Where to jump in on board games, anime, books, and movies as a Nerd
We’re getting down to it, getting close to the Top 10 games, only a few more of these lists. It’s been a blast as always putting these out and I’m glad that people are enjoying them. I’d be very curious to know what your top …
Getting close to the end, the top 100 are all games that I really do love and would want to play basically whenever someone asks but as we get higher in the list, and I think about and write up about these games, I always …
Make a map of the lands in this flip and write game based off in the Roll Player world by Thunderworks Games.
Pros
Cons
The Page
This is a well laid out Kickstarter. Thunderworks Games has done a lot of them before with their various games in the Roll Player line and universe. So it’s expected of them.
Also expected is that there won’t be any stretch goals, which is something that is interesting. Now, I don’t think that stretch goals are needed on a campaign, and in fact sometimes Stretch Goals don’t work well, such as when they are an additional buy that is unlocked at some point in time or along those lines. But I find it a little bit interesting that they don’t do any. Again, they never do, so it’s not a surprise, this game just feels like it would be easy enough to add in a few simple ones, like alternate art monsters or heroes that wouldn’t affect timeline but would be a kickstarter bonus. But I’d prefer no stretch goals to lots of them that inflate the cost.
Overall, though, well laid out page, they explain what the new things are, they do a solid job of telling you what you get in the different levels and they lay out what shipping is.
The Game
I already know that I like the game, or at least I like the original, Cartographers. So what I’m really looking at is additional content for this game and what this adds.
It is adding heroes, which are interesting because they are defeat monsters. Normally there was only one way to deal with monsters, just building around them, so now it’ll be interesting to see how the heroes interact, it’s a simple addition though, and they work very similar to monsters in how they are added into the game, so it doesn’t make the complexity go up massively.
The other thing is additional maps. Each of them adds an additional element to the game. One adds in volcanos that will destroy spots you can fill in or possibly have filled in. One has islands, so you can’t create as big groups potentially and will change scoring that way. The final one has an undercity, so you have normal rules for above ground, but underground, everything has to branch/tunnel out instead of being able to be put anywhere. These seem like nice little variations on the game.
Back or Brick
This is an easy back for me, after seeing what was going to be “exclusive” to the Kickstarter. If nothing had been exclusive, I would have been less likely to back. And even that, I put quotes around stuff, because Thunderworks themselves will be selling some of it, while supplies last. So, for me it made a lot of sense to back. Especially with the big box that will store everything. That’ll be nice because it’ll take up less space on the Kallax for me. I also know the track record of the company with their other games, which I’ve played Roll Player and Cartographers as well as Roll Player Adventure playtesting at GenCon, and I like them all.
How about for you, is this game a Back or a Brick?
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We’re back for more of my Top 100 games, this is the fourth part of it, and second year that I’ve been doing a Top 100 list. You can find links to the previous parts below: 100 to 91 90 to 81 80 to 71 …
Double posting today to go along with my Friday Night D&D post, but I just felt like it and it’s about what I have focus for thus far on a Friday. This time we’re looking at two games that have a bunch of dice chucking, …
So, Gencon is upon us, and last year I picked up a whole mess of games from Gencon that I’ve enjoyed over the past year, all sorts of fun new releases and cool older games that I wanted to add into my collection. This year, as I have said before, no in person Gencon and actually, a good number of what would have been Gencon releases have been delayed, but that doesn’t mean that game companies aren’t trying to get you to buy. A number of them are doing sales or bundle specials for Gencon, so I picked up a couple of things for that, and my birthday that’s coming up soon.
Greenbriar Games
So first I ordered from Greenbriar games, during Gencon use the code GENCANT to get 50% off your order. The game I ordered from there was Champions of Hara, this game is a competitive and cooperative game with two different parts. The first part each player race to protect the lands of Hara from monsters and rifts that are opening and completing goals in order to get a wish of their fulfilled. This can be done with combat of both monsters and the other players. The second part is that the winner gets their wish and then they have to, along with the other players deal with the fallout of that wish. This game just seems like a lot of fun as you level up skills and get new cards to play giving your already unique character even more unique things to do. I like that it has the two modes as well.
Checkout a playthrough from GloryHoundd that sold me on this game:
Cool Stuff Inc
So Cool Stuff Inc normally has a big booth selling random games as well at Gencon even though they aren’t a game development company. As a sale they have a code GENCON5 to get 5% off your order. Since I’ve bought a fair amount from them, I also got an additional 3% off my order.
