Yes, we’re (thankfully) nearing the end of my Gen Con G(J)ournal, probably just a few posts left. While I find myself in the main hall more often than not, I enjoy it when I get to hop out to smaller events. One of which was Greater Than Games evening showing off some of their new titles. Crime Scene Tamperer is a tongue-in-cheek take-that card game of setting up your opponents to take the fall when Strong Bad/Dangeresque is on the scene. Digital Detox is a go-fish game of forcing other players to doomscroll on their phones. Defenders of the Realm: Definitive Edition refines the cooperative game and will add a ton of new content. Project Gold is an as-yet unnamed worker-placement game where one can expect to get their engine rolling as early as turn one. Even further out is Center Chair where you and your friends command a starship in a story-driven thematic cooperative spaceship game. Stonemeier Games held their traditional location in the demo hall just barely outside the main hall. Wingspan Pocket looks to be a great card game version of the original where cards are resources and birds. Think streamlined and faster playing with all your birds in a single row. Props to Stonemeier for pulling off Duel of Meloch which pits a Scythe player against an Expeditions player in one of the more impressive you got chocolate in my peanut butter boardgames I’ve seen. Dire wolf has several expansions in the mix, Invincible: The Hero-Building Game: Season 2 expands on the first bag-building game taking the game into season 2 of the cartoon along with four new heroes with a diverse power set. Finally, there’s Blue Orange Games with a new version of King of Tokyo. King of Tokyo: Godzilla has all new, spiffy Japanese-style art along with an entirely new, powered up set of ability cards. New to me, we’ll finish off by looking a A_Way, a card based take-that racing game.

Greater Than Games

A few years after the acquisition of Greater Than Games by the Flat River Group, the brand essentially ceased new developments. As of this past spring, Handelabra (publishers of many of the digital adaptations of Greater Than Games) acquired most of the rights back and then the founders of GTG took back control of the company and brand. As for the near future, GTG is making sure all their best titles are still available. Reprints of the Sentinels RPG materials should now be available. The new, Definitive Edition of Sentinels of the Multiverse, along with the highly sought-after Disparation expansion should be coming down the pipe soon. For now, the Spirit Island line is not back under the GTG label. While they did not have a large presence at Gen Con, the company did have some small events, primarily a small gathering Thursday evening showing off upcoming titles, including several upcoming lightweight, party-style games.

Crime Scene Tamperer by Christopher Badell, Christopher Burton, Matt Chapman, Mike Chapman, Matthew Kroll

If you are lucky enough to remember the pre-Youtube years, you may recall a goofy series of flash animations involving Homestar Runner, with the most popular character by far – the luchador-style wrestler Strong Bad. Well, he’s got his own game in this 2 to 4 player title.

To get you in the mood, here’s a blurb: Dangeresque Presents: Crime Scene Tamperer: The Party Game for Guilty Parties! You are some of the worst criminals in Brainblow City. But not worst as in, like, worst offenders… worst as in: you’re all terrible at being criminals. And now you’ve all been caught red-handed at the crime scene. And here comes world famous private eye/crooked cop Dangeresque to investigate. Lucky for you, he likes to monologue. There’s still a chance to tamper with the evidence and pin the crime on one of your fellow lawbreakers before he finishes his investigation!

The game mainly consists of playing humorous cards on opponents and oneself. Over the course of three rounds, players try to assign guilt tokens to everyone else. At the end of the game, whoever has the fewest tokens wins the game.

Digital Detox by Christopher Badell

Another lightweight game, Digital Detox has go-fish vibe and is for 3 to 8 players. Everyone has a hand of cards, representing their typical doomscroll on their phones. Try to detox yourself by getting rid of your cards and, hopefully, passing them on to other players. Rather than asking around to get card matches (as in Go Fish) players ask their opponents “Do you like X?” If they already have card X, they also get to take yours.

If you have too many of a single type of card, you can “Log off” and dump them in one big heap. There is, I believe, an optional, 6 sided event die that can modify a player’s choices. When one player manages to play their entire hand, players score (this is a bad thing) the point values still left in their hand.

Defenders of the Realm: Definitive Edition by Christopher Badell, Paul Bender, Matt Bender, Christopher Burton, Matthew Kroll, Richard Launius, Darrell Louder

A long, long time ago I had the prival\idge of reviewing Defenders of the Realm – a sort of Pandemic-style cooperative game with unique player powers and some randomness thrown in. The game had bad guys invading, including special extra-powerful leaders that would (annoyingly) boost the rest of the enemy strength when a leader was defeated.

Greater Than Games is taking the old game and revamping it this year through a crowdfunding effort over at Gamefound going on right now. The game will play 1 to 6 players and has all-new art updated mechanics. There will be a ton (10) of new characters (and their special abilities) to play with and four main bosses to provide a wide range of complexity – making the game suitable for beginners and more experienced players alike.

Gameplay revolves around a day/night cycle where players take their actions during the day and the enemies respond at night. The game is set up so that the more damage/success the players have during the day, the worse the attack will be that night. Thus, players are sometimes going to choose to do less than the maximum damage, just to prevent a worse situation that night. The hope is for the game to be out in backers hands before Gen Con 2027.

