This week, no elaborate miniature-filled productions or complex campaign backgrounds, just three games that struck me as different…

Deep Space D-6 is a solitaire worker-placement dice game inspired by choose-your-own-adventure books and early science-fiction RPGs like Star Frontiers. With a minimalist graphic design, the game has its player commanding a spaceship trapped in dangerous territory, fending off attacks, troubleshooting emergencies, and generally trying to survive until help arrives. Gameplay involves rolling the custom dice and allocating them to various crew positions.

Monster Truck Mayham from Dice Hate Me Games is roll-and-move played in real-time. Fast as they can, players roll dice to race their trucks around the modular dirt-track board. Along the way, of course, there are cars to crush, slicks to escape, and buses to jump.

The Great Dinosaur Rush is a game of competitive paleontology, where the players are as much concerned with recognition as scientific integrity. In the dig phase of each round, players collect bones, manipulate museums, and sabotage or even steal from other scientists. In the build phase, players assemble bones in to dinosaur skeletons. Matching recognized species is worth extra points but definitely not required to get ahead.

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“Deck Building: The Deck Building Game combines the thrill of building your deck with the excitement of building your deck.”

Are you confused yet?

In this card game for two players, you are competing against your neighbor to build the ultimate front porch (or back patio, if you wish). You’ll need some tools, materials, and some funds to create your ideal deck.

Players buy cards from the general deck using their pre-built three-card hand. Once you’ve got enough cards to get started, you can lay down planks, build stairs or railings, and stain your wood.

Staining wood keeps your opponent from being able to play a rotten plank onto your pretty new deck.

The game ends when one player runs out of cards or when the general deck is gone. However, the player to end his or her hand is not necessarily the winner. Your score is tallied by how many planks and ornaments are played, minus the number of rotten planks that are present.

Deck Building: The Deck Building Game was funded on Kickstarter in April of 2015. It is now available to the general public for $10 through Greater Than Games. You can order it online, or head to your local board game shop and ask them to order you a copy today (if they don’t already have some in stock, of course).

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Greater Than Games, in collaboration with Dice Hate Me games, is reissuing the chemistry based Compounded board game. Due out this July, the expansion set is also in the works. You can preorder both from the company’s website now.

Players take on the role of a lab manager, hoping to be the first to create the next great chemist by combining elements to complete a compound. The player with the most compounds at the end of the game wins.

Messing with the elements can be tricky. So, if you draw a Lab Fire card, you must place a token on all flammable compounds that have not been created yet. Too many lab fires will cause an explosion, which will destroy your compound.

Players work their way up the discovery track and try to become the Lead Scientist and work toward completing the most elements.

The game has been out of print for about a year now, but Greater Than Games has been working hard on getting it back into print. Additionally, Dice Hate Me is quickly coming to the end of its production ramp up and will be delivering the Geiger Expansion to Kickstarter pledgers this summer. Expected delivery is this July. However, Kickstarter buyers get first dibs on the goods, so it may be August before the second edition of Compounded and the Geiger Expansion hit store shelves. The base game costs $35. The Geiger Expansion costs $20.

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Greater Than Games (GTG) recently announced that it is unify its forces with Dice Hate Me Games to create an even better powerhouse of successful games publishing.

The immediate affect, according to the company blog, will be unnoticeable to the public. GTG has already been warehousing and shipping for Dice Hate Me Games, so the transition is minimal. Upcoming games publishing from both companies will remain on schedule.

GTG is restructuring its company, as well. There will now be three imprints under the GTG parent. The Sentinel Comics imprint will cover games such as Sentinels of the Multiverse, Sentinel Tactics, and other games within the comic universe. The Dice Hate Me imprint will cover previous titles owned by the company, such as Brew Crafters and VivaJava. Dice Hate Me will also be in charge of future strategy board games. Fabled Nexus is the newest imprint and will cover science fiction and fantasy titles like Galactic Strike Force.

The first game to be published under the new structure is Bottom of the 9th, which begins its Kickstarter campaign on Mar. 1. It is a one or two-player dice and card game based on the final inning of a baseball game. Players compete against each other as pitcher and batter for the final score.

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