01 Jul
Posted by David Miller as Card Games, Miniatures, Modern Board Games, RPGs
Goodman Games is doing for the post-apocalyptic genre what it did for fantasy with the Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG. Mutant Crawl Classics, inspired by Gamma World and Metamorphosis Alpha, is stand-alone but still fully compatible with DCC. Characters can be human, mutant, manimal, or plantient and in a typical adventure venture the wastelands to collect lost super-science.
For a system that’ll allow gamers to make their own mutants, Weapons Grade Funk is working toward a line of customizable anthropomorphic miniatures. The current round of fundraising will support sculpting of all the various body parts. These will then be incorporated in to an online application with which users can mix-and-match for 3D printing.
Game of Blame combines be-the-first-to-dump-your-cards game-play with a kind-of hot-potato mechanic for a light card game of courtly intrigue. As the queen’s advisers, the players know that personal success isn’t really about fixing the kingdom’s problems but instead about making sure someone else takes the blame for the things that go wrong.
Beautiful and with a unique theme, Planetarium from Game Salute has players forming the planets of a new solar system by colliding matter on board orbits, and then further evolving those planets through the play of various cards.
Back on earth, players operate ice cream trucks in Rocky Road a la Mode, Green Couch Games’ tribute to the summer season. Cards in the game serve either as music to attract customers or as frozen treats to relieve the heat. With the right customers, players can also lay claim to summer hot spots, such as the pool, park, or ball field.
For the more sinister players, there’s Mr. B’s Madness at Midnight, a cultists-side Cthulhu game. This one combines worker placement and action-dice mechanics as players fulfill sinister plots and work to control key locations in Arkham. The first to 13 victory points is the winner, that is as long as they manage to keep the investigators at bay.
In the lead position this week is a game that despite hitting my pet peeves—chaotic, an “intentionally vague ruleset,” and that annoying exclamation point—still somehow manages to sound interesting. Mr. Game! appears to be the kind of game where the winning player changes rapidly and is pretty much selected at random. There must be something subliminal hidden in the video.
Among Nobles, though, makes a more direct play for my interest. It’s a game of political intrigue and military conquest in feudal Europe. Military conquest is abstracted at a high level. But more interestingly, political intrigue in the game is focused on the arrangement of marriages between noble houses. When cards representing royal husbands and wives are brought together, the number of actions available to the owning player multiply.
Updating to the Fate Core rule set is the Bulldogs roleplaying game. [Oh, wait a minute. It’s got one of those pesky exclamation points too, so…] Bulldogs! is for high-action science fiction adventure in space. But not for some sissy fantasy version of science fiction. Rather for adventure in a rough-and-tumble, save-your-own-hide version of space.
In Poland, a team is planning to rent out Czocha Castle for a series of 4 day LARPs about a College of Wizardry. Each event can accommodate about 130 people. Though a variety of lower-priced pledge levels are available, tickets start at $375. Or for $75,000, the organizers will run a private LARP just for you and your friends.
Puca Trade is seeking support for extending its service to Magic: The Gathering Online. With $50,000 to finance further development work, Puca Trade also promises that users of its service will even be able to trade physical cards for digital ones.
Best Treehouse Ever has players, of course, competing to build the better treehouse. The game incorporates card drafting and spacial reasoning, in that the rooms to be built an a treehouse are featured on individual cards, and when built must be added in balance (to prevent the house from falling down).