Knockdown - A fighting boardgame

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Board Games – Awaken Realms has created a unique fighting game that mixes a few genres so you can have some epic fights.

Transmissions - Cute Robot Worker Placement

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Board Games – Transmissions is a neat board game.with some amazing miniatures:

Based on the lovely illustrated world of Matt Dixon, Transmissions brings his world of mechanical friends to life. In the game, players share robots as workers moving around a rondel-styled board, collecting engrams and electricity. These are used to gather ideas to improve your use of the robots or items to score points at the end of the game. You also build your own set of connected, flowing pipes while gathering birds and butterflies to score even more points. The game ends when no ideas are left, a player's robots are complete, or no pipes remain to be built. After an equal number of turns, the player with the highest total score wins!

The game features a unique mechanism of worker selection and sharing with incredible illustrations, adorable miniature robots, and very welcoming play for everyone!

—description from the publisher

Zombie Carnivale –

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Board Games – Venice is usually a great location for an interesting style of game. Zombie Carnivale is a unique game that was nominated for several awards with the first edition of the game and with the Kickstarted Second Edition new scenarios and miniatures were added to the game to improve the experience.

From the Publisher:

The ancient manuscripts talk about a Leviathan, a huge creature lying on the silt bed of the lagoon on whose back the city has its foundations. All manuscripts agree on its eternal sleep and they all tell that the beast will wake up one day, shaking the city from its muddy roots, smashing the vitrified stilts on which the city stands, and crashing it into the seething sea where the monster will rise. The ancients say, however, that there will be signs; it is written that the Venetians will feel the tremors, that they would therefore save themselves from the monster, who will recover his freedom by plunging into the waves a deserted city.

But there were no signs. What ancients did not know is that the Leviathan is not alive. For centuries, the city lived and prospered on the back of a corpse. That corpse, though, is now awakening – and with it the dead arise from the lagoon...

In the cooperative game Carnival Zombie, players lead a group of characters who are fleeing on terra firma from the terror that has emerged from the lagoon of Venice. This group of characters must make its way through hordes of rotting "Infected" to leave the city, and players need to rush as the Leviathan upon which the foundations of Venice were built is awakening. Thus, it's only a matter of time before the city sinks in the dark waters of the lagoon.

Each game is divided into several nights and days. During the nights, players hide in trenches behind the barricades to resist the attacks of the Infected. During the day, players move through the city, which is shaken by tremors. The Infected are drawn by the groans of the Leviathan in the abyss to help their master free itself from the rotting stilts that nail it to the silt bed.

Players have several ways to get out of town, but little time to do it – and their path is hindered by the bosses, the most implacable servants of the Leviathan. If the players do make it out, they can assess their skills – and set a goal for next time – by counting the points scored during the game.

My Father's Work - Perfect for Halloween

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Board Games – Do you love Frankenstein? Are you a Victorian Horror aficionado? Is being a mad scientist interesting to you? If so you probably want to check of My Father’s Work.

This game from Renegade Studios seems really interesting:
The walls were lined with iron shelves, each metal slat overfilled with glass jars containing formaldehyde and grotesque curiosities within. Pristine brass tools and refined metals of a quality I had never before laid eyes upon were strewn across sturdy slabs of rock and wood, their edges sharp with use. However, my eyes were soon drawn to a sturdy writing desk, its mahogany eaves inlaid with thin strips of copper, the center of which contained a well-worn leather-bound book. My father's journal — passed down to me and representing years of knowledge and countless experiments. And inside that weathered tome, atop the pearly parchment oxidized yellow at its frayed edges, were the deliberate quill marks of a crazed genius outlining the ambitious project he could never complete in one lifetime — his masterwork.

Without realizing it, my hands were shaking as I clutched the book to my chest. At once, I felt an ownership and anxiety for the scientific sketches scrawled so eloquently on those frayed sheets. It was at that moment that I began my obsession: I would restore this laboratory to its former brilliance and dedicate my life to completing my father's work!

