Some positive comments about Kinfire Delve by Incredible Dream Studios encouraged me to stop by their booth and scout out the card-based dungeon-delve type game. While there, I got a gander at their new worker-placement Kinfire Council whose twist involves players voting on new rules at the start of each round. Going in and out of the gaming hall I kept seeing lots of blue and red boxes being played. It turns out they were the same game, Call of Duty: the Board Game, and it comes in two flavors with two unique characters in each box. The boardgame mirrors the computer game. Players preprogram a turn, trying to secretly move around the board and get a jump on their opponent. Combat uses dice and cards. Winners gain points while eliminated losers just spawn back in again later. Arcane Wonders was also showing off Leylines, a sort of collect and deliver game that is a remake/reimagining of a Spiel des Jahres winner from 1987!
Incredible Dream Studios
Kinfire Council
Kinfire Council is a two to six player worker placement game with some political (game-wise, not real-life) overtones. Players are members of the council of the city of Din’Lux and are trying to increase their influence while simultaneously helping the city to repel an attack of cultists.
Every round (there are five rounds) starts with the revealing of some decrees. These decrees affect how the game is going to play this round. The catch is, players get to vote for which decree will be used. Then, players take turns placing their workers to take actions. There are eighteen or so spots with two more that change from round to round. More powerful actions also cost coins, a moderately scarce resource that can be obtained in various ways. In lieu of taking an action, a player can place a worker to arrest a cultist. The cultist is claimed as a sort of resource and can be traded in for things at a later point. This is also important to do, as the cultists have their own score and a player can only win the game if they also have a higher score than the cultist score/track. Other actions include building a lighthouse – a kind of communal effort of spending resources that can yield quite a few points depending on how high it is pushed and one’s contribution. However, cultist attacks can knock it down a few pegs so that’s something to watch out for… A final action of note (there are lots of gather/spend resource type actions) is one that triggers the docket chosen (voted for) at the start the round.
Continue reading
Alison Brennan: Game Snapshots – 2025 (Part 22)
Â
Before BGG started in Sep 2000, public discourse on games was mostly held on a reddit-type discussion board on Usenet called rec.games.board. For those who were around back then, this is the place where Scott Peterson had multiple colourful episodes defending PIrateer (or P*r*t**r as it was laughably referred to because some half-assed legal threat was thrown around at some point re disparagement of the game) and it was also where David Coutts had a tough time defending how real the science was in 6 Billion.
Anyway, prior to BGG there were multiple ranking systems, using different terminology, being bandied around that discussion board. At one point I took what I thought was the best of them, Mik Svellov’s and Mark Jackson’s I think, and combined the best bits into one that I preferred. And BGG eventually took the first line of those rating descriptions for each rating point and used that as their rating system – it was all in the public domain and a group effort of gradual refinement so no issue of course, but anyway that’s how it started. There wasn’t any science behind it … just boardgaming minds at the time thinking it’d be nice to find a consistency.
 Continue reading →
Share this:
Like this: