Having seen High Heavens a few years ago a PAX East, I was excited to finally get a copy of my own. I really enjoyed the game when I demoed it, and I’m glad to see not much has changed in the time I’ve spent waiting to play again.

High Heavens is a game of epic battle between the Norse and Greek Gods. Setup and play is super simple, with a nice deal of depth provided by the Gods’ powers and spell cards. Each turn you have 3 actions to summon Gods from your hand, cast spell cards, or have your Gods take action. Actions include moving, attacking, and using some special powers. Each God has a stat for movement, health, range, and melee/range damage. The goal of the game is to wipe out all the opponent’s Gods, or destroy their home base.

One of the coolest mechanics of the game is the rings. High Heavens comes with a pile of stack-able rings. There’s red rings that indicate health. Your Gods will sit upon a tower of these until their health is gradually chipped away. There’s also orange rings for attack bonuses, silver rings for armor, green rings for poison, and black rings traps. You can always tell the condition of a God by looking at the stack they’re standing on. The last color ring is white, which represents obstacles that can be placed on the battlefield. It’s worth noting that weapons and armor a God has are dropped when the die, and can be picked up by other Gods to use.

I ended up playing this one with my 8-year-old daughter, as she’s really shown an interest in games with miniatures. She picked up the rules extremely quickly, and after a close game, she managed to take down my home base after wiping out a majority of my Gods. I have to say I really thought I had the game locked down, but some cleverly played spells turned turned the tide in her favor.

So in closing, I still enjoy the game as much as I did when I demoed it 2 years ago. The final components are really top notch, from the plastic minis to the rings and the excellent Neoprene board. I look forward to checking out some of the add-ons to the game, the largest being the addition of Egyptian Gods.

A copy of High Heavens was provided free for review by Wild Power Games.

• Comments Off on Second Look—High Heavens

High Heavens

Ryan Lesser, known in the video-game world for Guitar Hero, Rock Band. Beatles:Rock Band, and Dance Central, was demoing High Heavens at a small booth tucked away in the corner of the tabletop space. His wife, and game’s artist, Jennifer, started the game’s demo with me until Ryan was able to run the rest of it to completion. The game is a tactical one where you take control of a set of mythological gods and battle it out, trying to destroy the other gods’ home base. In this demo I played the Norse gods, while Ryan played the Greek Gods. Each turn players take 3 actions. This can be summoning a god, moving a god, attacking another god/base, or playing cards that effect the board of miniatures on the board. The coolest mechanic of this game are the stackable rings that each god sits upon. These rings signify health, armor, extra attack power, poison, stun, etc… The more health an armor you have, the higher your character sits on the board. Rings like armor can be dropped when a god is downed, and then picked up by another god who passes next to them.

High Heavens is super simple to learn, and offers a great bit of strategy when it comes to managing your gods, powers, and protecting your base. I’m hoping to get a more in-depth review of this one once it’s out. While I saw a bit of this game at Connecticon, PAX East is where it was officially previewed.

SFR, Inc

SFR surprised me a bit, because they’ve been putting out a product I thought was long-since dead. Dragon Dice. I haven’t played Dragon Dice since I was in middle school, and just looking at all the stuff that’s come out since then got me drooling a bit. So many cool dice! TSR originally had published the game 1995, only to be bought out by Wizards of the Coast. Wizards put the game on the back burner after a while, and SFR bought the rights in 2000 and has continued to keep the game alive ever since. Several new army packs were available to check out at the show, as well as an entire new dice game. Demon Dice.

While each die represents units in Dragon Dice, each set of dice in Demon Dice represents one demon. Each die is a part of the body. Players take turns rolling against their opponent’s previous roll to try and damage the other player, and eventually knock out all their dice from play. It seemed a little complicated at first, but once you get the hang of it you realize it’s really not. I’ve got a starter set on hand, along with an extra set of dice, to review and report back here in a bit.

Attack the Darkness

The name of the game brings back memories of the Dead Alewives “Dungeons and Dragons” bit from a long time ago. An impressively large and hefty box filled to the brim with cards and tokens is what initially caught my eye. Attack the Darkness is a dungeon crawl game with RPG elements and deck building/drafting mechanics. The cards make up the random dungeons, characters, and pretty much everything in between. It plays up to 1-8 players, and can be played with or without a game master. While I didn’t get a chance to play it, it should be on the way to my doorstep very soon. I really liked what I saw, and can’t wait to dig in.

• Comments Off on PAX East 2014: Part 3