Sure, you can play an engine-building game that constructs a farm, builds a cathedral or castle, or even an entire empire. Or…, stay with me here, you can play an engine building game to collect eight octopus tentacles! Stick that in your medieval farming community! Cosmoctopus is a 1 to 4 player, mostly card-based game where players are trying to gather up eight tentacles for the win.
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Beacon Patrol is a coop tile laying exploration game in which you navigate the coast of the North Sea to secure its beacon buoys, lighthouses and waterways. You are captains of the Coast Guard. Together you check beacon buoys and lighthouses to ensure the safety of the North Sea coast. You place your tiles next to tiles that are already on layed out, move your ships and explore the sea. Your goal is to explore as many tiles as possible. A tile is considered explored when it’s connected to other tiles on all four of its sides.
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Despite its size, Asmodee had a stealth presence in the dealer hall. There were many games on display under the Asmodee umbrella but they were all presented under the name of the design house. Libellud had the hint-giving party game Dixit: Disney Edition, CMON was showing off the cooperative whack-a-mole Stranger Things: Upside Down, Lookout Games was showing the tree-based combo-tastic card game Forest Shuffle, and Days of Wonder had a tantalizing glimpse of Ticket to Ride Legacy: Legends of the West.
Continue readingPlayed with review copy provided by publisher and base game provided by good friends
Revive was the consensus #1 game of 2022 for my Euro loving game group. I believe Revive will continue to receive love for many years, which is rare in today’s game scene. Revive as a base game has a lot to explore, especially with the advanced content. So while the game doesn’t feel like it needs an expansion, I was still eager to see what these designers had come up with for an already stellar game. Upon reading the rules, I was surprised to discover that this expansion was not in fact modular. While the rules read like and gameplay feels like 5 modules, they are all reliant on the expansion. So although I’m going to approach this review discussing each “module” as they play, do keep in mind that it would take major house rules or potential game breaking to not play it all at once (and if I dislike one module, it would be hard to recommend any of it). Also, I assume the reader has played the base game and does not need an explanation on the core gameplay of Revive. If you haven’t played Revive and are reading this, do yourself a favor and seek out a play.
Hachette Boardgames brought several companies to the convention. Le Scorpion Masqué looked to have a hit on their hands with Sky Team. This dice-management 2 player co-op of landing a plane was in continual play at their booth with a long line to boot. Meanwhile, Randolph was showing off the family-friendly co-op Miller Zoo based on the actual Miller Zoo in Quebec.
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Like NCAA football, there is a tendency for smaller game publishers to join up Transformer-like to create a larger organization to take advantage of whatever it is that larger organizations can do. Flat River Group is the new home for several game studios. Of these, I came away from Gen Con with a look at King of Monster Island by Iello and several games from Greater Than Games. King of Monster Island is a cooperative dice-chucking game reusing King of Tokyo mechanics with a healthy dose of power up/upgrade mechanics. Greater Than Games was busy showing off recent expansions for Spirit Island – Nature Incarnate, Sentinels of the Multiverse: Definitive Edition – Rook City Renegades. Upcoming games include a reworking of the co-op Defenders of the Realm into DotR: Legends Retold, and a polyomino placement game, License to Grill.
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