Whenever I play a game that's new to me, I enjoy passing along that experience. Though not a full review, posts like this will provide an overview and initial impression. This past week I played several games that were new to me. I'll discuss a bit about Alien Frontiers and give quick highlights of several others. Alien Frontiers Last week I went to the Dice and Decks monthly game night at the Atheneum in downtown Indianapolis. My neighbor Nikki and I drove down together. One of our new friends, Jamie, brought Alien Frontiers to play. We sat down to try out this area control, worker placement, dice rolling, strategy game with Jamie and our other new friend David. Apparently the version we played was the 4th edition. Board Game Geek indicates there is new 5th edition expansion to be published yet this year. The designer is Tory Niemann and the art is by Mark Maxwell according to the box (some other versions may have additional artists credited). As space corporations, your goal is to place all of your colonies and control different regions on the planet thus earning more victory points than your opponents. Each turn you roll your dice (spaceships). Based on the numbers rolled, players assign their dice (space ships) to different orbital facilities located around the planet to gain necessary resources, ships and alien technology. The two primary resources needed are solar power and ore. These two resources are a essentially the game's currency needed for constructing colonies. Alien Tech cards can give you additional advantages in the game, in some cases assisting with adjusting die rolls or protecting territories and other assets. Having the majority of colonies placed on a territory of the alien planet grants control over that region. Gaining control over a territory also grants the controlling player a special bonus unique to that location. Victory points are gained by building colonies on the planet and controlling territories. Once a player has built his/her final territory on the planet, the game ends. The player with the highest points on the tracker is the victor. Nikki and I enjoyed this game. It had a nice mixture of strategy mixed with the randomness of dice rolls. The theme was consistent throughout the game and components. I felt like actions I took related to the locations in which I placed my dice. We took about an hour and a half to learn and play. Experienced players can probably play in about 60 minutes. Overall, we liked Alien Frontiers. Its straightforward, fairly easy to teach/learn and offers a nice amount of decision making and strategy. Some may have an issue with the randomness of dice rolls, however there are cards and bonuses (relatively few) that can be used to help offset this by changing a die value. As a matter of fact, I had a very interesting experience with "randomness" in dice rolls... During our play of Alien Frontiers, I had an interesting dice rolling occurrence. Nearly every time I rolled, the dice results were "1", "2", & "5". Roll after roll I seemed to always have the same result. Even as I gained a fourth, fifth and sixth die (spaceship) there seemed to always be three dice that read "1", "2", & "5". Eventually I snagged an alien technology card which allowed me to change a die by subtracting one from it. This helped a little. I wonder what the odds are of rolling the same three numbers over and over and over are? It was really kind of strange. We had fun watching my rolls to see if I rolled "1", "2", & "5" again. Nikki ended up winning our game. Pretty good for just our first play! It was lot of fun playing with Jamie and David at the Dice and Decks event. Thanks again to Jamie for bringing the game and inviting us to play. If this game sounds like it may be your cup of tea, check out the link to the Board Game Geek entry here. Be sure to check the multiple versions and expansions to get the full picture. I had the opportunity to play several games last week. I'd like to give a quick overview of some of other games I played while at a friend's game night. We had a large group at Troy's game night and he found four games we could all play. Pick Picknic This quick family game deals players cards of different values with images of chickens, turkeys, geese and other fowl as well as foxes. Food (wooden cubes) of different point values are placed on each of six different colored fields. Players play a card from their hand in an attempt to gain the food on the field of the matching color. In the event more than one player plays a bird card of the same color, they can choose to share all the food on the card OR roll dice adding the value of their card to the roll, with winner taking all. If a fox is played, it eats any fowl played to that field and receives the cards for their point value, but none of the food cubes are taken. After several rounds the game ends and all players count the value of their bird cards and food they were awarded during the game. The one with the most points wins. This is a cute game that plays quickly. Children and adults can play together and both get some enjoyment. To learn more about Pick Picnic click here. Brick Party In this "Lego" building game, players team up each round working together to build a specific brick layout. A dexterity game and test of communications and teamwork, Brick Party is a fun family game. The box says ages 5+, however in order to properly give instructions to a partner may require a child of an older age than five. Probably a bit better starting age is seven plus? Each round new teams of two are selected. During a round one player will be the architect and the other the builder. The architect chooses a pattern card with a specific silhouette pattern of blocks