Tag: Action Points

Action Points are a mechanic typically used in turn-based games. Players receive a number of action points and use those points to perform different actions on their turns. This is a common mechanic in games.

Zombie 15′

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Zombie 15′

Zombie 15′

In an apocalyptic world in which everyone over the age of 18 has turned into a bloodthirsty, flesh-hungry zombie and most youngsters have been served as meat to quell their elders’ appetite, a small team of kids and teenagers tries to survive on their own. As part of that small group of survivors, you must unite to escape the relentless horde of undead. Run across town to find shelter or food, hold a strategic position, meet with new survivors, and discover the truth about this terrible and mysterious disease!

Zombie 15′ is a frantic, scenario-based survival game in which time is scarce and cooperation is key. The game features easy rules but real choices to be made as quickly as possible if you don’t want to get overwhelmed by zombies!

Zombie 15′ features a team of 15-year-old teenagers; a 15-minute soundtrack to give each game its tempo; a 15-scenario, progressive campaign; and much more than just 15 zombies…

Game Mechanics:

  • Action Points
  • Cooperative
  • Grid Movement

Game Specifications:

  • 2 – 4 Players
  • ~15 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.22

Zombicide: Night of the Living Dead

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Zombicide: Night of the Living Dead

Zombicide: Night of the Living Dead

Night of the Living Dead: A Zombicide Game is a standalone game in the Zombicide franchise based on the George A. Romero movie of the same name.

In Night of the Living Dead: A Zombicide Game, players take on the role of the movie’s main characters, holed up in an isolated house while the dead come to life all around them. The original movie sees the few survivors hunkering for safety in the house as the ghouls (as they’re called in the film) pose a continuous threat from outside. It’s a tense psychological thriller full of gritty moods and dark themes, but the game lets the survivors take the fight to the hordes of the undead. The game uses standard Zombicide mechanics.

There are two variants included in the game: Romero – where the characters have the attributes from the original movie and Zombicide: where the movie characters have had their attributes amped up to meet the Zombicide world – but always have the chance of regressing to their original Romero character.

Game Mechanics:

  • Action Points
  • Campaign
  • Cooperative
  • Dice Rolling

Game Specifications:

  • 1 – 6 Players
  • ~60 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.43

Zombicide: 2nd Edition

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Zombicide: 2nd Edition

Zombicide: 2nd Edition

Zombicide, the board game, has taken the world by storm with over two million copies sold since its release in 2012 and spawning a cult franchise of cooperative zombie slaying all over the world. In Zombicide, zombies are controlled by the game, while players take on the role of survivors who must co-operate in order to survive and thrive in a world overrun by the bloodthirsty undead. Find guns and gear to take the fight to the zombies through 25 different scenarios linked by a branching story as you pick your way through an infested city.

Zombicide (2nd Edition) features refined and streamlined rules, including updates to target priority for ranged attacks, interactions with doors, and vehicle mechanisms. A new dark zone feature, a zone that hides zombies from survivor’s attacks, has been added as well. Zombicide (2nd Edition) will include new components and miniatures as well, including plastic dashboards and new child survivors. Returning players will be able to use their existing collection from previous Zombicide releases as well.

Game Mechanics:

  • Action Points
  • Campaign
  • Cooperative
  • Dice Rolling

Game Specifications:

  • 1 – 6 Players
  • ~60 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.46

Zombicide

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Zombicide

Zombicide

Zombicide is a collaborative game in which players take the role of a survivor – each with unique abilities – and harness both their skills and the power of teamwork against the hordes of unthinking undead! Zombies are predictable, stupid but deadly, controlled by simple rules and a deck of cards. Unfortunately for you, there are a LOT more zombies than you have bullets.

Find weapons, kill zombies. The more zombies you kill, the more skilled you get; the more skilled you get, the more zombies appear. The only way out is zombicide!

Play ten scenarios on different maps made from the included modular map tiles, download new scenarios from the designer’s website, or create your own!

Game Mechanics:

  • Action Points
  • Campaign
  • Cooperative
  • Dice Rolling
  • Grid Movement
  • Hand Managment
  • Player Elimination

Game Specifications:

  • 1 – 6 Players
  • ~60 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.54

World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King

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World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King

World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King

In World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King, players journey to the frozen continent of Northrend to face the armies of the Lich King. This “Pandemic System” game showcases familiar mechanisms and gameplay, now tweaked to embrace the setting of the Wrath of the Lich King. Forts, temples, battlegrounds, and more populate the game board as you and your fellow heroes journey across the cold landscape. Along the way, you’ll set up strongholds, complete quests, and do battle with legions of undead.