The first game I am getting is Sonora a flick and write game from Pandasaurus. In this game you are doing two main things, you are flicking disks around a board to try and land in specific areas. These areas then translate into what you are filling in on your board. What seems fun about this game is that you can strategize some with your flicking or knock people out of a spot where you’d want, but then when filling in things on your board, you have a ton of different options which can then lead to getting more things filled in on your scoring sheet. There are four different areas there and four areas on the board, and each scores well, and you can really focus in on a single area if you want or maybe two, and score well in those, but if you try and do everything you might spread yourself too thin.
I’m also getting Dig Deeper and LA Crime expansion for Detective: A Modern Crime Board Game. I have really enjoyed my playthroughs of that game, and we’re going to be getting back to it shortly, so I just want to get some more games in of it, and I think more cases are going to be great for it. I like that these are smaller box expansions as well, so I don’t need to get everything for it again, I can just get more content without it feeling like a whole new game. I’ll let you find more of why I love that game here.
Finally, I got Camel Up. This is a camel racing game, but one that is light and silly. On your turn you can guess who will be the lead camel at the end of a round, you can put a booster or something to back-up a camel on a track, you can bid on who is going to win or lose overall, or, you can roll the dice. When you roll the dice, you shake a pyramid that has all the camel color of dice, plus a die for the two crazy camels, and whatever die falls out falls out. So there’s a lot of randomness with that, but what makes it even sillier is that the camels can stack on top of each other. So if the blue camel ends up on top of the red camel, and then the red camels die is rolled it moves with both itself and the blue camel on top of it, and whatever camel is on top is the leader. It’s a silly game, but it can play a large number of players, so I think it’ll work well for game nights coming up.
Which of these games seems the most interesting to you? Do you have any of them in your collection?
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So, we’re almost at GenCon, tonight is Fantasy Flights In-Flight report for their new stuff. Then GenCon online kicks off on Thursday. While I decided not to take any time off for it, I have decided to play a few con games on Saturday and …
So last year in the lead-up to GenCon, I did lists of things that I was excited to see, games and expansions I was interested in demoing. Now, this year GenCon clearly isn’t happening, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t still some GenCon related …
So, not my main topic for today, but I figured that it was probably worth posting about. I know last year my Gen Con coverage with the games that I picked up and got to demo or play there was fairly popular and I was looking forward to going to Gen Con again this year.
However, like many things in 2020, Gen Con has been cancelled. Not really surprised by it, even with Indiana having plans to slowly re-open the state as it flattens the curve on Covid-19, having so many people come from not just out of state but around the world would have been risky for not only the people attending Gen Con, but also the population of Indiana/Indianapolis just with more chances of the disease being spread.
Am I saddened that Gen Con won’t be happening this year? Yes, it saddens me, but I have been expecting it for a while. They might have figured out a way with their costs as to not go bankrupt, and they have announced the dates for Gen Con 2021 that I’m already looking forward to going to.
I think we have to ask what this means for board game companies. While sales are huge at Gen Con and a chance to get people excited about your game that is coming to Kickstarter, the cost of shipping games and paying for the space is also high. For more established game companies, they’ll be able to release their Gen Con games through their own stores and probably end up making about as much money. But it will hurt on the hype. There’s always some hot game coming out of Gen Con that does more sales because of buzz built there than it would have otherwise. Likewise, smaller or newer companies, one of the biggest benefits is brand recognition. When people walk through the dealer hall multiple times, they can run across a company that they haven’t seen before. It might be a harder year for those less established companies, just for brand recognition.
Finally, they are doing something as an online Gen Con over the same time period. To be determined what that is. But I’m glad that a lot of cons that are being cancelled, CMONExpo, Board Game Geek, Dice Tower East, and more are doing online “conventions”. This might be something as little as them playing games online or talking about upcoming games and giveaways and things of that nature, but it’s nice to have those board gaming options still show up. It won’t be the same, but hopefully it’ll be a chance for some board game companies to still get the brand recognition and game sales that they need to keep the hobby growing.
Were you planning on going to Gen Con this year? What do you want from an online version of the convention?
Share questions, ideas for articles, or comments with us!
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Tomorrow I’ll be doing an article looking forward to my 2020 resolutions, and I just wrapped up things that I’m looking forward to in 2020 for movies, games, and more. Today, I’m going to look back at 2019, it was a big year for nerdy …