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Sam De Smith - Cosmoctopus:
COSMOCTOPUS is top of my wishlist. Can hilarious and charming sit side by side with nameless cosmic horror? The answer is absolutely yes, or possibly Fhtagn. In this delightfully bonkers game, you compete to be the first to successfully summon the great squidly one, tentacle at a time. The first player to call forth 8 pseudopods opens the portal and wins!
At its heart this is an engine builder that's rich in mythos detail. If you're a diehard (or undying) Lovecraft fan you'll love all the sly references to the Cthulhu mythos, though it's absolutely accessible to all - and mighty pink one is simply adorable in its nameless horror, making it a fun game for ages 10 to 10,000.
The 4 core resources are ink, coin, stars and whispers, which in turn fuel tomes (which can count towards resource costs), artefacts (generating additional resources of a type when you gain them), constellations (enabling you to summon the great one's tentacles) and rumours (powerful one-shot events). The squares on the semi-random board indicate what resources you gather, as the great inky one gazes upon you - literally, in fact, facing the current player.
Get ready to Ïa!Ïa! across time and space for this fab wee game. It even has fun coop and solo modes (questing against a Private Investigator no less - Straight Outta Arkham!). A sure-fire hit; meet me at the Elder Sign! The mighty Quacken approves!
David Ireland - DCeased: A Zombicide Game:
Have I ever mentioned Zombicide before??? I’m not sure I have…
It’s coming up (again) today with the latest version from CMON hitting the shelves very soon.
DCeased see’s our favourite DC characters entering the Zombicide series. After the huge success of Marvel Zombies, CMON has now got access to DC. That’s right, Batman and Superman up against the Zombies, or are they?
The DC universe is now under threat from the rampaging zombie hordes. Society is under threat yet again and the zombie virus is everywhere. It is up to our heroes to prevent complete takeover, but wait, some already are no longer on the side of the living. Aquaman, Green Lantern and Superman have already succumbed to the virus and are rampaging with the hordes. Those remaining superheroes have to stop the onslaught.
I have so much time for Zombicide. I’ve played plenty of the original set and the 2nd edition as well as having had the opportunity to try Marvel Zombies. I’d love to play DCeased. Utilising the heroes to stop the oncoming hordes and those Anti-living heroes already infected would be intense but so much fun. For those unfamiliar with Zombicide, players work cooperatively against the game to complete a mission with unique objectives within. Typically the goal is to escape because the Zombies do not stop coming. I’d love to see what unique twists come up in these missions with the DC theme.
I do have one big question on this game which I also just want to know the backstory on. How did the Zombies get Superman? I cannot get my head around that, can he even be stopped?
It’s another big game for my Wishlist this month and another I would love to get the chance to play.
FavouriteFoe - Castle Combo:
With Essen upon us, there has never been a better time to get dreaming about future game plays and purchases! And for me, I have my eye on a few smaller but no less exciting offerings!
CASTLE COMBO is a super fun, tableau building game where we are forming a 3 x 3 grid of cards and trying to score maximally for each one! From the same publishers as the banging Faraway, this is another super simple to learn but super tricky to score well card game! With coins burning a hole in our velvet pantaloons, we are buying cards from two different markets. Each card has a cost, a scoring criteria, as well as some other bonus icons. Collect keys to manipulate the market, banners to reduce the price, and purses to boost your coffers. The game ends when everyone has placed their 9th card and then the winner is the player with the most points!
Another fast, portable game on our radar is FLOWERS. We have been playing the heck out of this on BGA, and it’s addictive! The game play is simple in that each turn you draft and lay a pretty numbered tile into your field space. You can lay a tile adjacent to an existing tile or on top of one. The thorn in that pleasant rose comes in the end game scoring. To avoid negative points, you must connect the number of tiles matching that number to each other e.g. four x 4 or three x 3. And no two identical number groups can touch. Moreover, you also need to connect at least five tiles of the same colour together for those groups to score! Butterflies help sweeten things slightly with their bonuses, but this is a fast playing, placement optimisation game with a sting!
Harold Cataquet - Arcs:
Does the name Cole Wehrle ring any bells? Probably not, but this American game designer is responsible for some of the most innovative games of the 21st century. Games like Root [1], Pax Pamir [2], John Company [3], and Oath [4] are all amazing games, and every single one of them was designed by Cole Wehrle (and most were published by Leder Games). So, when I heard that Cole had turned his attention to the trick taking mechanism, I was hooked on Arcs [5].
