There’s still more to talk about in the gaming hall. It really is a big mix of trading card game, miniatures, and boardgames from big and small publishers.

A new publisher, Resurrection Games, had a very nice setup showing off their new superhero bag-builder battler called Brave & Bold. If I were going to spend far too much money on a miniatures game, StarCraft: Tabletop Miniatures Game by Archon Studios would be awfully tempting.

As is traditional, Hasbro and Avalon Hill were only to be found in the gaming hall. They had rereleases of Fury of Dracula (now 5th edition) and the old Guillotine card game along with the new Market Fresh game of produce-stacking. Hasbro had two new flavors of Monopoly Deal: KPop Demon Hunters and No Mercy. There is also a new release of the BB shooting Crossfire for some mindless fun. In honor of the wonderful midwestern weather, we’ll take a peek at the bonus water also appearing in the gaming hall.

Resurrection Games

Brave & Bold: Bag Building Combat Game by Brad Zander

Brave & Bold is a push-your-luck bag building game for two teams (1v1, 2v2, or 3v3.) For an experienced gamer I would say it has the vibe of a combination of Quacks and Dice Throne. It is a hero/villain vs hero/villain game where players use special abilities to attack and defend against their opponent.

Each player has their own hero and thus their own powers. Many simple powers are similar, but the stronger powers will play to a particular hero’s strengths. Each hero has a deck of five cards, these are shuffled together at the start of the game to make an event deck. One card in the deck is flipped over at the start of each turn and will affect both players in some way.

Then, the players simultaneously draw tokens out of their bag until they decide to quit or they encounter three crisis tokens. Players then use those tokens to power up their special abilities and purchase new tokens. Drawing three crisis tokens rules out powering up a hero ability but a player still does some damage and is allowed to purchase new tokens, up to a maximum of two tokens rather than the default three. These tokens can be standard ones or special upgrades available to all, or hero-specific tokens that are only available for that hero. (Side note, as a villain you can even buy a Kryptonite token to put into Superman’s bag!) All purchased tokens are added to a player’s bag. Additional crisis tokens may need to be added to one’s bag once the total tokens reach a specific level.

At the start of each round after the first, players also get to take a recovery step. This varies from hero to hero but consists of drawing some tokens from one’s bag and checking to see the result, depending on one’s hero and the tokens drawn. This could be healing the character, gaining a temporary token, or even another way to damage the opponent. Of course, the goal is to defeat one’s opponent by knocking down their health to zero. If no one is knocked out after 10 rounds the game is called in favor of the player with the most health. This can be important for some heroes, as they might excel at healing more than combat.

The game currently has a two-player version, containing Superman and Lex Luthor, and a Combat Vault containing those two plus six more heroes (the Flash, Batman, Wonder Woman, etc..) Lobo and Supergirl are not found in the vault but are available in a separate two-player version.

Archon Studios

StarCraft: Tabletop Miniatures Game by Sławomir Aftarczuk, Jarek Ewertowski, Jacek Karpowicz, Aleksander Nowacki, Michał Pawlaczyk

The real-time strategy game, Starcraft is a natural fit for a miniatures game, and Archon Studios is bringing it to the tabletop.

Players choose up their armies based around the three main combatants in Starcraft: Terrans, Protoss, and Zerg.

In the lore, Terrans are the baseline human faction. They have baseline armor that can be worn down, but their worker units can repair it. They also have bunker buildings that can be filled with low level units, making them much harder to overcome. They’re good at defence but also pretty flexible via unit upgrades.

Protoss have more expensive units with regenerating shields. They have powerful psionic units, units with energy shields, and some powerful single units that need to be placed carefully to avoid being overwhelmed by swarms.

The Zerg are known for attacking with waves of low-cost units that can regenerate and burrow to create an ambush. (Note, the game minis all come unpainted although some do have translucent bits…) They’re cheap and fast, putting out a lot of models and trying to win by overwhelming numbers.

As is common nowadays, many of the game’s minis come on sprues. Bodies and parts detach and must be put together to form an unpainted miniature. Many of minis in this game have special translucent bits (seen above) which help to give it that Starcraft videogame feel.

Players won’t start the game with all their pieces on the board. Like a real-time strategy videogame, players have to gather resources to buy minis and/or upgrade their tech tree. Each side has support structures that can be built to increase the number of their armies allowed on the map at one time.

