Quinns: Morning everybody! It’s got to be morning where one of you is, right?
You can see our top story illustrated just up there: Board gamers’ arms are hairier than ever before. The problem is now reaching critical levels. Coincidentally, also pictured above is our second top story, which is that the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game arriving in stores globally is, apparently, a bit good.
Some background, then. Pathfinder is a role-playing game from Paizo Press that’s been out-Dungeons & Dragoning Dungeons & Dragons in recent years. This Adventure Card Game is a new release from Paizo designed to offer the same thrill of friends wading hip-deep through goblins, but without a player running the game, or, indeed, any roleplaying at all.
As I say, the game’s been reviewing well, and sounds full of interesting ideas. Your personal character is a deck of cards that’ll grow and change between adventures, as you find other cards and absorb them like a kind of papery… living paper thing. And where do you get new adventures from? Why, you’ll be buying them from Paizo, of course!
Oh Paizo, you cheeky funsters. That’s quite a clever evolution of the RPG. Evolution’s a bit of a theme this week, actually, with no less than four games SU&SD likes getting expanded. Four! That’s more than three, and miles more than one. Where’s my coffee.
Much-loved chunky-dice-fest King of Tokyo got some updates this week. The first an announcement of the above expansion, King of Tokyo: Halloween (Collector Pack 1), “Collector Pack” being a quaint way of marketing something that doesn’t have a huge amount in it. You get two new monsters, the evolution cards needed to play them with divisive expansion King of Tokyo: Power Up, some costumes to go in the power deck and some orange and black dice to replace the base set. Hmm.
But that’s not the BIG King of Tokyo news this week! The redoubtable BoardGameGeek News Blog caught that the above expansion would ship with a single promotional card for “the next King of Tokyo standalone game, releasing in 2014”.
A new King of Tokyo is coming! That’ll set the fans quivering like tuning forks, to be sure. Not me, though. I don’t like KoT and I don’t care who knows it! I like the look of this, though:
Not one, but four expansions for Dungeon Fighter have been announced, starting with Dungeon Fighter: Fire at Will. Mostly this excites me because I hadn’t looked into Dungeon Fighter properly, and am now kicking myself.
This is a co-operative board game that sees you fighting monsters, collecting equipment and rolling dice as you trundle towards a final boss, but equipment and monsters all make different demands of you. Fighting Medusa? Roll the dice with your eyes closed. Shooting her with a bow? Throw the dice from under the table. Doing both at once? Get under the table, shut your eyes and do your best, pal. Cue the screaming of your friends as you gracefully arc the dice clean over the table and into someone’s drink.
I cannot BELIEVE none of you told us about this. Especially after we talked about how much we love Catacombs. C’mon, guys!
When we reviewed Fantasy Flight’s re-release of strategic lol-a-thon Wiz-War (the 8th edition, at this point) we said it felt a bit like an 80s relic. Something that probably didn’t have to be resurrected, a bit like Fortress America.
I also said that I’d probably end up buying any expansions for it, because it’d only get better the more variety and madness there was in the game. Time for me to put my money where my mouth is, then, with Wiz-War: Malefic Curses. We’ve got components for a 5th player, an extra arena and three new schools of magic, including (here we go!) a “Chaos” school that lets wizards dematerialse to dodge spells, but then end up in a random adjacent square.
That’s what I’m talking about. I really would like to see this become a grand ol’ drinking game. Some friends, some beers, some fireballs, and total nonsense occurring on the board.
Course, my actual favourite drinking game is Jungle Speed, so I’m pretty pumped about the announcement of Jungle Speed Safari. I guess it’s mostly the same game? Except instead of racing to grab a central totem, there are now five totems, which sounds like it only increases the probability of finger-crushing impacts. A worthy update, then.
AND FINALLY! A game that proves everything I thought I knew about successful Kickstarters is nonsense.
Click that image for a bigger version! And then marvel at how it *still* doesn’t make any sense.
Septikon: Uranium Wars has slipped past its funding goal in 15 days. Now, I thought that to run a strong Kickstarter you needed a comprehensible game, or a popular theme, or sexy miniatures. With Septikon, it appears that just bright colours are the secret, so long as you use enough of them to kill a horse.
The actual game is marginally less batshit than it looks. It’s really just very inventive, with two players balancing resource reserves with further resource collection, defense and flinging attacks at one another, and the designers seem to know what their stuff.
Go look! There’s something ineffably charming about it, and I’m certainly hoping they send us a review copy.
