This cat should in no way symbolize any laziness on the part of the article’s author….

It’s been a crazy fall and so the Gen Con articles have been pretty strung out, but with Essen basically already around the corner, I thought it necessary to chuck one final post over the finish line.

Allplay is really leaning into the “All” part of their name, distributing a huge number of titles in addition to starting three new lines of games under their own label. Three of their newest titles are Enchanted Ivy, Mountain Goat Legacy, and Through the Mountains. Pink Hawk Games is one of those partners and I got a nice overview of their cooperative Good Kitties – a mission-based game of cats mucking about while their pets are asleep. Further afield I talked with folks at the Rebellion Unplugged booth about Dino Battle! (card+dice chucking battles with minis, co-designed by Stephen Baker of Heroscape fame) and the Operation Kraken expansion to the bag-token driven, asymmetric Sniper Elite: The Boardgame. I made a point of visiting We Have Issues! Publishing to check out their “use any mini you want” minis game fought on any surface – Zynvaded! EVO. Finally, while on the topic of miniatures, a shout out to The Army Painter who now have really cool Speedpaint Markers (paint-pens) designed to use with their one-coat paint. They look easy enough for me to give them a try on some boardgame minis I have lying around.

Allplay

Moving forward, Allplay will be releasing more in-house games that are not their typical small (or tiny) box format. These games fall into one of three different lines: Masterworks, Epics, and Creations.

Masterworks will feature high level components and complex gameplay.

The plan is to release  one masterworks game per year.

The first game on the list will be a rerelease of Dominant Species. The main game will remain the same (in Spain?) with an automa mode to make a better 2 or 3 player mode.

Epics will also be large box games but not quite as complex as Masterworks. These wouldinclude campaign and legacy titles like Sail Legacy or Crash Landed.

Sail Legacy is a multi-session campaign of the co-op trick-taking game found in Sail while Crash Landed is a three-act survival and settlement building campaign where players scavenge alien technology, farm, fish, etc… to build up from their crash site. Unique characters provide bonuses.

Creations is focused around games that are stand-alone, highly thematic games that are still in the common industry box size but probably not as big as the other two lines. The example held up is Have a Magical Day. Players plan out a perfect trip to a “very thematic” theme park, having to pick when (or whether, in the case of long lines) to go on rides, whether they should watch the parade, try to meet costumed characters, do they eat snacks throughout the day or stop for full meals, etc…

Through the Mountains by Reiner Knizia

Not a retheme or just new maps but a true sequel to Through the Desert, in Through the Mountains players are still taking turns to place two pieces on the board per turn to create routes (or block an opponent’s route.) The new game uses “valleys” and “temples” to modify how pieces use and are placed on the board.

Enchanted Ivy by Sarah Joshua

Extremely popular at Gen Con (over 1000 copies had sold by Saturday is what I was told), Enchanted Ivy is a tile-laying, solo-only game that has a player taking on the role of a brand new owner of a magical inn.

Place tiles into a grid to assign guests, trying to meet their specific location (relative and absolute) in order to score them by the end of the game. There’s a story mode that can be played where players can earn rewards for accomplishing various goals while building their inn.

With the very positive reception, there are plans in the works for several new extensions to the game.

Mountain Goats: Legacy by Alex Cutler, Michael Mihealsick, Stefan Risthaus

More Mountain Goats. Players are still rolling dice and moving their goats up the mountain without getting knocked off. Rolled goat symbols provide players with new abilities in the game. As a legacy game, those abilities change and become more powerful as the story is explored. Meanwhile, more and more hazards also show up. There is a “courage” system that lets players have a bigger handle on mitigating luck and dice rolls. Of course, all this extra stuff does come at the price of a slightly longer game. While a legacy game, it is non-destructible and players can reset the campaign and play again.

Pink Hawk Games

Good Kitties by Emily Vincent

In a thoroughly, and appropriately, pink booth, Pink Hawk Games were giving demos of their upcoming Good Kitties cooperative strategy game.

Players are house cats trying to take and/or keep control of the house while their human owners (maybe their human pets?) are asleep. Kittles move around the board to collect supplies, sometimes combining them to make usable contraptions.

Example starting cards…

Cards are played to accomplish actions like wiggling (presumably your bottom?) to upgrade your attack power or scratching up the furniture to find supplies. Use those supplies to make cool toys like a laser pointer, yarn, forks (adds to your “cattitude”), and a cat toy to distract the mice. Of course, zooming around or batting at things are also fine moves.

