One thing that became very obvious to me from an early age is that ghosts stories tend to be tragic ones. If anything because they involve someone’s death. But I also learned that they make great stories.
Phantom is Ludonaute’s attempt to mix great story with great gaming and for that they’ve come up with a ghosts story.
You can’t sit down at a table to play Tzolk’in without immediately noticing the big draw- and the thing that sets it apart from its numerous mechanic-sharing brethren- the huge functioning cog-wheels embedded in the board, baring their teeth at you in a brazen attempt at intimidation. Let’s put those aside for one moment however, and pretend giant wheels are run-of-the-mill.
Fantastiqa is a competitive story-telling game for two to four players who will need to travel from land to land subduing beasts and creatures in order to recruit them and get their help to go on quests that will bring glory, and therefore victory, to the first player who caries out a number of quests.
Zombicide is one of those products about zombies (hence the name) that came out recently and it takes the theme of survival and makes a game out of it. It also came out of Kickstarter, successfully funded and thank goodness for that!
As a lover of Dungeons & Dragons, and since I have loved all the Wizards of the Coast boardgames hat have been released so far, getting Lords of Waterdeep was pretty much an instinctive reaction more than an informed decision.
I suspect that, like me, you have many friends (Shut up! I totally do!) who, while happy to play the odd game, are not ‘gamers’ per se. This is normal and fine (right…right?).
Every once in a while, a moment of clarity will occur in your life where you have to kind of sit back and re-evaluate just what the hell it is that you think you’re doing. For some people, it’s sitting in a bar, completely tossed and chain-smoking Marlboros, realizing they should quit the lifestyle before they become a sucked-up Iggy Pop look-alike. For others it’s sitting, glazed, on the couch in a dope-fuelled stupor, perhaps concluding that you’ve been watching a TV that’s not even on, and that you should put down the bong for a minute. Life tends to kick us in the bollocks from time to time with little gems of wisdom, and about a year ago or so, I got mine.
Hands down, the best Family Strategy Game for 2012 was Takenoko.
Takenoko was available only by special import in 2011, and then became widely available in the US in 2012, and that’s good enough for me.
If you’re anything like me you spend a lot of your time being right about a great many things. Furthermore, if you’re anything like me, you’ll find that trying to improve the lives of others by gently correcting thought-patterns and behaviour is not only rather burdensome, but often goes unappreciated. Some even react negatively to being helped in this way.
Ah you kids today with your futures. Now, the future in the 1980s, that was a future. It was/is/will-have-could-been a fascinating beast. All that cyberpunk. All those katanas. Pink neon reflections on the rain-slick streets of Neo-Tokyo shattered as a gang of netpunks scream by on their heavily customised lazbikes. Groovy. Thing is, you can’t make a stylized dystopian future without breaking a few metropolises. How did that go down then, y’reckon? What cataclysm could have befallen old Tokyo to require such reconstruction? Fortunately we can now know the answer definitively since those events are recorded in the datapacket transmitted back from the future in the form of the board game we in the present know as King of Tokyo.
Hail to the king, baby! A review of King of Tokyo Read Post »
