Played 3 times with review copy provided by Pandasaurus Games
Wild Space is a futuristic game where you are competing with your fellow gamers to assemble the best crew to pilot a spaceship to explore the galaxies! The bulk of the game revolves around the 102 crew cards; comprised of specialists and emissaries of six different animal species as well as robots. These cards are quite busy with icons for species type, occupation type, bonus scoring, etc found on the small squares.
Per the rules: “Welcome, daring ones! Are you ready for a flight into the galaxy of the notorious space dragons? You will need to assemble your crew before take-off, but then what? Will you capture a dragon or patch up the ship before it blows up in your face? Activating shields may sound boring but doing so could boost the mood of your crew — and thus earn you those last few victory points!”
This innovative card game combines drafting cards to generate your hand, and then some interesting game played during the trick taking portion. a total of 7 rounds will be played, and the player with the most points at the end will be the winner.
More Gen Con 2021 coming your way. Only three letters today, but you’d be surprised how many publishers like “G”, “H.” I’ll say no more of that here. As always, any errors on dates, publishers, titles, (and spelling) are mine alone. Don’t go blaming the poor publishers or their overworked booth helpers.
ebay was a big show sponsor. Why? They had a nice display case of trading cards on auction for thousands of dollars. It’s like a market speculation game, but one you don’t want to lose…
Games Workshop
Warhammer 40,000 lies pretty far out on the bell curve of my gaming preferences. I could enjoy the game, but it’s one of those things best enjoyed by a deep dive of time and money. I’m not quite willing to commit to either. However, Games Workshop is working on becoming more accessible with their newest miniatures entry, Kill Team. Kill Team has the flavor of Warhammer miniatures, but with a much more streamlined set of rules and combat. Measuring tape is out, now range is governed by simple templates. Combat is now a single roll of the dice, not an offense and then defense roll. It is even packaged with a beginner in mind. One “starter” set comes with two full teams of miniatures that just snap together and a set of terrain, a core rulebook, and a special rulebook to cover powers and abilities of the factions in the box. The minis are the same scale as standard Warhammer 40k and there is a compendium available that provides statistics to use the Kill Team minis in a 40k game. I have to admit that there is a generous amount of terrain (and minis) in the box. It isn’t one of those situations where a starter set doesn’t actually provide a “full game” until things are added on. On the other hand, it isn’t cheap. A full starter runs nearly $200 and a starter with less terrain runs closer to $150. Each box also includes a campaign of a series of missions that can be played between the two factions.
The Octarius starter set, which is nearly sold out, includes Death Korps of Krieg and Ork Kommandos. Releasing soon is the Chalnath starter including T’au Pathfinders and Adepta Sororitas Novitiates. The goal is to be releasing a new, stand alone, starter set every three months or so.
Dwarves and taverns go together like peanut butter and chocolate, like T-Pain and autotune. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the Dwarven kingdom of Nidavellir, where the dwarves gather and regale each other with stories and await their recruitment to battle the great dragon, Fafnir who is wreaking havoc over all of the Dwarven kingdom.
In Nidavellir, you are doing the aforementioned recruiting. You are trying to bring together the best group of Dwarves in order to take down the dragon. How do we know you have the best group of Dwarves? Well, in the end, Bravery points are the tell-tale sign of a successful dragon killing party.
Played 5 times on review copy provided by Asmodee NA
Repos is one of my favorite design houses. I have had the pleasure of getting to know the crazy sombrero wearing Belgians through the years, going all the way back to meeting them in Essen with their original game, Cash N Guns. Since then, they have been a publisher who has generally had at least one new game each year, with their centerpiece being 7 Wonders. In the past few years, they have made a foray into party/word games, with Concept and Just One getting lots of play time here in the past few years.
This year’s entry in that field is So Clover! In this game, players work together as a team to score the most points. Each player gets a clover board, which has four raised squares on it. The Keyword deck is shuffled, and each player gets 4 Keyword cards which are randomly arranged onto the clover. You will see that on the exterior of the clover, two words from adjacent cards will be paired with an area to write something above them on the clover itself.
I scoured Gen Con to bring you what I’ve found. I leave you to scour this (and sibling posts on this site) to see if anything I scoured is of interest to you. Without further ado, here’s the start of some of my explorations. More to come later as time for writing permits. As always, any errors on dates, publishers, titles, (and spelling) are mine alone. Don’t go blaming the poor publishers or their overworked booth helpers.
Devious Weasel Games
Looking way out ahead, Devious Weasel is planning to bring The Mirroring of Mary King to GenCon 2022. This card game with striking art has players attempting to flip over the central tableau to their preferred side (ghost or Mary.) Players take turns playing cards which can flip specific cards on the tableau. The game plays over the course of a week (five days) and players can only play a few control cards per day, but as many action cards as they wish. In the lore, your deck serves as your “mind” and your discards/played cards are your memory. Thus, if you run out of cards in your personal deck you’ve lost your mind and lose the game. Barring such a loss, players compare majorities for flipped cards to determine the winner.