Meanwhile the dog is chasing you around while mice try to steal your supplies. Catch enough mice, and everyone can upgrade one of their cards. Players can use special cards with strong actions but that makes them officially a “bad kitty” which I think means the dog chases you more…

The mouse and doggie track showing their actions, with spaces that can be filled with more powerful actions later in the story…

It’s a mission-based game with the first mission to become famous on the internet. Players have to get a kitty in the same room as a camera. Of course, and in every mission, you have to frame the dog while you do it.

As players get into further missions there are more and better cards but the mice and dogs also get more powerful. If that all sounds interesting, the game is currently running a kickstarter campaign here.

Rebellion Unplugged

Dino Battle! by Stephen Baker, Roger Ford, Anthony Howgego

Coming next year, Dino Battle! is a card-activated dice-chucking skirmish game full of unique dinosaurs with their own dino-powers.

Brachiosauruses can trample you, Raptors can surround and outflank you, etc.. It’s a reimplementation of a German dino-battling game from back in the 90s. Battles are played between dino teams on hex grid.

(some 3D renders of figures)

Dinos are ranked by dice, with bigger and/or badder ones (3-dice) rolling more than smaller (1-die) ones. With a designer credit to Stephen Baker (of Heroscape and HeroQuest fame) color me interested in the result. A Gamefound campaign exists but has not yet launched.

Sniper Elite: Operation Kraken – Roger Tankersley, David Thompson (I)

Sniper Elite is a series of “stealth shooter” videogames. Sniper Elite:The Board Game takes that formula and creates a game where one player is the sniper, trying to take out the other players by drawing chits out of a bag.

Meanwhile the other players are trying to maneuver around to complete their objectives and/or find and take out the sniper. One of the main ways to disrupt the sniper is to mess around with the chits in their bag.

A nice thematic screen to hide your moves and decisions…

The newest expansion (releasing alongside a reprint of the base game), brings in two new maps, two new vehicles to play with, more weapons and tools – like TNT or Bolt Cutters. The backstory has players trying to find information to defeat an upcoming Axis “Super Carrier”. A Normandy Village map has wide open areas to plan around while the second map, of the carrier itself, is tight and full of walls and locked doors to create a maze-like feel. The expansion also includes new cards to expand options for the Solo Mode in the base game.

We Have Issues! Publishing

Zynvaded! EVO by John Vogel

Zynvaded! EVO is a miniatures game, but one that is more of a labor of love than a money grab. Well, you or I would call it a miniatures game, but since the pieces are 1 to 1 scale models of toy-sized figures – technically the pieces are just “small” and not “miniaturized”…. Players can use any figure they want and slap them down on any old playing surface – the dining table or the middle of the family room floor.

This is not a display. This is an actual pitched battle in action… beware that ancient cell phone, who knows that technology it holds…

Terrain and obstacles are whatever you have on hand – LEGOS, other toys, the volcano from Fireball Island, your sibling’s doll house, whatever. Games are played with three figures on a side, each taking on the role of a support, scout, and leader. Figures all have a range of stats as well as special abilities unique to that figure.

Combat is resolved with standard 10 sided dice and scenarios are typically based around some sort of battle over control of locations.

These battles can be chained into a campaign where if a figure does X, they can gain EVO points which can be spent to get a random stat boost going forward.

Rather than try to ding you with lots of jumped up costs for this or that, almost every part of the game is available for download online.

Good old “Captain Leader” and his stars and stripes goodness… all his stats are available for download.

The rules (and even the statistics for all the current figures) are available free on their web site, https://www.zynvaded.com/

Those folks looking to deluxe their experience or support the designers can take advantage of a nice fancy hardcover rulebook and/or a two player starter set on offer with two teams of 3 figures, rules, dice, and other bits and bobs to help resolve play.

There is also a full line of unpainted figures designed to match their available statistics – individual units as well as in complete teams of 3.

The Army Painter

As someone who occasionally dabbles in painting miniatures I have occasionally produced something I’m proud of, although I’m never sure how I did it. I’m always on the prowl to find something that might make that event more likely to happen. My newest interest is a line of Speedpaint Markers.

The company already has a line of Speedpaint designed to cover a miniature in one coat (after priming) to accomplish basic painting, shading, and highlighting in just one go with one paint. While that sounds cool, they’ve now gone a step further and put their paint into markers.

Rather than drop your paint onto a pallet and dip your brush around, simply charge up the foam(?) tip of the marker by pressing it into the cap, and then you just draw away on your figure to place the paint – no brushes needed and perhaps easier to handle for anyone more used to writing or drawing.

While there is a little less paint in a maker than a traditional bottle of their paint, the fact that you don’t lose any paint to a pallet makes the net usable paint about the same. They’re quite proud of their expanding line of maker colors, with metallic paints one of the more recent additions.