Some new games came in last Thursday. If you haven't had a chance to check them out, now is a good time:
Betrayal Legacy marries the concept of Betrayal at House on the Hill — exploring a haunted mansion — with the permanency and multi-game storytelling exhibited by Daviau's Risk Legacy and other legacy games that followed. Betrayal Legacy consists of a prologue and a thirteen-chapter story that takes place over decades. Players represent families, with specific members of a family participating in one story, then perhaps an older version of those characters (assuming they lived) or their descendants showing up in later stories.
Why would people keep exploring a haunted mansion for decade after decade, especially when horrible things happen there? Curiosity, I suppose, or perhaps an ignorant boldness that comes from the belief that we know better than those who have come before. Look at all that we've learned, marvel at the tools we have at hand! Surely we'll all exit safely this time...
As with other Betrayal titles, the game is narratively-driven, with elements that record the history of your specific games. The tools mentioned earlier, for example, become attached to specific families. This isn't just a bucket; it's my bucket, the one my grandpappy used to feed his family's pigs when he was a boy, and while you can certainly use that bucket, I know how to wield it best from the time he spent teaching me how to slop. Yes, it's an heirloom bucket, and when kept in the family, I get a bonus for using it.
RRP: $110
Fog of Love is not a new release, but we have now received the alternate art covers for male-male and female-female couples, as well as the three expansions.
RRP: $80
Exps: $25
Fog of Love is a game for two players. You will create and play two vivid characters who meet, fall in love and face the challenge of making an unusual relationship work.
Playing Fog of Love is like being in a romantic comedy: roller-coaster rides, awkward situations, lots of laughs and plenty of difficult compromises to make.
Much as in a real relationship, goals might be at odds. You can try to change, keep being relentless or even secretly decide to be a Heartbreaker. It’s your choice.
The happily ever after won’t be certain, but whatever way your zigzag romance unfolds, you’ll always end up with a story full of surprises – guaranteed to raise a smile!
You awaken with a splitting headache and no idea of how you got here. The wilderness stretches in every direction, and something howls in the distance. Your quest for answers will have to wait; first, you need to survive. Will you help the others that are stranded here or will you save yourself at any cost?
When two to four players find themselves marooned in the harsh wilderness, you must cooperate and compete to search for water, food, and tools that will be essential to your very survival. But your adventure holds many secrets. Every copy of Discover: Lands Unknown is unlike any other in the world. A mix of environments, storylines, characters, locations, items, and enemies have been engineered to tell a story unique to every copy of the game thanks to an algorithm that ensures no two copies are alike. Your copy will contain various tiles, cards, and tokens, each pulled from a shared pool of components, and the combination will be different from every other copy in the world.
RRP: $100
Between Two Castles of Mad King Ludwig is published by Stonemaier Games as part of a collaboration with Bezier Games.
The king demands a castle! You are a world-renowned master builder who has been asked by the Mad King Ludwig to help design his castles. Projects of such significance require the expertise of more than one person, so for each assignment you are paired with another master builder to execute your grandiose plans. Will your planning and collaborative skills be enough to design the most impressive castles in the world?
Between Two Castles of Mad King Ludwig is a competitive tile-drafting game in which each tile is a room in a castle. You work together with the player on your left to design one castle, and with the player on your right on another castle. On each turn you select two tiles from your hand, reveal them, then work with your partners to place them. To win, you have to share your attention and your devotion between two castles.
This game includes 147 regular room tiles with unique art, 83 other tiles, 20 bonus cards, 7 custom wooden castle tokens, 1 full-color, double-sided scorepad, and a 4-piece Game Trayz custom insert that reduces setup time to less than 60 seconds.
RRP: $75
Warsaw is a unique city. It is said that it "survived its own death", and there is truth in this. Poland's capital was largely destroyed during the Second World War, and its reconstruction was an exceptional urban development process. Warsaw is a combination of elegant buildings from Saxon times, architecture from between the World Wars, socialist blocks, and modern buildings. Walking through the streets of Warsaw's Wola district, one can see this diversity at a glance. Modern glass office buildings stand next to pre-war automotive garages, and concrete block buildings touch elegant older houses, which show the signs of time's decay. Some call it a spatial mess, while others see in it the residents' determination. Both views are right because that's how Warsaw is. Maybe not the most beautiful, but strong and determined. Nothing reflects the city's character more than its diverse buildings.
In Capital, players jointly build Warsaw over six epochs, from when Warsaw first became the capital at the end of the 16th century through modern times. Each player creates their own district of the city. At the end of each of the six epochs, districts give income and victory points to their owners. After six rounds, whoever has the most points wins.
RRP: $85
Find the lost runes and save the planet Asteros!
A long, long time ago, the ancient King of Asteros confined the brutal monsters in the Rune Gate and sealed it with four divine runes. But five days ago, a mysterious evil power opened the gate and changed the code. Asteros is haunted by fear and disasters again! The wise leader ORAKL asked the Council of United Planets and they sent four famous agents: EKHO, HAL, ELLI and NOVA. ORAKL the wise and the four brave agents begin to fight against the evil powers to save Asteros. They must find the Code to reset the Gate and confine the monsters again. People call them "Rising 5", hoping they will be able to restore peace on the planet.