In My Father's Work, players are competing mad scientists entrusted with a page from their father's journal and a large estate in which to perform their devious experiments. Players earn points by completing experiments, aiding the town in its endeavors, upgrading their macabre estates, and hopefully completing their father's masterwork.

But they have to balance study and active experimentation because at the end of each generation, all of their experiments and resources are lost to time until their child begins again with only the "Journaled Knowledge and Estate" they have willed to them — and since the game is played over the course of three generations, it is inevitable that the players will rouse the townsfolk to form angry mobs or spiral into insanity from the ethically dubious works they have created. The player with the most points at the end of three generations wins and becomes the most revered, feared, ingenious scientist the world has ever known!

—description from the publisher

Night Lords - Can I Win In the Morale Phase?

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Warhammer 40,000 – Chaos Space Marines and Chaos Knights have been left to gather dust on my shelf for the majority of 9th Edition.

I always loved the look of Night Lords and the mechanic of being scary is interesting to me.

Raptors are one of my favorite units even though they don’t really know what role they want to fill.

Sadly when you build a weird niche force that tries to win in a unique way you will inevitably meet a rock that ruins all your plans. Thousand Sons are that rock to this force.

Conan - The Barbarian

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Board Games – I’ve painted up several set of miniatures for the various Conan games and have been pretty pleased with the look of most of them. This latest batch is no exception the sculpts are decent and interesting.

Space Marines and more

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Warhammer 40,000 – One of the things about playing Warhammer is that a army is never truly done. A Steady stream of releases and update each year means you’ll always have a reason to adjust your force or try out a new model. It really doesn’t matter what force you collect you’ll inevitably want to add to it,

Chaos Space Marines - New Core Unit

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Warhammer 40,000 – I’m a big fan of the new Chaos Space Marine codex, the updated rules really bring the various traitor legions to life with decent rules and a pretty expansive crusade section. One of my favorite updates is to the Legionary data sheet, getting access to a psyker in every unit and having a cool new melee weapon helps to bring new life to a pretty bland unit.

This unit is painted to match a basic level force that I painted up a few years back.

For those of you interested in the new Kill Team this unit is available as a Kill Team and in order to play the game you need to pick up these fancy measuring tools which I also painted up recently.

Return to the Dark Tower

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Board Games - The 80’s were a crazy time for board games electronic components were all the rage and the big daddy of them all was Milton Bradley’s 1981 Dark Tower. Recently Restoration Games did a Kickstarter to bring this classic back into production with improved components and some amazing miniatures.

Horus Heresy - Ultramarines

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Warhammer 30,000 – It’s pretty amazing that Horus Heresy is now in plastic, the kits are really nice and so much easier to work with than the resin versions (real or knock-off). I imagine I’m going to be putting many of these boxes together in the future but for right now this is a simple scheme that matches up with an existing Ultramarines force.

Steamwatchers - Something Epic

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Board Games – Steamwatchers is a big box game with several expansions that add to the game play and introduce new elements. As a huge game these parts are pretty small but also pretty well detailed.

I don’t know that most people would spend time painting all these minis, but using a few techniques you can get some paint on them quickly to give the game a bit more life that the colored plastic provides.

The game sounds interesting, based on the info from the publisher:

Steamwatchers unfolds in a frozen Europe, broken by an ice age that followed a brutal water level increase. In those hostile conditions, nomadic clans struggle to survive with the regular and puzzling outbreak of steam columns everywhere on the continent. These columns are a testament to intense subterranean heat sources. They free earth from the grasp of ice and allow mankind to grow food once again. These oases of heat are vital for survival...and, unfortunately, only transient. To make things worse, a strange sickness spreads around them: The Bane. It affects both mind and body, and to this day, no cure has been found. Handling it is necessary to the survival of the clans.

Steamwatchers is a 2 to 5 player game in which you play as the leader of a nomadic clan. You will struggle over the geothermal resources of Europa in scenarios that last from 3 to 6 rounds. At the end of the last round of the chosen scenario, the winning clan is the one with the most geothermal resources (steam columns and farms), but a clan can claim victory before the end of the scenario by acquiring 10 geothermal resources.

