In the near future, an astonishing new technology has been developed that allows the sleeping mind and machine to be connected. It is called Oneiroshunt, and with it, the business of crafting and selling dreams has become a thriving industry. For the right price, clients can learn new skills, overcome deep-seated fears, and travel to the most extraordinary locations all from the comfort of their beds.
In Neodreams, each player is the CEO of a company that is developing and using this technology, and they must expand fast to keep up with the competition. In this economic strategy game, players will deploy their Oneironauts to gather resources, craft stunning experiences, improve dreamscapes, and gain clients. The player who accumulates the most wealth once enough dreams have been created will dominate the Oneiroshunt industry for years to come!
A ray of moonlight shines in the clearing. The fairies wake up and stretch their wings. Mushrooms pop up from the ground, forming a circle. The first fireflies start to land. Magic is returning to the forest, and now it’s time to prepare for winter…
In Fairy Ring, you want to create a mushroom village to house the fairies in the clearing. Guide your fairy carefully, from village to village, through the fairy ring to gather as much mana as possible. You have two seasons to develop your village before winter begins. Each decision counts towards winning the game.
With two Kallax cubes dedicated to the work of this one designer, I think it’s time to compare and contrast the work of the truly inimitable Cole Wehrle. I first discovered Cole’s unique design style in November 2018 while at the Netrunner World Championships at the FFG headquarters in Minnesota. I’d never heard of Root before that fateful day, but between dozens of Netrunner games, a friend pulled out a copy of Root, started explaining it, and I was hooked. It was a bit reminiscent of when I was at a Magic: The Gathering event in 1996, and between games of Magic, someone pulled out a copy of Settlers of Catan, and I was simply drawn to it in a powerful and inexplicable way. Root has been an all-time favorite since then, rocketing up my list of favorites and my played games list, and overtaking thousands of others games in the process. But of course, Cole didn’t stop at Root, and while many of his subsequent games have an aesthetic that is extremely similar to Root, the differences among his underlying creations are striking.
My thesis is that each of Cole’s creations fills a very different niche in the hobby and in my collection, and each excels at something distinct (not unlike the Clash of Civilization Games). Root is the four-player free-for-all extraordinarily asymmetric combat game for bashing your friends while playing the psychological warfare of demurring and finger-pointing that was pioneered in 1959 by Diplomacy and perfected in 1995 by El Grande. By contrast, Oath, Pax Pamir, and Arcs all offer something very different and unique, despite their seeming similarity…
Congratulations! Your architectural firm has been selected to renovate the city’s downtown…but you’re not the only ones. To pip your opponents at the post, you need to manage your resources and carefully plan your constructions. Be careful not to leave too many opportunities to your competitors!
Hachette USA had its usual conglomeration of individual publishers melded together into an exhibit hall booth whole. Wander the tables and you could find any number of publishers happy to tell you about their fine games, usually with a nice French accent. There were games for every taste. Scorpion Masque was showing Flashback: Lucy as a sort of goth picture-puzzle time-travel game as well as Monster Chase, which is a reprint of an excellent monster-themed kids memory game. Unfortunately, the new expansion to their popular 2-player co-op, Sky Team: Turbulence was not in the booth. Sorry We are French were showing off In the Footsteps of Marie Curie, a quick-playing game that uses a cube tower to determine the resources on offer. Studio H had Middle Ages, a reprint of Majesty: For the Realm that has a less luck-driven tile selection with a couple new buildings. Possibly the hit of the booth, Unfriendly Games had the cat-on-a-powerline dexterity game, Nekojima. Gigamic was eye-catching with their Pac-Man themed version of Quoridor, complete with an alternate video game style mode. We’ll finish off our tour with La Boîte de Jeu and From the Moon which has players competitively building up their economy on the moon to cooperatively launch three missions to the solar system.
Unfriendly Games
Nekojima
Nekojima has 1 to 5 players building up a set of high wire power lines throughout the city, making sure they don’t touch, even when burdened with the occasional cat. Players roll a die and pick a pair of wooden dowels attached by a string. The dowels are of varying lengths. Some are high, others low, often it is mixed. The dice determine which two of the four areas need to be connected by the towers. A colored cube is drawn to determine which dowels are used by the color of the string connecting them. When a black cube is drawn, a second cube is drawn to decide the rope color but then the player must also hang a cat token from any string of that same color. Not only must the wires never touch, but any hanging cat should not touch any wires either. Players can play competitively – with one loser who knocks things over, or cooperatively to see how high they can build. That may be quite high indeed as there is no rule against stacking new dowels on top of old ones, perhaps just to find some open air.
Once upon a time, there was a magical book of fairy tales that had three chapters. You will now live through that book in 3 Chapters, a trick-taking game with three game phases:
Chapter 1: Start with eight cards in hand, choose one, then pass the remaining cards clockwise. Continue doing this until all cards are drafted.
Chapter 2: Play one card each. The highest card wins the trick and receives two points. Additionally, compare the skills on your cards with one another as this can earn you additional points.
Chapter 3: Finally, evaluate the skills within your selected hand cards. They can bring additional points in this chapter.
If you choose the fairy tale creatures wisely at the beginning, you can win plenty of tricks and collect lots of points. Clever card combinations can also bring points without tricks because everyone knows, say, that Hansel and Gretel are particularly strong as a team…
