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.
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Gen Con 2024 – Dire Wolf Digital, Starling Games
Dire Wolf was generating a lot of buzz about their new bag-building game, Invincible: The Hero-Building Game, based on the comic and Amazon series.* The procedurally generated Clank! Catacombs gets a Lairs and Lost Chambers expansion. Finally, the cute little denizens of Everdell reappear in the 2-player and/or solo Everdell Duo, which even features a co-op campaign. Oh, and I finally took a look at baby Everdell – My Lil Everdell.
Dire Wolf Digital
Invincible: The Hero-Building Game
Invincible: The Hero-Building Game is a cooperative bag-builder for 2 to 4 players (There’s a solo mode where you control two characters with one hand of cards.) Each player takes on the role of one of four teenage heroes from the Invincible comic (now also an Amazon cartoon.) The young adult superhero theme of the comics comes through in the game as players’ heroes grow in power throughout the game. Players begin the game with just a few powers and then draw cubes from a personal bag three at a time. These cubes are placed onto powers, activating the power when all its spaces are full. There are several colors and, of course, many of the spaces on powers are color-coded. There are six black cubes in the bag that act as any color. After placing their cubes, players may push their luck and continue to draw another set of cubes and place them until they draw a fifth black cube from their bag. That hero then crashes (too much power!) and is taken out of the fight for the round unless another player comes to rescue them. If rescued, the downed player may spend the rest of their drawn cubes but cannot draw any more. If a crashed player is not rescued by the end of the round, they’ll take more damage. Hero-building comes after the power activation phase. Once everyone is done drawing cubes, each completed power earns its owner determination points. These are used to play new powers from one’s hand, giving more interesting and more powerful options in the future. There are also some options to add more colored cubes into one’s bag. Play continues until the scenario is completed either by accomplishing the goals or losing due to the loss of too many bystanders or hero KOs. There are several scenarios in the box that can be played individually or played in sequence to reflect the first season of the Amazon series.
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