Sea of Legends - Purple Box

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Board Games – Pirates are pretty cool, a cartoony looking pirate game with interesting character design and fun illustrations is even cooler. This is an expansion for Sea of Legends which you can read more about here.

The game looks really nice and the miniatures are big, detailed and fun. I have no idea if the game is actually good but according to the Kickstarter it funded in under six hours, which is pretty good I suppose.

Crisis At Steamfall

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Board Games - Crisis At Steamfall is an engine building board game where players attempt to set up a city that will level up their characters. I guess the game was Kickstarted and added an expansion during that process. You can read more about the game here.

Erune - Hero Quest with an App?

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Board Games – Prior to the rerelease of Hero Quest you’d get a similar dungeon crawl every now and then or replacement components to recreate the magic of the original. I guess using modern technology you can attempt to recreate that dungeon crawl with a narrated app. The concept is cool but as I mentioned in my post about Familiar Tale - app based games have the same issue of limited shelf life as the VHS games of old.

Apart from the app “issue” the game looks really cool and having a narrator solves that age old problem of needing a DM that doesn’t get to play with the party. I like the graphic design and box design for this game, everything has a place and they even thought of including boxes to keep track of your character throughput the campaign.

The description from the publisher is pretty good:

Enter the world of Erune and roam through its darkest dungeons... Experience epic quests, fight hordes of monsters and thwart the Master of Shadows' evil plans!

Erune is a Dungeon-Crawler for 1 to 5 players.

Thanks to the mix of a board game with a mobile app, you can talk with your game!

The Spirit of Erune is the privileged companion of your adventures. Guardian of the ancestral knowledge of the world of Erune, it resides in each and everything. Impartial, it does not take part in the conflict between the Adventurers and the Master of Shadows.

The Spirit of Erune is the narrator of your adventure
It allows you to speak with the characters you meet during your adventures.
It punctuates your quests with all kinds of events.
Beware! Your choices have consequences that influence your story!

The Spirit of Erune is a source of knowledge
It will answer all your questions about the rules of the game and the objects of the world of Erune down to the smallest detail.

The Spirit of Erune is luck
It unveils the treasures, the traps and the effects of items among thousands of possibilities!

The Spirit of Erune makes you evolve
It reveals your earnings when you level up, your quest objectives and the winner of the game.

The app is free on iOS and Android but requires an Erune Game Box to be used.

Townsfolk Tussle

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Board Games – I used to love Merry Melodies and the other vintage cartoons, they had such a unique look and feel that feels a bit lost in modern cartoons. Oh course the extreme cartoon violence isn’t there any more either so this game looks to capture some of that lost magic with a co-op boss battle.

I really enjoyed painting these models the cartoony style allowed for some mixing of contrast paint with some more traditional techniques to get the look i was going for.

Here’s the description from the publisher:

After the death of the beloved sheriff of Eureka Springs, Ruffians are coming in droves to take advantage of the defenseless town! It is up to you and your fellow townsfolk to wallop these troublemakers into oblivion. And who knows—if you play your cards right, you may just prove yourself worthy of becoming the new sheriff!

Townsfolk Tussle is a co-op boss battler for 2-5 players. In each game, your goal is to take down four unique Ruffians, each one tougher than the last! You'll build up your townsfolk with gear, explore Eureka Springs, and concoct unique strategies to take down even more unique hoodlums.

Batman - Gotham City Chronicles Expansions

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Board Games – Gotham City Chronicles looks like a really interesting game, you’d never know that by looking at the game box which has some really cool art on the front but zero information about what’s in the box on the back. It’s really frustrating and bad packaging design. If I pick up a game box I should be able to flip it over and at a minimum get a description of what in the box with a picture. Sure a nice clean fancy looking box is impressive but years down the road no one’s going to remember what this game is and won’t be able to quickly figure it out at a glance.

It’s a shame really because the miniatures are great and the inside of the boxes are well done, if not a bit space hungry. These expansions are the Batman Inc and Suicide Squad Expansions which are nice sets but to further add to my rant the characters pictured on the box art are not even included in the sets. I’m sure they appear in another box but putting Harley and Dick on the covers when they’re not in the box is a bit annoying.