“Project Gold”

Project Gold is a still-in-development heavy/hobby strategy game using worker placement mechanics. It’s early enough in development that “Project Gold’ is only a placeholder. As things stand, players are creating religions or cults in a sort of pyramid style – playing out cards three across and slowly adding more layers on top. As an engine building game, the design isn’t set up to wait until the climax to have your engine running at full tilt. Supposedly, players get to have a decent engine up and running after the first round and then have the rest of the game to play with it. It is still very early in the game development but I was told that I could take some photos, so here are a few pictures to tide you over (that I’m 90% sure are of “Project Gold” and not some photos from a random other game…)

Center Chair

Center Chair is a still-in-development title around captaining a star ship vessel – sitting in the center chair, as it were. It’s a cooperative game where each player takes on a role in the ship command.

It’s a heavier game, and is a strong thematic/story driven experience. Still early in development, it has a planned release sometime even after “Project Gold.”

Stonemeier Games

Wingspan Pocket – Elizabeth Hargrave

The newest in the Wingspan line, Wingspan Pocket is a stand-alone game (the bird cards are not compatible with the original game) that tries to distill the original game into an easier to learn, faster-playing, portable Wingspan experience. Players are still trying to gain food, place birds, and lay eggs to score points. Each game may also include a unique set of goal cards to give a bit of strategic direction.

Each turn a player either plays a bird, draws two cards, or lays three eggs. Bird cards, based on species from around the world, are double-sided with one side displaying a bird and the other side representing food, forcing players to decide whether to use a card for its species or its food value.

Rather than four rows of birds, a player’s tableau is now a single line of cards or “flock.” When a player gains their sixth bird the last round is triggered. With a single line of birds, each bird triggers far more often and has a greater effect on the overall game. The game takes 1 to 5 players and finishes in around 30 minutes. A small, special deck of cards takes on the roll of other players in the solo mode.

Duel of Meloch – Jamey Stegmaier

Duel of Meloch is a somewhat crazy 2 player amalgam of Scythe and Expeditions. The two games share the same alternate-history background, so why not put the two games together? In Duel of Meloch, one player becomes a Scythe player, complete with its action mat, workers, mechs, and combat wheels.

Meanwhile, the other player is an Expeditions player along with its card and hand-management tendencies alongside colored worker assignments and move/play/action cubes. They move their expedition mech around the board locations to complete quests, get rid of corruption, and scavenge discovery cards.

Very broadly, someone plays Scythe and someone plays Expeditions at the same time and whoever plays their game better, wins.

Duel of Meloch takes place in a small map (either jungle or desert) which is “watched over” by the entity Meloch that throws in complications designed to meld the two rules systems (Scythe and Expeditions) together. Players progress along the Triumph Track by achieving milestones (some Scythe/Expeditions specific and some more general) to claim victory.

The game is cross-compatible with both Scythe and Expeditions, with the faction/player options appearing in Duel of Meloch also able to be used in the appropriate primary boardgame line, making this release an expansion for those games. Factions from the other main games (Scythe/Expeditions) can be used within Duel of Meloch. The game can also be played solo, with an automatic system to run whichever side not being played.

Dire Wolf

Invincible: The Hero-Building Game, Season 2

The original Invincible: The Hero-Building game now has a Season 2 expansion. In the base superhero themed cooperative game, players take on the roles of the main cartoon headliners: Invincible (son of superman-equivalent), Atom Eve, Rex Splode, or Robot. Players cooperate to solve a specific scenario/episode loosely based around the first season. Players gain power as they add better cubes to their draw bag, used to power up cards in their tableau.

Season 2 brings in new episodes as well as four new characters from the show.

Dupli-Kate, obviously, has multiple standees and is able to do more than one action on a card. She also survives attacks if at least one of her copies survives.

Shrinking Rae has two sizes of standees with her powers changing depending on her current state. Black Sampson starts as a brawler in his power suit but eventually becomes a ranged leader once his suit is gone/used up. Finally,

Monster Girl uses negative cubes in her bag to trigger positive results. These Falter cubes are new to season 2 and represent the stress heroes are under. They clog up your cube bag and, unlike normal black bad-cubes, the Falter cubes typically can’t be used for anything. Some scenarios will also have triggers based on Falter cubes drawn or in-hand.

Blue Orange Games

King of Tokyo: Godzilla by Richard Garfield

King of Tokyo: Godzilla is more than a reskin of the original 2-6 player game. It sports some nice art matching the Japanese theme.

There’s 50 entirely new power-up cards, much “spicier” than the original, allowing even more controlled chaos in the game. Which, if you ask me, is rather the point of a game like King of Tokyo.

It Has a Child! Was a promo card available at the convention. A bit of a miss for me to have this as a promo card as I feel like it was part of the original and was a fun card to get in games where it was mostly a battle to the death.

A_Way by Clément Bongibault, Louis Fievre, Benjamin Niess, Hugo Socié

Out for awhile I think, but new to me, A_Way is a light strategy with a space theme. 2 to 4 players are racing to get back to their home, which just so happens to be their opponent’s starting space.

On a turn, play a card or do a special ability. Moving from station to station, take care to take advantage of one-way routes and mandatory checkpoints while simultaneously avoiding the other players.

Cards drawn from the central deck lets players mess with the board, trigger special effects, teleport, or mess directly with your rivals. Cards can be rotated or swapped around for maximal benefit/annoyance. It’s one of those very tactical games where you do what you can with your cards when your turn comes up. Hopefully that involves really annoying your opponents while making progress yourself.