As for the combat, players roll dice for most things. Range, height, cover and other statistics can modify attack rolls. Different attacks have different effects on enemies. Light, armored, biological, and mechanical targets will all have their own resistances to an attack.

Avalon Hill

Fury of Dracula by Dave Chalker, Stephen Hand, Craig Van Ness

A fifth edition of Fury of Dracula was being played at the game tables. It’s a one vs many game where Dracula is trying to avoid up to four other hunter players while he galavants around Europe, spawning new vampires.

The newest edition is based on the revisions of the 3rd and 4th editions but includes a new hunter to play (Jonathan Harker) and a “quick-play” variant for shorter games. The quick-play basically skips over the first bit of the normal game and sets the board up so that players can jump in with everything already rolling.

Market Fresh by Michael Kiesling, Wolfgang Kramer

Market Fresh has 1 to 4 players vying to sell their wares at the local farmers market. Players take a 2×1 tile of goods and add to their hand.

They then place a crate from their hand into their market stall and score points. Points are awarded based on the number of matching goods already on a player’s stall.

The crates are stackable, so a wily player may be able to place a stack onto their board to cover up non-scoring goods and get better use of their 5×5 market stall area. At the end of the game players earn bonus points for every type of produce of which they have the most crates. There are a couple variants (like smaller stands) that make things more challenging by requiring players to stack their crates higher.

Guillotine by Paul Peterson

The French Revolution continues in this macabre card game of executing the people in power. Originally released last century, Guillotine has now been reprinted for a new generation of would-be executioners. Guillotine is a card game based on a tableau of nobles in the center of the table.

On their turn, players are allowed to play cards to rearrange the order of the nobles before claiming whoever ends up at the end of the row, next to the guillotine. Some of the nobles also have abilities that trigger when collected.

Play continues to the next player who messes with the line and claims the next victim. This continues until all the nobles are gone. This is repeated a second and third time and then players compare the nobles in their score pile to determine a winner.

Hasbro

Monopoly Deal

There were no less than two new versions of Monopoly Deal. Monopoly Deal mirrors the boardgame but is played solely with cards. Players draw cards and then play up to three of them each turn. The goal is to try to collect colored sets of cards, like Monopoly properties. Most cards fall under special actions, properties, money, or rent. Typically none of them value until they are played out of one’s hand. Play a rent card to make another player pay you money depending on your properties matching the color of the rent card. Once a set of same-colored cards is completed they are “locked in” and cannot be messed with. It’s not exactly Monopoly but has some of its flavor, and is much faster. It is regarded highly in my house for a very quick game with light rules.

Monopoly Deal: KPop Demon Hunters

Similar to Monopoly Deal Card Game, but comes with character cards.

Each player receives one at the start of the game. They all have an ongoing, different ability (either “On your turn” or “during your turn”). Obviously, the players are not fighting over money, here they are trying to collect fans.

Monopoly Deal: No Mercy

Monopoly Deal: No Mercy is a much more aggressive version of the game.

Players can now go into debt. If you can’t pay now, a player can give away a debt chip. On your next turn you have to pay them back with a card – but it counts as one of the three cards you can play per turn. Sets of collected cards and cards in your hand can now be stolen. Finally, the action cards are much meaner, charging double-rent or forcing a player to lose their banked cards.

Crossfire

On the border of game and activity, Crossfire has players shooting little metal BBs at three targets on the playfield.

Use the little plastic gun to hit the targets to knock them over into the opponent’s area. Manage to get all three onto your opponents side to score.

Gen Con Storms

Gamers from other parts of the country were treated to a nice tornado/severe weather warning. (I never remember but a watch is when you’re looking for one, a warning is when there’s one already there.) An announcement was made over the convention speakers that everyone was to remain calm and head towards an interior room with no windows. Well, the huge dealer and gaming halls don’t have windows so I suppose they were safe??? I would guess maybe half of the gamers looked up from their table and looked around after the announcement before getting back to their game. Most of the rest didn’t even look up. I can safely say I did not see anyone panicking. Thankfully no one was harmed. However, I learned later that the roof sprang a leak in several places.

The lonely fire extinguisher looking out at all that water, wondering where he went wrong in his career choices…

I saw a few mop brigades but didn’t realize the reason until I saw later. There were several places in the demo hall (thankfully not the dealer hall) where there was minor flooding. I think no company had significant water damage but there was a lot of hustling around as people tried to get everything safely out of the way.

Before you can fix a ceiling you’re gonna need to a have a meeting.