In Stay Out of My Dungeon!, players are working together, as a team of goblins, to keep a wildly-varied group of adventurers from ransacking their dungeon. Stay Out of My Dungeon! (henceforth: SOOMD!), while being cooperative, includes the risk of one or more members of your team secretly being traitors. There are a lot of games out there on the market with this idea, but SOOMD! has a neat twist that we haven’t seen before: At the start of the game, players draw one of sev...
Shambling hordes of people, dead-eyed, purposeless. Yes, the suburbs are terrible. Also, there are some zombies.
Zomburbs is a semi-cooperative deck-building game about suburbanites sometimes working together, sometimes competing with each other, during a zombie apocalypse. Deck-building games have been popular since Dominion established the genre, but new entries like this show that there is still a lot to be done with the mechanic.
For those who aren’t familiar wit...
A remote planet on the edge of space, where competing fleets converge to fight for resources and influence: this is the setting for Sky Dynasty. Similarly, the game itself is an interesting coming-together of several different game mechanics, which interact with each other in interesting ways.
At its heart, Sky Dynasty is a bidding game. Each turn, players will draw a hand of ten cards from their starting twenty card deck. Starting decks are the same for all players, an...
“I drank a fish smoothie, and now I have diabooties. As a result, I’m suffering from swollen hands, burning pee, and my toes have fallen off.” is the kind of thing you might say while playing Death Wish. I don’t actually have diabooties. That’s not a real thing.
Death Wish is a game for up to eight players, where the winner is the first person to die. The way to die is to be the first person to collect a certain number of skulls on Disease cards, with the recommended wi...
In Outchasers, you get to pilot a giant battle mech in space. Is this as exciting as it sounds? Fortunately, the gameplay in Outchasers is actually deep.
At the beginning of the game, both players select a pilot card and a mech card from an available pool of twelve (two pilots and two mechs from each of three different colors). Then you shuffle up the 48-card equipment deck and give half to each player at random. There are alternate rules for drafting your equipment de...
Ave is a card-based game where players compete to be the first collect seven of the hard-to-get currency (Influence). They’ll do this by manipulating the easy-to-get currency (Denarii), and by playing cards. The cards come in three flavors: one-shots you play on your turn, one-shots you play as a response to other player’s cards, and permanents that stay in play in front of you (Proclamations). There’s a lot of stealing, destroying, and canceling of other players’ card...
Ancient Sands is a fantasy-themed archaeology game in which players compete to dig up treasure cards for points and special powers. Along the way you’ll be recruiting teams of workers, both mystical and mundane, and dealing with game-changing events that vary turn-by-turn.
The play area for Ancient Sands is a 4x4 grid of cards laid out at the beginning of the game, three cards deep. The top card of each stack is the easiest to dig up, but the better cards further down a...
The great war is over, and the good guys won. Specifically: the computerized good guys won. Humans lost. In Emergence, players team up to play as the computers, routing out the last few evil humans lurking in the ruins. Thing is, one or two of you are actually dirty humans, pretending to be honest, upstanding computers. Shocking.
Hidden traitor games are pretty popular right now, and Emergence is a decent entry in the field, being deeper than something like Spyfall, but...
Does your gaming group have that one guy who gets really, disturbingly angry when talking about Libertarianism? You may just want to keep on moving. For everyone else, SuperPACS is a nice, middleweight card game, in which players strive to build up political power and take over the country.
One of the nice things about the game is that there are at least three valid ways to accumulate the political power that serves the same role as victory points. You can build a large...
Bird watching is a hobby that some people have, apparently. We’re too busy playing tabletop games over here for additional hobbies, so we’ll have to take their word on it. Fortunately, Birds of a Feather brings the two together in what we can only assume is a rigorous simulation of the passtime.
Birds of a Feather is something like a friendly trick-taking card game, where everyone can score off the same hand. It’s also a game of timing, misdirecting and baiting your opp...
Raiding a dungeon is typically held up as the pinnacle activity for players of massively multiplayer online videogames. You and four, or nine, or nineteen (or gods be with you thirty-nine) of your closest friends delving deep into monstrous lairs to extract adventure and treasure. What could be better? There’s a reason that dungeoneering has been well-represented across all forms of tabletop gaming.
But that’s not what this game is about. In this game you play the haple...