However, I have to warn you that most of Cole’s games have dense 20 page rulebooks that you have to read a couple of times before you understand how to play the game. So it should come as no surprise when I say that these games are rated difficult by BGG. But don’t let that scare you. Part of the reason for the length of the rule books is that Cole likes to design games with asymmetric player powers. All of his designs have a certain elegance that just make his games a joy to play.
Arcs was Kickstarted back in May 2023, and Leder Games raised almost $1.46 million (£1.11 million) thanks to over 15,277 backers. If you’re a fan of the artwork in Root and Oath, then you’ll be glad to know that Kyle Ferrin returns to do the artwork for this game.
Like most of Cole’s game designs, the essence of Arcs is a war game and this one plays 2-4 in just over an hour. The beauty of Arcs is its core mechanism (trick taking). There are four suits (each of which represent an action) numbered 1 to 7. In addition, the cards are marked with stars, which represent how many of those actions you can take. The lower value cards have more stars than the higher value cards, but the higher value cards are more likely to win the trick (which determines who goes first on the next trick). You don’t have to follow suit, but it helps.
There’s a lot of going on with the card play, but the rules are very straightforward. The four actions allow you to mobilize (move or influence), construct (build or repair), administer (tax, repair or influence), or aggress (battle, move or secure). In the battle action, the aggressor takes a number of dice (equal to the number of ships they have in an area), and rolls them. The battle dice come in three colours (blue, orange and red), so you can adjust how aggressive your attack is. The defender does nothing but watch.
The key to victory is getting victory points (from the Ambitions area of the board), and these are awarded at the end of a round. At that point, you look at who has the most resources, the most captives, the most trophies, etc. depending on which ambitions are scoring in this round.
I’ve only seen the “How to Play” videos on BGG, but this is another winner from Cole Wehrle and I’m sure it will be in many gamers’ list of top ten games of 2024. Note that this game is also available with a Leaders and Lore expansion [6] (to add more variety), a brilliant miniatures pack [7] (to add more bling) and a Blighted Reach expansion [8] (to add a campaign element to the game).
David Goldovski - Dungeon Pets: Dark Alleyz:
The following paragraph, the opening of my review, presents a short game of two truths and a lie, challenging the good reader to solve it:
Some board games are perfect simulators of real life, and my game of choice is a great example. As a small business owner, I love how the original game—where you manage a pet store—captures all the nuances. You start by buying pets, raising them, and taking care of their needs while making sure they look appealing to customers. The interpersonal dynamics are really well done, too. You must match the animals to the customers, and sometimes, no matter what you do, they will complain. Like the time you sold your vampire-unicorn to the dungeon lord’s grandma, and she complained that it never gets sick—so why did she buy it in the first place? Or when your baby dragon decides not to eat your imp brother in front of the honorable dungeon queen, ruining your reputation. That’s what makes Dungeon Petz such a good game: it’s the most realistic business simulator ever created as a board game.
OK, so the lie in the above is that I am NOT a small business owner – my wife is. Dungeon Petz really is a great pet store simulator, and from the stories I hear from my wife, the tales of the dungeon grandma and others seem quite legit. In this game, you and your imp family run a small business of pet monsters for evil dungeon lords, the dungeon princess, the dungeon farmer, and more. The game is both ridiculous and ridiculously challenging as you stroll through town to buy pets, supplies, and accessories while taking care of your pets, hoping they’ll behave as shoppers come by.
For some reason, even though this has been my personal favorite for a long time, I somehow missed that it has an excellent expansion—The Dark Alleys! What does it bring to the table, you ask? A lot! First, you get all-new cool monsters, like the vampire that eats your imps instead of regular food. There’s an industrial zone that offers new actions to perform each turn, special artifacts, new buyers and exhibitions, a fortune teller who happens to be the wife of the guy running the black market, and, of course, the black market itself! This expansion adds even more complexity, with new cards and areas on the map to keep in mind as you hopelessly manage your business from end to end. It’s exactly the experience this innocent-looking game should provide in the first place. I’ll definitely include it in my next zatu-mega-order, right after I’ll forget how expensive the last one was. You’ll thank me later!
