking rot dramatic introduction slamming I like to do long brackets from the outset !!) to talk about a future project that seems figurinistique promised a real success.
As an investigator, you believe you have seen it all: grisly murders, seemingly unsolvable mysteries, and all the horrible nightmares that comes along with these things. Nothing surprises you anymore, and you would be shocked if you found something that did. But perhaps, this new job you have taken is a bit more than you can handle?
In Mansions of Madness, you play the part of the investigator, sent to explore a seemingly normal crime in a seemingly normal house. But things aren’t always as they seem. It appears that the unseen forces in the darkness are working against you. Not only are you unsure if you will solve the mystery, but will you even escape the house alive?
So you opened up your copy of Cash & Guns and you were pretty happy with all the contents; as advertised, you found both a stack of cash and a pile of guns.
But maybe, just maybe, you looked in that box and you said to yourself, “Really? This is it?”
I’ve got great news for you, stranger. There’s a new box in town, and once again it brings exactly what it advertises:
War of Light is the second DC Comics Dice Masters set. It revolves around the various Lantern Corps. It also includes the Teen Titans. Yep. There are a handful of popular characters and villains recurring from the first DC set, Justice League. However, here of course each of those is associated with its role in the War of Light story arc. The general mechanics and game play remain the same as with other sets and IPs across the system. You can reference our review of the original Marvel Dice Masters sets for the basic rules.
Being a gamer it also gives you an ideal time to break out the occasional party game and see if you can convert some non-gamers. This is always somewhat tricky to me because there’s typically no grey area with party games. They usually make the party epic or bust it up in my opinion.
So, given my boom or bust party game gauge, we look at the social, party game: Two Rooms and a Boom. This game breaks the party people in two teams spread between two rooms who try to blow the other team’s leader away. Does Two Rooms and a Boom make your party night epic or was it just another party game dud? Read on!
Two Rooms and a Boom is a social party game for 6-30 players runs between 7-20 minutes per play. Two Rooms and a Boom plays best with 12+ players.
More often than not, I look for games that provide me a thematic experience, with a rich story and setting and the ability to interact with both. However, there are also times when all I want is to play something abstract and strategic.
Some of my earliest gaming memories are of playing Uno with friends and family. There’s an elegance and simplicity there that sometimes I yearn for. To meet that want, I was interested in trying out Aura by Michael Orion and WhoaWorthy Games, a newcomer to the card game scene. Are Aura’s colors vibrant and vivid, or do they take on a dull and muted pallor? Read on to find out!
Aura is an abstract strategy card game for 2-4 players, that plays in about 30 minutes. Aura plays well with any number of players.
It's time for another of 2015's most breathtaking releases, and that's not a euphemism for a fart. Rather, T.I.M.E. Stories is a whole new kind of co-op board game. Your team will complete each time travel scenario in a blistering five hours and then it's time to buy a whole new deck, making this the most expensive game we've ever covered. Great Scott!
On the other hand, the only thing Quinns loves more than the movie Primer are board game expansions. What happens when an immovable force meets an unstoppable object? Tune in and find out.
Wrath of the Righteous is the latest base set in the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game series. It follows the same formula as previous sets with a few new additions.
Seems like this would be the perfect time of year to release a board game based on one of the classic monsters in all of literature. As such, Fantasy Flight Games is pleased to announce that you can n
Seems like this would be the perfect time of year to release a board game based on one of the classic monsters in all of literature. As such, Fantasy Flight Games is pleased to announce that you can now pick up Fury of Dracula from either your LGS or from their very own webshop.
In the game, one player plays as Dracula, who is looking to extend his control over Europe through all sorts of nefarious means. Meanwhile, 1-4 players take up the mantle of one of the famous Dracula-hunters. Picking up clues here and there, trying to keep themselves as hidden as possible, lest Dracula find them and take them out before their advantages can be pressed, they must work together to root out any evil that Dracula is causing, and of course, they must survive a final showdown with the vampire lord.
Drac-u-leeeee! Drac-u-laaaaa!I should probably stop. I wouldn't want to incur the ire of Dracula. Though, it seems his Fury is already out. Or at least, it will be out when Fantasy Flight Games releas
Drac-u-leeeee! Drac-u-laaaaa! I should probably stop. I wouldn't want to incur the ire of Dracula. Though, it seems his Fury is already out. Or at least, it will be out when Fantasy Flight Games releases the 3rd edition of Fury of Dracula, the game of vampire hunting all across Europe.
In the game, you either take on the role of one of four famous vampire hunters (Dr. Abraham Van Helsing, Dr. John Seward, Lord Arthur Godalming, or Mina Harker) or as Dracula, himself. The hunters are looking to put a permanent end to the centuries-long reign of terror that Dracula has had. Meanwhile, Dracula is looking to only increase the influence of his malevolent powers across the entire continent. Only one group will be successful. The other will be cold and in the ground (and not for only the day).
The game will be available in Q4 of this year, but you can try it out for yourself at Gen Con next weekend.
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