I still have a few things left to talk about from the sprawling booth areas that were the domain of Asmodee. I picked up a few tidbits practically on my way out the door on Sunday. The Z-Man release of “Pandemic Lord of the Rings” in the form of The Lord of the Rings: Fate of the Fellowship was always busy and has been getting good press. CMYK has a new edition (regular and deluxe) of The Quacks of Quedlinburg, now under the name Quacks. (Hmm, Settlers is now “CATAN”, will Pandemic become “PAN”?) The final Asmodee booth game I have for you is the tile-laying INK from Final Score Games. Shifting to bigger games with waaay more plastic, I had a great time looking through the Flying Frog Productions booth. The Shadows of Brimstone series of cooperative dungeon crawl adventures came highly recommended. Their two upcoming core (can be played stand alone) releases are magic-western themed The Impossible Hell Train (complete with a train map) and Lost Tomb of Khamuntet (a more pulp adventure setting exploring Egyptian tombs.) My final “regular” coverage of the convention ends with Avalon Hill and its new quest pack for HeroQuest: The Crypt of Perpetual Darkness. It’s a set of 10 quests with extra-fancy cards and art. It was written and designed by Joe Manganiello, a famous D&D personality.

Z-Man Games

The Lord of the Rings: Fate of the Fellowship

The designer of Pandemic takes a riff on the game to produce a Lord of the Rings themed cooperative game. One to four players take on the roles of one (or more) members of the heroes of the Lord of the Rings trilogy and act together to stop the encroaching hordes and/or machinations of Sauron. Players move about the board, enlist armies, and collect resources while trying to avoid Sauron, his armies, and the Ringwraiths.

Like Pandemic, players have a hand of cards they use to move about, take actions, and collect to satisfy specific conditions. These conditions change from game to game because Fate of the Fellowship actually has multiple scenarios to play. Each game there are goal cards that must be completed in sequence in order to win the game. The introductory game gives the players a few things to accomplish and then ends with the Frodo player chucking the ring into the volcano in Mordor. Other scenarios are, of course, different and may require one or more specific hero characters – the rest of the characters are freely chosen by the players at the start of the game. Each character has a bonus power and making good use of that power is an important step towards winning the game. One difference from Pandemic is that players can, under certain conditions, cash in a card for a token of equivalent value. While these cannot be traded (cards can be traded under strict conditions) the tokens do not count against one’s hand limit and thus can be stockpiled.

Rather than an accumulation of dangerous cubes (disease cubes in Pandemic), the “bad cards” in Fate of the Fellowship instead spawn and move Sauron’s troops across the board. Movement uses an interesting mechanism. The game board has multiple troop “routes” between locations on the board. A given event card will spawn some troops in a location and then make every troop along one route take one step further. These troops can take out the players’ troops (not their heroes) and if they make it to a city/stronghold they contribute towards one of the ways to lose the game. As with other cooperative games of this ilk, as the game wears on the amount of troops and other “bad stuff” start to accumulate at a faster pace, forcing the players to take some possible risks to complete that final task before it is too late.

CMYK

Quacks

Quacks is the latest rebrand of the award-winning push-your-luck potion-making game, The Quacks of Quedlinburg. Players draw ingredients out of their bag to fill up their pot. The bigger the pot, the more points one scores. However, draw too many of the bad ingredients and your pot blows up, reducing the payoff for that round. The new edition has an art refresh with a bit bolder and brighter color scheme. It also comes in a deluxe edition with deluxe components, as well as an All-In edition which has the deluxe bits as well as the two main expansions to the game.

Final Score Games

INK

The one to four player game, INK, revolves around a rondel (see what I did?) where tiles are selected and then placed in order to make color groupings in one’s own area. When a tiles connects enough of the right color, a player may then place some of their very nifty, colorful plastic inkwells onto their area. Large areas may even give a special bonus ability of some sort.

Half of a player’s inkwells are tied into a specific color, providing a bit of a nudge to prioritize that color. Players are moving along a rondel to pick which tile to draft. Making a complete circuit requires players to take a blocking tile. This could be good or bad. Hopefully you have a spot to patch up you didn’t need rather than ending up mucking up your best laid plans.

Flying Frog Productions

Shadows of Brimstone

I’ve heard good things about the dungeon-crawler-ish boardgame, Shadows of Brimstone, so I wanted to hit up the Flying Frog booth and see what it was about. It’s a campaign-ish dungeon crawl where players keep their gear and other toys from game to game. The backstory is based around a magic-y old west theme where Dark Stone was found in the mines and now it’s used to power magic and super-weapons. However, this comes at a cost as the Dark Stone has a bit of a Cthulhu vibe where its presence and/or use starts to make the characters go insane. One of the game timers revolves around a growing darkness track that players must frequently roll against to keep it from advancing.

Otherwise, it’s a fairly typical fare with miniatures running around on map grids trying to defeat spawning monsters while also doing chores and preparing for a big boss fight at the very end. (There are even special Growing Dread cards that accumulate and all go off when the boss is encountered. Watching them pile up, knowing they’ll eventually trigger, really lets them live up to their name.)

At times, the game may feel a bit heavy on the look up things on tables and roll for results but where it really shines is in character advancement. Players gain experience from almost any action (healing, killing, casting spells, even just hitting the big monsters) and as they level characters can really get customized. There are various tracks to pursue but characters also get random abilities (sometimes festively strange) as they play. This makes sure everyone is unique, even before equipment is added or customized.

There are numerous expansions, but most of the game options available have been released in stand-alone boxes that can also be mixed and matched. The two newest games releasing soon are The Impossible Hell Train and Lost Tombs of Khamuntet.

The Impossible Hell Train does, of course, include a train. Players can expect to have fights on and off the train-shaped map. Enemies might ride up on a mount and then hop off onto the train for a fight. Players might do the same – or hop off perhaps.

Players can play as a Calvary Officer, good at hit and run attacks, a Reporter, and even a Rail Worker complete with an impressive two-handed sledgehammer.

Bad guys include Hell Shades which, somewhat unusual, use tokens instead of plastic miniatures. That’s because they are allowed to move through and even share spaces with other figures. There are other baddies aplenty including a huge Hellborn Engineer, a sort of half-train half-brute kind of guy. You know, the usual…

The other new base set is Lost Tomb of Khamuntet. More than some of the other base games, it leans a bit away from the western theme and heads more towards the Indiana Jones/Pulp Adventure scene. This means it is a brand new “OtherWorld” to explore – officially called Sunken City of Pharrox. Players can become an Archaeologist, Soldier of Fortune, Professor, or the wrench-wielding Mechanic. Bad guys include swarms of scarabs and a “towering” Tomb King. Of course, even though it’s a “new” setting, everything is still mix and match with previous releases if desired.

Avalon Hill

HeroQuest: The Crypt of Perpetual Darkness

The newest expansion to HeroQuest, The Crypt of Perpetual Darkness quest pack pits players against Zargon once again. Their mission is to invade an underground crypt containing a powerful artifact. There are 10 quests including a large-ish metallic black dragon miniature as well as cards and dice. The cards are fancy, with foil and everything. The big selling point for some people is that the quests were designed and written by the popular D&D game master, Joe Manganiello. It is an expansion, of course, and needs either the standard base game or the intro base game HeroQuest:First Light.

Many of the foiled cards already existed in some form in other sets and expansions, but the new versions are punched up with more color, foil, and the art goes all the way to the edges, so no borders!