In more detail, players team up as legendary heroes from across Azeroth, each with their own unique abilities to help in and out of combat. Heroes such as Thrall, Warchief of the Horde; Varian Wrynn, King of Stormwind; Sylvanas Windrunner, Banshee Queen of the Forsaken; and many more are at your fingertips. As the Scourge grows, more undead will populate the board. Throw dice as you enter into battle against the hordes of ghouls and ferocious abominations, using hero cards to add power to your attacks, block incoming assaults, heal wounds, take mounts to far off spaces, and so much more.

As you fight your way to the Lich King, all manner of dark magic and terrible creatures under his control need to be neutralized. This comes in the form of quests, a brand-new mechanism that can be completed as a team through a combination of dice rolls and the hero cards at your disposal. However, each quest comes with its own dangers and hindrances. Complete these quests to move closer to the final assault on Icecrown Citadel, where the Lich King himself resides.

Game Mechanics:

  • Action Points
  • Cooperative
  • Hand Management
  • Set Collection
  • Trading

Game Specifications:

  • 1 – 5 Players
  • 45 – 60 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.18

Wonder Book

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Wonder Book

Wonder Book

Oniria — the world of an ancient dragon civilization. Tales describe the land as an idyllic paradise filled with marvelous dragon-made wonders and surrounded by a flourishing wilderness. The only portal to that world is the Wonder Book, an ancient tome locked away in an abandoned tower. It sleeps, covered in dust, awaiting the one thing it desires most: you.

Wonder Book is a pop-up game for 1-4 players in which each player takes the role of a teenage kid in a group of adventurous friends. This is a co-operative game in which you all win or lose as a team.

The game is split into six consecutive scenarios (“chapters”), each composed of a specific deck of pre-sorted cards that contain the rules, the story, and the challenges you have to face. Each chapter has you explore a new part of the interactive 3D cardboard pop-up book and reveals more about the world in which your adventure is set.

Starting with the first card of the chapter deck, the story unfolds until you reach a goal card. These cards show a goal that must be achieved to proceed and explain how the players’ and enemies’ turns take place. Each hero can perform three actions per turn, including moving and fighting, using their individual skills, collecting sparks of magic (used to perform special actions), and interacting with cards and pop-ups. Once all heroes have taken their turn, a Wyrm card determines how the enemies will respond by moving, attacking, spawning, or doing something unexpected.

The basic mechanisms are easy to grasp, but the game keeps changing as each scenario offers different things to do. You will find yourself exploring, fighting bosses, solving riddles, playing little minigames, looking for clues…anything is possible during the story!

Game Mechanics:

  • Action Points
  • Campaign
  • Cooperative
  • Dice Rolling
  • Move Through Deck
  • Narrative Choice

Game Specifications:

  • 1 – 4 Players
  • 60 – 90 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.11

Wise Guys

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Wise Guys

Wise Guys

Wise Guys is a quick-to-learn, cutthroat, area-control board game in which you play as one of four rival gangs seeking to strike it rich as “Rum Runners” on the rough streets of Chicago at the height of the roaring 20s.

Each turn, players wheel, deal, talk, and fight to control locations where they buy and sell alcohol, help politicians get elected, and get help in return or double-cross rival gangs. Negotiate, threaten, and ally with rival gangs when it serves your needs, but be wary of the inevitable knife in the back…

Over six rounds, players take turns driving to locations in the city represented by the grid of cards at the center of the board. Different locations provide access to materials, cash, or clout that the player’s gang members can “acquire” through trade, earning profit from property within their territory or by exploiting parts of the city under the control of a rival gang. All players must maintain a certain discretion as selling too much in one round will draw unwanted attention or else saturate the city in liquor — and your fellow mafioso won’t be too happy about lost profits.

The gang with the most cash at the end of the game wins.

Game Mechanics:

  • Action Points
  • Area Control
  • Dice Rolling
  • Negotiation
  • Trading
  • Worker Placement

Game Specifications:

  • 3 – 4 Players
  • ~90 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.00

Vigilante

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Vigilante

Vigilante

In Vigilante, you lead a team of heroes to fight back a swarm of villains running free in the city. Vigilante brings social deduction, action management, and tableau-building into a unique combination that leaves you with many different paths to take to accomplish your goals, new strategies and synergies between heroes, and a lot of tension!

There are a variety of scenarios (game modes) depending on player preferences. The game plays in rounds, where players have 4 actions to either fight (and imprison) villains, recruit new heroes, search for equipment and other helpful cards, or heal. Afterwards, players secretly roll their dice and contribute one of them, which sometimes will help the group but usually hinders them.

