50 Games in 50 Weeks: Seven Dragons
Just finished playing a game of Seven Dragons, a strategy card game by Looney Labs. It manages to find an excellent middle ground between ease of comprehension and strategic options. The rules can be easily explained in 10 minutes (though I botched one of the rules’ aspects). After you begin playing and once you hit the game’s midpoint, your strategic options become complex and interesting. It’s something of a pattern-matching game. A silver dragon […]
50 Games in 50 Weeks: Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple
Do simulates a specific fantasy trope: adolescent temple iplgrims who travel the world, helping people and getting into trouble. As limiting as this may appear, it’s easy for folks to grasp and use to tell stories. The system is much more simple than the length of this review implies, and highly story-focused. Your character is represented by two words: an adjective or verb “banner” and a noun “avatar.” The banner represents how your character […]
50 Games in 50 Weeks: Fortune & Glory
Fortune & Glory is a new board game of pulp adventure. Each player is an Indiana Jones-style adventurer, traveling the world, looking for treasure, fighting Nazis and mob bosses. The board shows the world, split up into maybe two dozen zones for major countries and areas. Each player gets a specific character card to play, each of which has a couple of stats. The game includes a bunch of different card types, several […]
50 Games in 50 Weeks: Searchers of the Unknown
As part of RyvenCon, I decided to stretch myself a little and run a game in a system I’d never tried before: Searchers of the Unknown. Some background is in order: No edition of Dungeons & Dragons has ever been released for free. Moreover, copies of early versions of the game are increasingly impossible to find, except at sky-high prices. Searchers of the Unknown is one of several projects aimed at releasing a free version of the mechanics of early D&D, in this […]
50 Games in 50 Weeks: Hollowpoint
When my first game of Hollowpoint ended, one player burst out, “That was awesome!” and the others agreed that they’d like to run Hollowpoint again a bunch of times, trying different setups every time. So, yes, this is a fun system. Hollowpoint is built to tell stories about Agents on a Mission. These are the kinds of stories where everyone wears a black suit and a narrow tie, and carries a gun. Quentin […]
50 Games in 50 Weeks: Freemarket
As part of RyvenCon, the online gaming con, I played a quick game of Freemarket. Freemarket’s a fascinating system and world, which I honestly had trouble wrapping my brain around. That’s not a complaint or a suggestion that either system or world are deficient; they’re just sufficiently unusual for me to feel lost on mechanics and their consequences. Freemarket is set on a space station, in a post-capital society of plenty. Everyone has enough food and clothing. Matter printers […]
50 Games in 50 Weeks: #1, Hive
Years ago, I designed a territory-building game, one in which players lay down territory cards, then spawn monsters on them in an attempt to capture another players’ castle. Never went anywhere; turns out that game design is hard. But as I sat down with a co-worker to play Hive over lunch last week, memories of my territory-building game floated to my mind. This had a similar concept, beautifully realized as a chess-like pure strategy […]