Rising 5: Runes of Asteros is a co-operative deduction and adventure game with a mobile phone application or a game master. Players must find the answer Code with the four Runes in the right arrangement before the evil power devours the planet. Players can explore the planet to collect energy or clues and to fight against evil monsters. When players try to unlock the code, the App or the game master will give signs that lead to right code.
If players successfully find the code, they win; if the Darkness Level reaches the Red Moon because of the evil monsters or if the Character card deck is exhausted, the players lose the game
RRP: $75
Orbis is a tactical game of world development and strategic resource management, in which players take on the roles of gods creating their best universes. Utilizing lands lost in the aether, players accumulate worshippers to spend on even more fruitful lands — some of which grant game-changing bonuses. The key to victory lies in having the most creation points (CPs) at the end of the game!
On your turn, you must take a tile from either the nine region tiles in the center of the table or the available God tiles. (A player may take only one God tile throughout the game.) Every time you take a region tile, worshippers of the same color as the tile taken are placed on adjacent tiles, making the tiles left behind more enticing for the next player. Restrictions apply to region tile placement, making each decision tougher than the last!
After fifteen rounds, the game ends when all players have created their universe, at which point CPs are calculated, bonus tiles awarded, and a winner is crowned. Beautifully simple yet rich in strategy, Orbis is a different game each and every time you play it.
Become the best god and craft your most prosperous universe!
RRP: $30
Once upon a time a witch lived alone in her house in the depths of the forest. Her favorite hobby was baking yummy gingerbread; in fact, she loved gingerbread so much that she built her entire house out of it. Unfortunately, she wasn't the only one who loved it! Rude fairy tale characters passing by were eating away her walls, windows, and doors! One day, the witch decided that she'd had enough of them all helping themselves and, paying attention to which types of gingerbread these greedy intruders liked the most, she came up with an idea on how to get rid of them once and for all...
In Gingerbread House, you place domino-like tiles in a 3 by 3 grid, covering symbols that provide you with four different types of gingerbread and special actions. Tiles may also be placed on existing types of tiles, forming a 3D structure in front of you. Covering two of the same symbol is extremely valuable as it provides a bonus gingerbread or action. Victory points are awarded for building the tallest structure, completing orders by discarding sets of gingerbread, as well as being the quickest to achieve certain conditions. In the end, the player with the most victory points wins.
RRP: $65
Petrichor is a highly interactive board game, playable by 1-4 people (up to 5 with the expansion, see below). It’s an action selection/area influence game, with 4 simple actions which interact with the various fields in ever surprising ways. The players move clouds with water droplets, and then rain those droplets onto specific fields, to make sure they have the right amount of water for the Harvest. During a Harvest, crops that have been watered enough are scored! Players are able to influence when, and how often the harvest happens. Players need to strike a fine balance between maintaining control of the different fields as well as influencing Harvest, to make sure the two come together at the optimal time.
RRP: $90
7 Wonders: Armada is an expansion for 7 Wonders that can be combined with the base game or any combination of expansions.
With this expansion, each player gets a separate "naval" board at the start of the game in addition to their wonder board. The expansion includes additional red, green, yellow, and blue cards to shuffle into the deck, and each time that you pay for the cost for any red, green, yellow, and blue card — not only the ones added in this expansion — you can pay an additional cost shown on your naval board to advance your ship of the matching color. When you advance the red ship, for example, you gain naval strength, and at the end of an era, you compare your naval strength against all the players at the table, not only adjacent players, to determine who's strongest, who's second-strongest, etc., with victory points handed out accordingly.
Advancing on the yellow and blue tracks gives you coins and victory points, respectively, with additional naval strength at the far end of the tracks. Advancing on the green track allows you to discover islands, and to do this, you draw the island deck of whatever level you reached, then choose one of the islands in that deck and put it into play. Maybe you'll increase your navy, advance a ship of another color, find a source of raw materials...you'll see when the time comes!
Spiel Special: $90
Comes with Spiel promo exclusives
The heroes of Earth and beyond have fought against the effects of an unknown cosmic power for a long time, and each time they managed to prevail. However, other realities and timelines have not been so fortunate. The goal of this cosmic entity's encroachment upon the Multiverse has been the collapse of all realities and timelines into a singularity which will self-implode, leaving naught but OblivAeon, the true heir to nothingness.
OblivAeon itself has manifested on Earth in this timeline to put an end to the pitiful resistance. If it succeeds, everything will be destroyed. However, if the heroes are able to stop OblivAeon, the cracks which run through all realities will be repaired as the cosmic power that created them is destroyed, effectively cutting the timelines and realities off from each other.
One way or another, the Multiverse ends here.
RRP: $70
Reign and Reverie is a 156 card-expansion (with three copies of 49-new cards and nine unique one-of cards) featuring new tools for all ten factions in Android: Netrunner – The Card Game while exploring the urban metropolis of ChiLo, a beacon of light in the Midwest. This includes a new identity for all seven major factions, a new console for every major runner faction, and new agendas for every corp. Because Reign and Reverie features new cards for all ten factions, it is the perfect companion piece to the Revised Core Set released late 2017.
RRP: $50
Other recent arrivals include:
KOI
Meeple Circus
Micropolis
The Networks: Executives Expansion
Gukimono
Fallout: Wasteland Adventure
Megaland
Catalyst
Anchors Aweigh
Snow Time
Atlandice
Caper
Pyramid Penguin
Pikoko
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