In Brought to Justice, each player gets a secret role. ‘Good’ players represent the majority and must imprison 7 villains per good player before the end of the game (i.e. if there are 2 Good players, they need a combined total of 14). ‘Evil’ players are trying to foil their plans, and Neutral players have independent missions which generally throw a little chaos into the mix.

Shifting Allegiances takes Brought to Justice and creates even more uncertainty by only guaranteeing one ‘Good’ player, while the rest of the mix could be any combination of ‘Good’, ‘Evil’, or ‘Neutral’ players. Even though there’s a possibility that all players are good, it will take time to gain each other’s trust, and you could end up sabotaging your own victory!

Game Mechanics:

  • Action Points
  • Deck Building
  • Deduction
  • Hidden Roles
  • Storytelling
  • Team Based

Game Specifications:

  • 3 – 5 Players
  • 90 – 120 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.00

Via Nebula

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Via Nebula

Via Nebula

Crafters, builders and carriers — your help is needed to dispel the mists of Nebula! The people of the valley will reward you handsomely if you harvest and exploit our many resources, open paths through the mists, and help our settlers build new structures. Cooperate temporarily with other builders in order to create paths and share goods, but do not forget your own objectives. Will you have a statue erected in your honor on the Nebula City plaza?

A game of Via Nebula starts with a board showing a hexagonal grid, some production sites with a few available resources on them (wood, stone, wheat, and pigs), building sites in various areas scattered over the whole board, and a lot of mist.

Turn after turn, players have two actions at their disposal from these options: They may clear the mist of a hex to create new paths of transportation, open new production sites, open a building site in a city, carry resources from any production site to their own building sites, and, of course, achieve a construction. Resources and paths through the mist may be used by all the players. This initially induces a kind of cooperation, but eventually other players will take advantage of your actions!

To achieve a construction, you fulfill a contract on one of your cards. You start the game with two contracts, and four more contracts are available for all players to see and use on a first come, first served basis — and that’s where the cooperation abruptly stops. Additionally, most contracts have special powers that are triggered on completion.

The game ends when a player finishes a fifth building. Opponents each take two final actions, then players score based on the number of cleared hexes and opened production sites and the point value of their contracts, with a bonus for the player who ended the game.

Game Mechanics:

  • Action Points
  • Network Building
  • Pick-Up and Deliver

Game Specifications:

  • 2 – 4 Players
  • 45 – 60 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.22

Valor & Villainy

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Valor & Villainy

Valor & Villainy

The beloved king Shapiro has perished in a freak catapult accident, but not before his most suspiciously named and irrefutably trusted adviser, Evil Wizard Mordak, claimed credit for his “murder” and legged it through a hastily conjured portal to the WORLD OF ETERNAL AND UNCARING DARKNESS. Mordak promised the kingdom he’d return in 8 days with semi-phenomenal cosmic powers to take his rightful seat upon Shapiro’s ruined throne! A lofty promise for an amateur Wizard…

Valor & Villainy: Minions of Mordak is a one vs many roleplaying board game for 2-6 players. One of you plays as the comically evil wizard, Mordak, and the rest form a band of Allies called the “Order without Borders”, who must halt his path of destruction! The game focuses on a strong and playful theme, capturing the best parts of a classic roleplaying game and boiling it into a one time play session. Every player will appreciate satisfying character progression. Spending Experience Points their team has earned and locating powerful Treasures to make their characters mightier with every passing turn!

Mordak has vanished into the WORLD OF ETERNAL AND UNCARING DARKNESS! This player will have a lot of fun, plotting secrets in the dark and throwing despair into the Allies’ plans in order to grow in power. They must hold nothing back, drawing upon all of their cunning and evil genius to win the game for themselves!

The Allies must locate three Ancient Shrines hidden among the land. For each of these Shrines diminishes Mordak’s power. Finding them all will reveal his location and commence a final battle for victory. They can explore the map at their own pace, however they will learn they must balance their ambitions with what they can handle! Exploring too quickly will fuel Mordak with threats the game-board has to offer, yet doddling will allow him the time to grow his cosmic powers! Ultimately the winner of the game is the victor of the final showdown between the Allies and their nemesis Mordak! Only the party which is better prepared and utilizes superior tactics will win the day!

Game Mechanics:

  • Action Points
  • Dice Rolling
  • Grid Movement
  • Hand Management
  • Role Playing
  • Team Based

Game Specifications:

  • 2 – 6 Players
  • 90 – 150 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.26