Sometimes I’m lucky enough to give a game a good demo, as I did with Cephalofair’s card drafting Mercenaries Wanted. Of course, having played the original game I didn’t necessarily need to take the new Buttons & Bugs expansions for a spin. Pub Crawlers adds in a new campaign while the smaller, The Flames of Ashtar, is just a few scenarios to link the two. Other times, like visiting Dara Studios, I was only able to get a brief rundown as I travelled about the hall. Terraria: The Boardgame is a sprawling sandbox exploration/upgrading/fighting boardgame modeled after the videogame. Then there’s Computer Junkyard where players try to collect the pieces to build a vintage computer, which will certainly not be able to run Terraria. Pegasus Spiel was showing a sort of werewolf/Love Letter game called Wolfmoon and I was happy to see the real time Light Speed Arena being shown off. I love the original and having an app do the scoring is pretty handy. Finally, there was Pine Box Entertainment’s Pendragon: Glory of the Round Table. Players, as knights, bid cards to fulfill quests to score glory points. You only have one squire so use them well, or just use them up and get another one.

Cephalofair Games

Buttons & Bugs – Pub Crawlers by Nikki Valens

Gloomhaven: Buttons and Bugs was somewhat of a just-for-fun release during one of the many Gloom/Frosthaven crowdfunding campaigns. A tiny-box solo Gloomhaven-like experience found a decent following so there are a couple of expansions on the way any day now.

Players take on the role of a miniaturized hero who must make their way through tiny bug-enemies on tiny game fields to make it back to get big again. It uses a somewhat reduced Gloomhaven-like card playing mechanic while the combat is done on small cards with a hero figurine and enemies as small cubes.

While it comes in a tiny box, it still takes up some table space once all the pieces, cards, boards, tokens, etc.. are laid out. The Pubcrawlers expansion brings a bunch of new scenarios and two new mercenary classes to bring to the tiny game world.

Buttons & Bugs – The Flames of Ashtar by Joe Klipfel and Nikki Valens

The Flames of Ashtar is a small expansion consisting of a pack of cards in a sort of “booster pack” that add in six more B&B scenarios to play. For those playing through a campaign, they serve as a sort of bridge between the stories of the original B&B and the new Pubcrawlers release.

If your’e really into the bugs (and buttons) you can pick up the cool coloring book…

The Buttons & Bugs future is looking very bright. Sometime next year there will be a two-player edition based on map cards that are tarot-sized, rather than the current playing-card size. Yes, all the mercenaries from previous editions will still be interchangeable. Even further ahead, there will probably be a new Buttons & Bugs game releasing sometime in 2028.

Gloomhaven 2nd Edition

Gloomhaven 2nd Edition is a thing. It is more than a cleaned-up release of the first edition (although troublesome rules, imbalances, and other things have been cleaned up.) The new edition will have more content than the first edition including 5 mini-campaigns. The campaigns are set up for faster character progression – players should feel like the power curve moves at a faster pace. The hope is to release Gen Con 2027.

Mercenaries Wanted by Dennis Vögele

Mercenaries Wanted is a drafting game where players are trying to put together a team of champions to compete in upcoming tournaments. Players are basically mercenary HR managers who recruit champions from a deck of 61 cards in a typical draft format. Players draft by passing cards and once completed players should have four cards. One is ditched and the others are added to a player’s team.

At the start of the game, several possible odd-jobs are drawn to create a tableau of possible challenges during the game. There will also be some end-game challenges for players to work toward.

Every champion has four statistics, elements, and many different tags (like Control, or Duelist), and usually some sort of special ability. The odd-job challenges to overcome in the middle refer to these attributes. These are things like: have X different elements – more points for more elements; have champions with X attribute greater than 4 – more champions grant more points; 2 points for each duelist; 6 points if you have at least one summons and one control tag, etc…

At the end of each draft, players decide which “job” to attempt and then go around in order declaring what they are going to do. Anyone can take any job but if you take the same job as a previous player you get 1 less reward. After each job, players also gain an item (draw 3 and pick 1) which buffs specific champions and sticks around the rest of the game.

At the end of the round, players keep 1 of their champions for the next round, set aside one champion for the final round, and get rid of the third. This means, for the second round, players will have 4 champions (1 kept + 3 drafted) and 5 champions in the fifth round. This hopefully means players will be able to earn even more points in later rounds.

After three rounds, the players enter a final tournament. Like the odd-jobs, there are several possible ways to earn points. Unlike the first three rounds, players compete against all the different possible point-gathering options, rather than choosing only one.

Work on the Gloomhaven RPG continues. Lots of moving pieces (books, minis, etc..) and, as always, international shipping, etc… means I don’t think it’s seen the light of day. I think the hope is to have it see the light of day by the end of the year.

There’s plenty of options to bling up your copy of the RPG…

Dara Studios

Terraria: The Board Game by Chris Kingsnorth

My sons (and brother-in-law) are huge fans of the adventure/exploration videogame, Terraria. Players journey all over a huge 2D map, building a base, digging down into the depths to mine and/or explore caves, meeting the occasional boss monster, all in a quest to become more powerful. There’s no set ending (other than maybe beating all the boss monsters) so players are free to explore however they wish. Dara Studios has taken a stab at somehow reducing this grand scale retro-style game into a boardgame format.

All the photos here are from the “Gold Edition”

Like its namesake, Terraria: The Board Game is a free-form sandbox game for 1 to 4 players. Players dig, fight, and explore their way through the game. There are many biomes to explore, gems and ores to dig up (and use), fight enemies to loot them for more cards, and use up all those materials to craft a base and new equipment cards.