Veiled Fate

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Board Games – I love when a game has a unique look. Great illustrations really help to define and set the tone for a game. Even if a game isn’t great, if I like the art style I’ll try and find a way to get it to the table more often just to enjoy the art.

Veiled Fate looks like one of those games. The art style is unique and the miniatures try their best to reflect that look.

Here’s the description from the publisher:

Play as a divine being who has sired a demigod in the realm of humankind. The identity of your lineage is known only to you. Use positional play to complete quests—and influence fate to ensure the outcome is in your favor. Strike the perfect balance of misdirection and mischief to capture the throne.

There are 9 Demigods. At the beginning of the game, each player is secretly assigned one Demigod as their offspring. When the game begins, however, players may control the actions of any Demigod, not just their own. Through strategic play, special powers, and secret voting, players must aid their Demigod in gaining Renown. But be careful! Giving away your lineage too soon may cause the other players to work together toward your Demigod’s demise.

On their turn, players will have 2 actions with which to send Demigods on quests. Each Quest can result in 2 different ways, which the gods influence with secret voting cards called Fate Cards. When a Quest is completed, the Fate cards are revealed and the winning side of the card is resolved, giving some Demigods Renown and taking it from others. A player wins if their Demigod has the most Renown at the end of 3 rounds called ages, and that Demigod becomes the heir to the throne.

Part social deduction, part strategy, Veiled Fate pits wit against wit. Every move is a new clue to discovering the true lineage of your opponents. Can you foil carefully laid plans, while cementing your own path to victory?

Familiar Tale - There's an App for That

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Board Games – I don’t know how I feel about combining apps with board games, part of the appeal of a good board game is having everything in one box that you can pick and play after reading through the rules. Age doesn’t matter as everything you need is in the box. When you introduce a media component to the game you’re eventually going to lose a means to access that media. Remember the VHS supported games, DVD or CD guided games, any of these app games that used a no longer supported operating system? I’m not against innovation and it’s cool that publishers are looking at ways to push the definition of where a board game ends and video game begins.

Familiar Tale is on of these app supported games by Plaid Hat Games. The premise seems fun and the miniatures are really cool. You do need to download an app in order to play so there’s that.

Here’s the description from the publisher:

Familiar Tales is a co-operative, deck-building, fantasy adventure for 1-4 players. It's an exciting narrative game in which players take on the roles of a wizard's familiars, entrusted with saving and raising a displaced princess. They must keep her safe from the evil forces that would see her dead, but when it comes to children, it is not enough to merely survive! The familiars know that every choice they make will affect the young one in their care. If they are victorious and the throne is reclaimed, what kind of woman will sit upon it?

Players will explore a massive world through the pages of a fantastical story book filled with branching paths and memorable characters. Fight off enemies, and explore the many nooks and crannies of an enchanted world. Experience a professionally narrated, fully scored, decade-spanning fantasy epic. Easily downloadable for both Mac and Windows, this browser-based app is required to play Familiar Tales. Think of it as an automated game master and storyteller! The app also features a digital, searchable rulebook.

An innovative card play system allows players to level up their familiars by building and customizing their skill decks. Players will use their skill cards to perform all manner of exciting actions throughout their campaign.

Another Bug Hunt?

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Board Games - Aliens seems to have had quite a few games in the market lately. This latest one to cross my table is Alien Bug Hunt by Upper Deck Games. From what I’ve been told the game is ok, but feels a bit like you’re stuck on rails based on the character you choose.

The info from the publisher doesn’t do much to elaborate on gameplay:

Your challenge in Aliens: Bug Hunt is to complete the mission and evacuate the complex because these xenomorphs converging from every direction are heartless, smart, relentless, and hungry.

Pick your favorite character from the movie Aliens, each with a unique ability. Every role is critical as players rely on each other to cover their six and make it out alive. The complex is comprised of thirty different location tiles to create different challenges. Private Hudson might ask whether this is a stand-up fight or just another bug hunt; the real question is who's hunting who?