Roll for It (prototype) from Calliope Games
The next morning (thankfully, simulated drinking games don’t give you hangovers) my first stop was to see Ray Wehrs of Calliope Games. He showed me a finished copy of Tsuro of the Seas along with the Kickstarter rewards (you can see those in my PAX Kickstarter Round-Up), and then showed me his upcoming game, Roll for It. Each player gets three dice, and there are three goal cards set out at a time. Like Yahtzee, you get three rolls with the dice, setting aside the dice you want to keep. At the end, you get to commit matching dice to the goal cards — if you complete a goal card, you take it and reveal another one. If you have dice committed to incomplete cards, though, you get fewer dice to roll, so you’re forced to make some tricky decisions about how many cards to go for at a time. The game reminds me a little of Take It or Leave It, but with each player in control of their own dice rather than a central pool, and it’ll be a portable game that you can easily grab for on-the-go gaming. I’ll be looking forward to this one.
Leviathans looks really awesome on a Geek Chic table. Of course, what doesn’t?
Although I didn’t stop to play Leviathans — I was eager to check out games I hadn’t seen yet — I did take a moment to admire this setup. The Geek Chic table was a perfect way to show off the game (though I’m wondering if you’d be able to put the leaves in, since the airships are so tall).
Trying out Ruse (prototype), a game of accusations and alibis.
I went to the Game Salute booth, which was running demos of cool games all weekend. I got to meet CEO Dan Yarrington and had some great conversations about the state of the board game industry, Kickstarter, game stores, and the Star Trek Catan–Target deal. I believe Erik Wecks will be speaking with Yarrington further, so watch for that in the coming weeks. We also picked up a few board games to try out, which we’ll tell you more about as we review them.
Meanwhile, I also met Levi Mote and Sarah Sharp, creators of Ruse, a not-yet-released murder mystery game. I saw folks playing an earlier prototype at GameStorm but didn’t get a chance to try it. Basically you’re trying to pin a murder on one of the other players while maintaining your own innocence. Play a motive, method, and opportunity of the same color on an opponent to win — and in the meantime, match up alibis to the accusations other people play on you before they find you out. The gameplay is fairly simple but it allows for Gloom-style storytelling, and the artwork really accentuates the theme. Watch for this on Kickstarter soon.
Kingdom Builder – checked out from the extensive PAX Tabletop Library
Dave Banks, Erik and I went over to the Red Lion tabletop area for a couple of games. First we played Kingdom Builder, this year’s winner of the Spiel des Jahres. It’s an interesting territory-control game, designed by Donald X. Vaccarino, best known for Dominion. While the mechanics of the game are the same each time — draw a card, build three houses on that type of terrain (with some restrictions) — the replay factor comes in the fact that scoring may be different each round. Points are determined by three randomly selected cards: you might want as many separate settlements as possible, or settlements that connect cities to other locations, and so on. The differences in scoring will determine your building strategy. Overall I thought Kingdom Builder didn’t feel very exciting, but it was interesting enough that I’d consider playing it again to see how the different board layouts and scoring mechanics work.
After that we played Pandemic, the extremely difficult cooperative game of preventing a global pandemic. Despite the Wired cover story this month, we found that the world did in fact succumb to too many outbreaks and everyone perished.
Mage Wars: a customizable strategy game
I met Patrick Connor of Mage Wars but didn’t have time for more than a quick overview. Mage Wars is played on a huge board, and combines elements of trading card games and miniatures wargaming. You do build a deck of spells, but rather than shuffling and drawing them randomly, you can choose which cards to play when. Also, the game comes with all the same cards, so players have access to the same pool of spells, setting it apart from traditional collectible games. It might be a little more involved than what I’m used to, but I’m intrigued. We’ll keep you posted if GeekDad does a Mage Wars review, but in the meantime you can find out more at the website.
