Kinfire Delve: Vainglory’s Grotto is a tactical and cooperative card game for 1-2 players. As Seekers, you will fight your way through the well deck of challenge cards to reach Vainglory, the master of the well, and face her in an epic final battle.
To defeat Vainglory, you’ll battle and puzzle your way through her well deck of 57 challenge cards before facing her final gauntlet. On your turn, attempt a challenge by playing a matching skill card and rolling the dice. Add enough progress tokens to a challenge and you’ll be richly rewarded. But fail and you’ll face the penalty by losing health, discarding cards, or being forced to return cards to the well deck.
Even when it’s not your turn, the cards in your hand can be played to boost your teammate’s action. But be cautious–emptying your hand means gaining exhaustion and suffering effects that can lose you the game.
Survive long enough to reach the bottom of the well and reveal Vainglory’s final form. Break through her gauntlet of protectors in order to face and defeat her once and for all and win the game.
From the Spine of the World Mountains to the bustling fishing villages of Earthquake Fish Bay flows a river where fortunes can be made and lowly traders can brush shoulders with Rokugan’s elite. Will your clan become the dominant force along this River of Gold?
In River of Gold, players take on the role of river merchants allied with legendary samurai clans, each vying to exploit the river to earn wealth, glory, and wisdom. Will you invest in developing ports, markets, shrines, and more along the banks of the busy river? Or will you rely upon sailing the river of gold, growing your wealth and influence through delivery contracts, visiting the nobility, and garnering a bit of divine favor during tough times?
When offered a lucrative job, a lone bounty hunter begins a journey that will put his skills to the test and redefine his world. The Mandalorian: Adventures allows players to experience a new part of the Star Wars universe on their tabletops. Navigating unique maps and missions, players must co-operate to accomplish their goals and avoid defeat. Play as one of eight unique characters, each with their own deck of cards and strategies that will help you fight enemies and solve dilemmas to complete mission objectives. All of the action takes place in an illustrated map book as players recreate iconic moments from season 1 of the hit Disney+ series. With an intuitive system that’s easy to teach, the game grows with new rules, components, and mission types added over time – some even featuring a hidden traitor mechanism…
Well, GenCon is essentially here. By the time that you’re reading this,I’ve hopefully cleared off my schedule so I can soon be on the road on the way to Indianapolis to take in as much as I can for a day and a half! While the tagline for the convention is “The Best 4 Days in Gaming” – but my schedule never allows me to be there for the whole time.
While it’s impossible to see everything in that short amount of time, I’ll try to list some of the games that I intend to learn more about this year. Of course, this list could not possibly be comprehensive – even with the great preview on BGG – there are always games that I run across that I’ve never heard about!
First and foremost – my brother’s best game is a getting an anniversary release!
Time: 10-15 minutes Played with prototype copy provided by publisher
Summary:
Your group of adventures encounter a tavern in the midst of a bar brawl. Guide your eleven, dwarven, orc adventurers/patrons and more to try to keep them all inside the tavern during the brawl. You’ll need to place, flick, throw the cards and adventurers to try to have them land inside the tavern.
Fantasy Tavern Brawl is a high energy dexterity game with an element of strategy inspired by fantasy roleplaying games. Designed by indie designer Adrao the owner of Amuri Studios an indie studio in Japan. This portable game is for 2-5 players. The game comes with 7 fantasy character races that all have their own characteristics, and includes various scenarios. But it’s flexible enough for players to make their own scenarios. It also comes with 75 meeples of 5 colors, and handy player reference guides.
Setup:
Each player selects a color and takes that set of meeples. Select a scenario for the game. Each scenario lists which combination of cards of fantasy races are given to each player to be kept as their hand. For example Scenario 1: each player gets 2 dwarves, 2 halflings, 2 orc cards.  Place the Tavern Floor card in the middle of the table, and place 1 of each player’s meeple on the Tavern Floor card. Play proceeds clockwise. Â
The Tavern:
Any cards that touch the Tavern Floor card or are on top of meeples that have cards connected to the Tavern Floor become part of the tavern. Any cards or meeples that have been slid/flung off and are not touching the tavern floor any more are not part of the tavern.