and has to describe to the builder how to construct that pattern. The builder takes blocks from a common pool of plastic bricks in the middle of the table and receives instructions from the architect without ever seeing the pattern card. Each turn a "rule" card is turned over. The rule card has a special requirement that makes building more challenging. Examples of rules are: Builder must use their "off" hand; builder must have eyes closed; or teammates must sit back-to-back so that they can't see what the other is doing. The round ends when one team believes they have completed their pattern and yells, "done". The others then have 30 seconds (egg timer) to complete theirs. Points are awarded only to those completing their pattern correctly with a bonus to the fastest successful completion. I really liked the teamwork and communication aspects of Brick Party. Tricky, yet rewarding once you successfully complete a pattern. To learn more about Brick Party click here. Among Thieves This card game wis a bit more involved than the previous two but still able to play within about an hour. The concept of the game is that each player is a different master thief and you are trying to take down one of three different evil corporations by infiltrating in small teams and performing a heist. Each turn the heist master chooses which of the other players get to participate in the heist. Prior to actually performing the heist players choose if they plan to be Honorable or Dishonorable to the group during the heist. They do this by flipping essentially an "Othello" token to the black or white side. If you choose to be dishonorable, you'll get double any points awarded on the heist while any choosing honorable receive nothing... however you move down and the others up the honor track. If all player on the heist choose honorable, nobody moves on the honor track, however everyone gets their fair share of the heist reward value. During the game there are events that alter outcomes of heists and may reward those whom didn't go on the heist. There are four different end-game triggers of which I'm not certain. When we played, the game ended once one corporation card deck was depleted. We followed the end-game rules to determine a winner. None of us seemed too thrilled with this game. The rules had some inconsistencies. The choosing of heist partners seemed unbalanced. I won the game, yet didn't feel much satisfaction. If you're curious about this one and want to learn more click here. Deadwood 1876 Based on historic old west characters, this semi-cooperative card-based game was my favorite of the four games we played that night. Each character in Deadwood is represented by a card showing famous old west personalities such as Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity Jane. There is no difference in character abilities, the different characters are simply for aesthetics. Speaking of aesthetics... this game was nicely done. The components were of high quality, the box looked like an old book. The card illustrations were well done. In my quick overview of the game: Characters are randomly distributed to one of three locations in the center of the table, each represented by a wooden sherif star meeple. Each character is also dealt two safe cards placed face down next to their character card. Initially only you may look to see what is in your safe cards. Players are also each dealt a hand of four cards. Those in the same location are essentially on a team, defending their safes and their contents from enemies. You can use certain cards to move to other locations or duel with another player to swap to their location allowing the players to potentially get to a location/team with better safe contents. Each card has two items listed on it, a weapon and an item with an associated action. When using weapons to battle other players, each rolls the special dice associated with the specified weapon(s) and compare rolls. Actions on the cards may allow players to share weapons with others, move to a new location, view safe cards and other useful maneuvers. This is important, because after the third round whoever is at the location with the most gold in their combined safes wins the first phase of the game. Then the successful group battles it out for sole ownership of the winnings. Those remaining players use the weapons in their hand and in their safes to battle each other. Last man or woman standing wins. Heavy with this card game was a lot of fun. It had a little bit of luck, strategy, and teamwork involved. To read in more details about Deadwood 1876 click here. New Game to Investigate I was recently contacted by the game designer of a new card game. He wanted me to share information about his company and the Kickstarter for a new game, Robinson Crusoe, Escape From Despair Island. Old Novel Games is a new game company specializing in turning classic novels into card games. I didn't really know anything about this company and game until I received this request from the founder/designer. I did look at the Kickstarter campaign. It appears to be getting support and positive reviews from others. I thought I'd pass this along to my readers and let you know about this new company/game and provide a link for you to check out the Kickstarter campaign for yourselves. To learn more about Robinson Crusoe, Escape From Despair Island the card game click here. That wraps up another post to King's GameNight. I hope you're finding tabletop gaming information and content that interests you. Please share your comments to the post. If you would like to send me a message directly, please use the contact form. And as always...
Game on!
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