Making a base is great for upgrading your character and attracting NPCs which provide bonuses. Combat is dice-based, but adjusted through the use of cards and inventory slots. Custom dice rolls are modified by weapon power, defence values, range, and other attributes from a character’s accessories.

Each round consists of the Day phase, where players roam around, fight, gather upgrades, etc.. The Night phase follows and is when new monsters appear and start to converge on players and the home base structures. Eliminate an enemy completely in your attack or suffer retaliatory damage.

At the start of the game, choose to start with specific objectives, or deal some out at random. The game length can be adjusted by adding more or fewer objectives. Players explore (digging down up to 5 levels) and gather up materials until they have enough to “summon” up one of the bosses for a fight. Many of the iconic videogame bosses are present like the Eater of Worlds, Skeletron, and the Eye of Cthulhu. Each boss fights using a dedicated deck of behavior cards. Like many videogames, bosses change up their tactics after falling below some HP thresholds, ramping up the danger.

The game can be played as a one-off or as a campaign progression of increasing difficulty that sort of mirrors the videogame spawning on the surface and descending into the depths to fight the Wall of Flesh. The game should be released and become available this fall.

Computer Junkyard by Allan Pincus, Jared Pincus

Computer Junkyard has two to four players trying to rebuild an old, crappy computer. Players are assigned a specific thing to build and try to purchase the needed parts and put them together to create a completed (ancient) computer, worthy of my father-in-law’s attic.

Players need specific pieces, some in multiples to complete their computer, finishing it off with a piece of software. Every piece of the computer has its own joining requirements, making one part of the game a bit like putting together a jigsaw puzzle.

Players can put Bugs into opponents’ computers, plugging up the works, or outright attempt to steal pieces away. The final computer needs to fit within a 9×9 grid, which can thankfully be sometimes helped by using rainbow colored Splitter tiles can help make connections that would otherwise be difficult to pull off.

So how does one get the pieces? Well all the pieces are purchased through a market. Items in the market go down in cost when there’s more present. Nasty players, of course, will buy up whatever good stuff their opponents’ want and then trade for what they really want, or maybe offer to sell it back to them at inflated prices.

Pegasus Spiel

Wolfmoon by Michael Palm, Lukas Zach

Wolfmoon is a social deduction game for 3-6 players. Everyone gets one secret villager role card to start the game. Like Love Letter, players take turns drawing one card at a time and choose to keep it or play it.

Every card has different abilities, of course. Some time in the first third of the game, one player will become the werewolf. Players continue to play, trying to suss out who is the werewolf.

The werewolf wins if they can avoid detection until the end of the game (at the full moon.) If the werewolf is eliminated, the villager holding on to the highest numbered card will win the game.

Light Speed Arena by Leonardo Alese, James Ernest, Tom Jolly, Emanuele Santellani

As a fan of the original Light Speed, an inexpensive real-time simultaneous-playing space combat game by Cheapass Games, I was excited to see the game was being brought back in a new format entitled Light Speed Arena.

It is still a simultaneous game. Players start with a deck of numbered space ships. Ships have weapon beams (of various power), shields, and other festive things. Some asteroids and other terrain is placed onto the table, and then the game begins. Players place their cards down on the table as fast as they wish, in any orientation. When one player finishes placing their ships, everyone else must stop (I think there’s a slight delay.)

It is now time to resolve everything. Ships now shoot their beams at other ships and at the asteroids. Hitting an asteroid gives a ship cargo, which will be worth points at the end of the game. Hitting other ships (not blocked by shields) will damage them, perhaps eliminating them.

The strategy comes in once combat starts being resolved. The ships are put down on the board in any orientation, so players must sight along the beam lines to see what they hit. Ships shoot in order from lowest to highest numbers and the more powerful ships have higher numbers. They may very well get destroyed before even getting a chance to shoot. For that matter, perhaps a lower number target ship is now gone, so your big old ship is now shooting at something you did not necessarily intend.

The original game had one big problem. It took much longer to resolve the combat than it was to put all the ships out. The new Light Speed Arena has solved that problem by using an app that reads the entire board. Take a photo with the app, and then it will automatically score everything, showing off the battle with some bells and whistles so players can enjoy the show. Of course, players are welcome to use string, markers, etc… to resolve the game the old fashion way.

The current game plays up to four players and I believe each of the four colored fleets have the option of having a slightly different emphasis on how the ships in their fleet play out.

Pine Box Entertainment

Pendragon: Glory of the Round Table by Channing Ogzewalla

Pendragon: Glory of the Round Table is a tableau building card game for 1 to 4 players with some elements carried over from the Pendragon roleplaying game. Players take on the role (and special powers) of a knight and their trusty squire. Together they determine a player’s main special powers and characteristics. A player’s knight is there for the whole game, but those poor squires will get moved/traded/replaced all the time.

The game is played over four phases: Spring reveals the Quest for the round and players gain gold and draw cards. Next, in the Marshaling Phase, players play cards and take actions to prepare for the Quest phase.

During the Quest phase, players set aside cards in a pile (the Cause pile) and then all piles are revealed simultaneously. Some extra actions might happen, and all players compare their stats for the current Quest. Highest stat (or ties) get prizes then knights who failed the Quest can swap out their squires.

Finally, the Winter phase checks to see if anyone has enough GLORY to win the game. Some Winter phase effects kick in, players can spend 5 Gold to buy 1 Glory, and all players discard their cards in their Cause. A new first player is chosen and we go back around to the Spring phase again.

The game is playable as a solo affair and can also be played in a cooperative mode.