I played through a few turns of Phase Shift Games’ new-ish cooperative game, Aetherspire. It was a nice mix of luck and luck management as players try to build a tower before enemy elementals knock down the tower core. Enemy pieces both attack and are used as currency for special powers. A large selection of player powers and element adversaries give the game quite a bit of variety. I then walked down the aisle and got the lowdown on two of Paizo Publishing’s boardgames. (They’re mostly a role-playing company but we’ll hit that up in a later article.) I was given a brief tour of the fantasy campaign game, Pathfinder Quest. Players take four heroes on a trip through nine adventures to complete the saga. The upcoming Pathfinder: Dice Gods was also shown which looks a bit like a more complex roll & write. Here you choose which “god” die you want to roll, and you can get “better” at rolling a specific god die over time.
Phase Shift Games
Aetherspire (by Tim Mierzejewski)
Aetherspire has 1 to 4 players cooperatively attempting to build four elemental spires before the attacking hordes destroy their home base. The spires are built upward from four bases on the printed game board. Purple pillars must be placed in all the available squares on a platform before the next level tile can be added.
A player’s turn consists of gaining 1 free platform tile, drawn from any of the three sizes. This is set aside in the players’ reserve. One tile in the reserve can then be exchanged for a new tile of the same size, taking it off the top of the pile. Players draw three invader tokens from a bag and place them out on the game board in the elemental wheel. These are placed laying down and represent shards, which can be used in pairs to power special abilities. Finally, five 8-sided dice are rolled to determine where new purple pillars can be added. One reroll, at any time, is allowed. Usually, one die can be spent to place a cube on a matching die location. However, many locations have an additional requirement and thus will take two discarded dice to be filled. If a section has its pillars filled, a player can freely add one of the tiles in reserve on top. It must be the same size or smaller than the floor below.
Element tokens (drawn from the bag at the start of the turn) can be used for special actions. It requires two elements and the effect will be determined by their color/element. A green+red will destroy two invaders, a green+blue will add three more d8s to roll – allowing for more pillar placement, a blue+green will even turn two invaders into shards (for more shard-play!) Any two can be spent to gain another tile into the reserve and spending three will allow players to gain a wildcard tile, where most of the pillar spots can be filled by anything.
If a spire is completed (a fourth floor is finished), a cute little cap is placed on top and the players get to pick a little bonus. Halve (five) of that element is removed from the grab bag. That element’s aether fiend is now defeated (more on that later) and if that’s the fourth fiend, the players win. Then, its time for bad stuff to happen. There is a purple track on the side of the board. At the end of each turn it moves down a space and a number of elements are pulled from the bag. These elements are now attacking the player’s towers. There is a special boss monster for each element and these may also trigger at this time.
Each element drawn needs to be placed onto an open pillar location of a matching element. As you can see in the photo, there are three attacking blue elements that have been placed on the blue tower. These need to be removed before pillars can be built. For each element not placed, it attacks the tower’s core. The core consists of two cores surrounded by one wall of each element. A wall will block a single element attack and then be destroyed. If there is no wall of a particular element, the damage is done directly to the core. Once the core is gone, the game is over. There are a few ways to add to the core or rebuild a wall, but it’s not easy.
If the players have not yet won (built a tower for each element) or lost, play proceeds to the next player.
Each player takes on the role of a hero with several special powers. There are fifteen different heroes in the deck. These abilities might cost something, have a passive effect, or allow the player to cast a more powerful version of a given spell (from the spell wheel thingy.)
I mentioned the element bosses. There are always four of them in a game, one for each element. These are placed along the purple progression track and they trigger once the progression token passes them by. Thus, there’s only one early on but players can eventually have all four firing at once. When a spire is completed, the boss for that element is flipped over and will no longer be a problem in that game. There are four sets of bosses, ranked in increasing difficulty. However, players are free to mix and match if they want an experience somewhere between a level 2 and level 3, for example. Between the 16 monsters and 15 player heroes, no two games should quite be the same.
Paizo Publishing
Pathfinder: Dice Gods (by Joe Pasini)
Out in September, Pathfinder: Dice Gods is a 2 to 5 player “dice drafting” game containing push-your-luck elements and some engine building through several ongoing minigames giving, to me, a bit of a roll and write vibe. I put dice drafting in quotes because I think you actually pick the die before you roll it, so it’s not like you roll all of them and then draft the one you want.
Players begin their turn by choosing one of eight possible 12 sided dice to roll. Each die represents one of eight major gods in the Pathfinder canon. While many symbols are found on multiple dice, each die has its own unique set. Once a player has made their selection, the roll is made and the result allows the active player to affect various game areas on the board.
This is where the mini-game aspect comes in. There are several (many?) bits of the board with which to interact, giving me flashbacks of many of the more complicated roll & writes I’ve played. (This is not necessarily a bad thing.) Of course, the goal will be to do well in one area, but also hope to chain that success to progressing in other areas at the same time. One unique aspect of the game lies in the 12 sided god dice. You can specialize in one (I think by rolling it more often?) and progress up a sort of research track for that particular die. That makes rolling that die more powerful for that player. There are also endgame points on offer for a player to push themself to the top of that die’s “research track.”
Pathfinder Quest (by Jason Bulmahn and Joe Pasini)
Pathfinder Quest is a cooperative campaign adventure game for one to four people, set in the Pathfinder universe. The game always involves four characters (I believe out of 6 possible ones) as they adventure through the storyline contained in the main adventure book. There are 12 total adventures but only 9 are typically played in one runthrough of the campaign. The game has story bits and pieces included to encourage players to have a second go-round at the campaign when they finish the first.
The core of the story is contained in the Adventure Book, but when specific challenges might arise, players are sent to the Challenge Book to resolve them. It’s basically an if/then sort of thing where you are told what happens if you succeed or fail.
Encounters are played out in small set pieces where players and monsters are placed on smallish tiles, allowing for maneuvering and other combat strategies. Monsters have a short decision tree that they follow to decide what to do and who to attack. For those wanting a comparison, the gameplay complexity is somewhere between HeroQuest and Gloomhaven (although I do admit that’s still a pretty broad range.)
Each character is composed of a set of cards, with more cards being added as characters level up..Characters have a class as well as an ancestry, consisting of a race and background. The campaign is structured so that a character should almost always have their specific race/background come into play in a challenge at least a few times throughout the campaign.
Class cards are flipped over to an improved side when a character levels up.
There are plenty of items, scrolls, and spells to be found along the way. Players are discouraged from freely looking through the item deck as they might encounter spoilers.
Some of the custom dice from the game.
The game comes in different versions. The standard version has all the content but used cardboard standees for characters and monsters. The main difference in the Deluxe version is the inclusion of 13 miniatures to take the place of six heroes and seven boss monsters. While it was available at Gen Con, I believe the Deluxe version is not readily available at this time.
Hey, I told you, do not read ahead!
