“SimCity” fans know that there a few different kinds of energy: wind, coal, nuclear, and etc. You know, the kind of power we generate in today’s day and age. Enter “PRISM”, the abundant energy source featured in the city-building strategy card game, “Rise to Power”. “Rise to Power” is like SimCity but on a much simpler scale, with your objective being to use PRISM to fulfill contracts and ultimately add districts to your ever-growing city. Before we touch on the details, I’d like to thank Kevin Brusky from APE Games for providing me with a free copy for review purposes.
Board Games
All posts tagged Board Games
I suppose it’s fitting that this game fell into my lap when it did, what with Halloween right around the corner. It may still be a few weeks away at the time of this posting, but it’ll be here faster than you can say, “Candy Grab”. Granted, “Candy Grab” has nothing to do with Halloween, but it sure does involve PLENTY of candy! In this 2-6 player game, your job is simple: be the last player standing by taking the other players’ candy…and eating it, of course! Before we start chugging the Pepto Bismol to stave off the inevitable stomach cramps that are sure to follow (from being old and eating anything other than fruits and vegetables), I’d like to thank Game Creator Matthew Williamson for reaching out and providing me with a press copy for review purposes.
“Encounters: Bravest Warriors” puts players in the shoes of heroes who will be attempting to score as many encounters as possible. To do that, they’ll be rolling dice and locking them in on encounter cards in order to defeat them. Essentially, this is a push-your-luck game that’s a cross between “Farkel” and “Roll For It!”…it’s like the former in the sense that you roll less dice the more you lock in and like the latter in the sense that you can assign dice to cards. Before we get into the nitty-gritty details, I’d like to thank Randall Neil Bills from Catalyst Game Labs for reaching out and providing me with a press copy for review purposes.
What do you get when you combine the structures found in city-builders like “SimCity” with tile-laying mechanics as found in a game like “Carcassonne”? You end up with “We Built This City”, a game that rewards players points for the buildings they lay on a shared grid/city. It’s a bit like “Sunrise City”, albeit a simpler version (no bidding, etc.). Before we jump into the details, I’d like to quickly thank Mike McGinnis of Enigma Nexus for providing me with a free press copy for review purposes.
You and some fellow researchers are working in a lab when all the sudden you hear the smattering of glass on the sterile stainless steel floor. This, it turns out, is a bad thing as said container held the deadly airborne virus, “Compound X”. It just so happens that your team was working on a number of anti-toxins for “Compound X” but unfortunately, none of you is certain which cure is reliable. Will YOU deduce and consume the correct antidote before the compound takes its lethal effect?
I received an unexpected surprise from the folks over at Gamewright yesterday and wanted to follow up with a quick article for those of you who have yet to subscribe to my YouTube channel. “Rory’s Story Cubes – Batman” is like other “Rory’s Story Cubes” games in the sense that you’re rolling dice and making up stories. “Sneaky Cards” is more of a social experiment, tasking you with approaching strangers and completing certain objectives. You then give the card to the stranger upon completing the listed objective. Both games require a bit of imagination, with the latter also requiring you to put yourself out there to the general public (which is scary in itself, at least for me).
Got ten minutes? If the answer is yes, then you have enough time to pump out a game of “Retro Loonacy”, brought to you by the makers of “Fluxx”, “Seven Dragons”, and “Just Desserts”. It’s a simple, high-speed game of matching pictures and the first player to play all of their cards, wins! Before we get into the details, I’d like to quickly thank the folks at Looney Labs for reaching out and providing me with a free press copy for review purposes.
Games can have a wide variety of different themes. Some focus on dungeon crawling while others on managing a town or deducing a player’s hidden identity. “Drop Site” is a game about delivering and coordinating humanitarian aid shipments, of all things. Not that I’m complaining mind you, it’s just…well, different. In this game, players will be dropping parachutes of AID toward different drop sites and the person who is better at it strategically, wins the game!