Gameplay:
On a player’s turn, they choose 1 card from their hand and follow the instructions of that fantasy race’s ability and perform that action. Actions may include placing a card, sliding a card, flicking a card, dropping a card, placing / flicking / removing adventuring meeples.  E.g. For the Halfling ability – place the Halfling card so it touches the tavern, then stack 4 meeples on top of each other. Attempt to flick those 4 adventuring meeples to try get them inside the tavern. Â
If the card touches the tavern it becomes part of the tavern. Adventurer meeples that land in the tavern can stay in the tavern. Any meeples that missed or were pushed out of the tavern during the player’s actions are returned to their respective players. Any cards that missed or were pushed out of the tavern are out of the game.
Card abilities may have some conditions that occur if a card successfully becomes part of the tavern. For example the Minotaur card. Fling the Minotaur towards the tavern, if it successfully lands in the tavern THEN you can place 1 of your own meeples on the Minotaur card that is now in the tavern, AND move 3 other meeples from anywhere in the tavern to another location in the tavern.
Once the player has finished with that card, the turn goes to the player on the left.
Once everyone has played all their cards, the game ends.
All adventuring meeples that are in the tavern score. The higher the adventuring meeple is in the tavern the more they will score. Meeples on the first floor score 1 point, meeples on the 2nd floor score 2 points, meeples on the 3rd floor score 3 points and so on. Players tally up the total of their meeples and whomever has the highest score wins. When scoring, I found the best way is to calculate backwards.
Impressions:
This is a fun dexterity game that is great for partying adventurers. Since this game plays quickly it is a good game day starting game, filler game, gateway game, or a fun game to end the night with. I thought it was great that it can also take up to 5 players.
Even though it’s a dexterity game where you are flicking/throwing/placing cards and meeples, you still need to employ some strategy to try to maneuver your meeples to an optimal position to avoid being knocked out, or to score more points at the end of the game. There are some cards where you need to think about whether to move your meeples higher up on a more precarious floor, or more towards the center of the tavern so there’s less chance it’ll get knocked out, or moving another player’s meeples. Â
The game has many icons, but it is great in introducing only a few at a time. For example, the beginning scenarios only have 3 different cards, so you only need to refer to those icons. And if your group is adventurous, you can draft cards or use your own imagination to choose which cards to play with.
The rulebook text is quite small, so I missed a couple of rules on my first playthroughs. But this game really lends itself to imagination so we house-ruled a little and used our imaginations. The rules even mention that house rules are permitted. The game is in a portable sized box and is jam packed full of colorful meeples. I usually sleeve most of my card games, but for this game I think I’ll be leaving the cards unsleeved. Â
I played the game many times with various groups of gamers, and it shone especially well with those who may like dice games, and players who like RPG games. Also those who like light-hearted games, and games that make you laugh, this one works well in those groups. I think this game would be really fun to add in a RPG campaign as well. I would love for a DM to bring this mechanic in as the adventuring group visits a tavern.
Played with review copy provided by blue orange USA
Become the best metro network planner Paris has ever seen. Use overhead crossings to link the capital’s iconic monuments, all while optimising shortcuts through the central platform! This game is the easiest version of the Next Station series, according to publisher Blue Orange Games.
Dale Yu – GenCon 2024 Anticipation Post
Well, GenCon is essentially here. By the time that you’re reading this,I’ve hopefully cleared off my schedule so I can soon be on the road on the way to Indianapolis to take in as much as I can for a day and a half! While the tagline for the convention is “The Best 4 Days in Gaming” – but my schedule never allows me to be there for the whole time.
While it’s impossible to see everything in that short amount of time, I’ll try to list some of the games that I intend to learn more about this year. Of course, this list could not possibly be comprehensive – even with the great preview on BGG – there are always games that I run across that I’ve never heard about!
First and foremost – my brother’s best game is a getting an anniversary release!
Ghost Fightin’ Treasure Hunters Anniversary Edition – Mattel
This is a re-release of the 2014 Kinderspiel winner – that now includes 2 new ways to play:
Cooperative Mode – All players work together to win!
Head Haunter Mode – Brand new One VS All mode where one player controls the ghosts against up to 4 other players!
Games are alphabetical by title otherwise…
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