What happens when you combine the likes of “Scrabble” with a colorful game like “Qwirkle”? You end up with something like “Latice”, a family-friendly board game that’s currently seeking your support on Kickstarter. It supports 2-4 players and ages 6+, with the average play time being about 20 minutes. To quickly sum it up, your goal will be to play all the tiles from your pool based on color and shape (sort of like “Qwirkle”, but not). Like “Scrabble”, the board contains special spaces and will fill up as the game progresses. Before we move on to specifics, I’d like to thank Jim Brikman from Adacio for reaching out and providing me with a prototype for preview purposes. It’s important to stress that prototypes are not reflective of the final product, making everything you see and read about here subject to change.
In the days of yore, monarchs used to construct huge temples to demonstrate their great power and wealth. I suppose the phrase: “it’s not the size that matters…” hadn’t been coined yet. In this two player game, you’ll be tasked with being the one who constructs the most majestic and imposing temples…though you’ll be able to play cards to further your own goals whilst messing up whatever plans your opponent may have. Let’s get right down to building, shall we?
I don’t like beets. Granted, they’re not as bad as turnips, but they are roughly in the same extended family in that they are root vegetables. Apparently I’m not the only one who doesn’t like them as someone developed a card game specifically designed around getting rid of all of your beets before the other players do. Before we get into specifics though, I’d like to quickly thank the folks from Stone Blade Entertainment for reaching out and providing me with a press copy for review purposes.
Have you ever wondered why Captain Kirk is climbing a mountain, or why Sylvester Stallone didn’t catch hypothermia in “Cliffhanger”? Well, you’ll have to keep wondering, because “7 Summits: A Mountaineering Challenge” (thankfully) doesn’t touch on these one bit…you’re welcome. Rather, you’re a simple mountaineer with the rather imposing task of climbing huge mountains on each of the seven continents. I suppose you could solve world hunger and the general public’s obsession with celebrity wardrobe mishaps afterwards, but we’ll leave the hard stuff till later. Before we begin, I’d like to quickly thank Kevin Fowler from Summit Games, LLC for reaching out and providing me with a press copy for review purposes.
The number seven apparently held a lot of meaning back in the day…some might even refer to it as having magical powers. All I know is that rolling one at the “Craps” table is generally a good thing, and rolling one in “Settlers of Catan” means you get to ruin someone’s day with the thief…fun times. “Seven7s” is a relatively simple to play card game that revolves around some of the most famous sevens in history, like the 7 Wonders or 7 Deadly Sins. The object is to have the highest point total in your hand at the end of the game, though playing particular cards will have varying effects on said totals and allow you to perform special actions. Interested? Keep reading to find out more.
You’ve been given a pile of cards and your goal is to get rid of them as quickly as possible, for the first one to do so wins the game. In order to do that, you’ll be adding these cards to several central stacks to which everyone will have access. It’s like “UNO” in the sense that you’re trying to be the first to go out, but instead of matching colors/numbers, you’ll be laying down cards in sequential order (with the help of wild “Skip-Bo” cards). To help you with this task, you’ll have a series of discard piles from which you can add to the central piles. It might sound confusing for some, what with all these piles…so let’s take a moment to briefly go over the rules in more detail before checking out the review.
Patchwork, for those of you who don’t do a lot of sewing in real life, is the process of piecing together different parts of fabric in order to create clothing or quilts. Now I know what you’re thinking, “Someone made a board game about sewing? Really?” If you bear with me, you’ll soon discover that yes, this game is actually more than meets the eye…sort of like Optimus Prime and his merry band of robots, except with less of Megan Fox bending over cars. Because that’s totally what people wanted to see in a Transformers movie, but I digress…let’s move on to the review, shall we?
Show of hands, who DOESN’T like being a giant monster and inflicting massive amounts of destruction onto whatever fantasy world they happen to be living in at the time? I, for one, loved playing “Rampage” for the NES. “Monster Destruction” is more like “Dominion” in the sense that it’s a deck-builder, though instead of building estates and provinces to earn victory points, you’ll be destroying cities. Before we get into the specifics though, I’d like to thank Game Developer Alistair Dandy for reaching out and providing me with a press copy for review purposes.