Tag: Area Control

When playing games with an Area Control aspect, players are typically rewarded for controlling the majority of a particular space.

Tyrants of the Underdark

| OTSG Staff
Tyrants of the Underdark

Tyrants of the Underdark

Tyrants of the Underdark is a territory control game with a deck-building element.

Each player leads a house of Drow in a section of the Underdark below the Sword Coast. The Drow house is represented by a deck of cards, with each card being a minion in that player’s deck. Each minion belongs to one of five aspects of Drow society, and those aspects correspond to different strategies in the game, e.g., malice minions excel at assassinating opponents’ troops, while ambition minions are best at recruiting additional minions and promoting minions to your “inner circle”, which is a special zone that increases their value at the end of the game.

When you set up the game, you create an 80-card deck by shuffling two 40-card half-decks together, with the half-decks being Drow, Dragons, Demons, and Elementals.

A central marketplace has new minions that can be recruited through influence, one of two resources in the game; purchased cards are placed in your discard pile, then shuffled together with other cards in your deck when needed. The other resource is power, which allows you to place troops on the game board, expand your forces across the map of the Underdark, manipulate happenings in the city, and assassinate enemy troops.

Players gain points by controlling sites, recruiting valuable minions, promoting minions to your inner circle, and assassinating troops, and whoever ends the game with the most points wins.

Game Mechanics:

  • Area Control
  • Deck Building

Game Specifications:

  • 2 – 4 Players
  • ~60 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.55

Tidal Blades: Banner Festival

| OTSG Staff
Tidal Blades: Banner Festival

Tidal Blades: Banner Festival

Flags of all colors dance in the wind as Navirians converge to Trawl for the long-awaited Banner Festival.

Generate the most profits for your trading house by selling goods, befriending the right suppliers, and making bets at the watercraft race. Opportunities abound in the floating market, but only the keenest trader will prevail!

  • Each turn, aim to play the highest, mid, or lowest Merchandise card to unlock different actions.
  • Utilize multi-use cards in dynamic trick-taking bouts to gain an advantage over your rival merchants.
  • There are numerous paths to victory, but reading your opponents and timing your moves is the key to success!

All set in the glorious world of Tidal Blades created by Mr. Cuddington.

Game Mechanics:

  • Area Control
  • Hand Managment

Game Specifications:

  • 2 – 5 Players
  • 30 – 45 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.00

Super Fantasy Brawl

| OTSG Staff
Super Fantasy Brawl

Super Fantasy Brawl

In the land of Fabulosa, powerful magics have rendered war obsolete. With nothing else to compete for, the bored populace has turned to the Super Brawl for entertainment. These same powerful magics are now used to reach back into the timelines to pluck out the finest warriors from every civilization in order to compete against each other in the greatest entertainment spectacle ever staged.

Super Fantasy Brawl is a fun, fast-paced competitive miniatures board game. Players select a team of three champions and combine their unique action cards to create a synergistic action deck. The game is faction-free, so players have their choice of any combination of champions they wish. Each turn, the players use their hand of action cards to maneuver, attack, displace enemies, and claim objectives to score victory points.

The objectives in Super Fantasy Brawl are only scored at the beginning of a players’ turn, ensuring that you always get a chance to disrupt your enemy’s plans and position your champions to score the objective for yourself. This tactical to-and-fro continues until one player reaches the victory point threshold, declaring themselves the winner and advancing towards victory in the Super Brawl tournament!

Super Fantasy Brawl will also offer a 2v2 mode for 4 players to clash in an all-out melee mashup!

Game Mechanics:

  • Area Control
  • Deck Building
  • Grid Movement
  • Hand Management
  • Team Based
  • Wargame

Game Specifications:

  • 2 – 4 Players
  • 30 – 40 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.28

Sons of Anarchy: Men of Mayhem

| OTSG Staff
Sons of Anarchy: Men of Mayhem

Sons of Anarchy: Men of Mayhem

Based on the hit TV series, in Sons of Anarchy: Men of Mayhem players take the role of rival gangs out to control territory, accumulate contraband and reap the monetary rewards of illegal enterprise.

With each turn gangs must attempt to control a range of sites by assigning gang members and resources to claiming, defending and fighting for money, contraband and guns. However, other players can challenge the right for territory, which will lead to conflict! Negotiate, threaten and ally with rival gangs when it serves your needs, but be wary of the inevitable knife in the back. This game is about making and breaking alliances, and only the gang with the most money at the end of six rounds wins.

Game Mechanics:

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

Game Specifications:

  • 3 – 4 Players
  • ~90 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.56

Sonora

| OTSG Staff
Sonora

Sonora

You have entered the Sonoran Desert, a place of vast beauty. Technicolor sunsets pop out over vistas revealing deep canyons, trickling tributaries, and ancient pueblo cliff dwellings. Immerse yourself in the secrets of the desert in a flick-and-write game in which cunning and dexterity meet.

In Sonora, players flick wooden discs onto a game board representative of different vibrant landscapes across the Sonoran sands. Each area encompasses a different unique game, so skillful aim is required to play in the region of a player’s choosing and score points on your dry-erase sheet! But watch out for other players eager to bump discs to score points for themselves.

Game Mechanics:

  • Action Points
  • Area Control
  • Dexterity
  • Networker Building
  • Paper and Pencil
  • Set Collection

Game Specifications:

  • 1 – 4 Players
  • 30 – 45 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.32

Smash Up: The Big Geeky Box

| OTSG Staff
Smash Up: The Big Geeky Box

Smash Up: The Big Geeky Box

Smash Up: The Big Geeky Box is a storage case for Smash Up cards that also contains a single faction deck for the game: “The Geeks”, based on the characters and shows on the online Geek and Sundry channel, including TableTop.

Game Mechanics:

  • Area Control
  • Hand Management
  • Take That

Game Specifications:

  • 2 – 4 Players
  • ~45 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.32

Small World of Warcraft

| OTSG Staff
Small World of Warcraft

Small World of Warcraft

In Small World of Warcraft, players vie for conquest and control of a world that is simply too small to accommodate everybody.

Small World of Warcraft is set on the fantasy world of Azeroth, where the races of the Alliance and the Horde — including Orcs, Dwarves, Trolls, and Worgen — clash in a world-consuming conflict. In the game, players choose combinations of special powers and races from the Warcraft universe, such as Portal Mage Pandarens or Herbalist Goblins, and vie for control of Azeroth. To help them achieve dominance, players will occupy legendary terrains and seek control of powerful artifacts. However, all empires must eventually fall, so players need to be ready to put an overextended race into a state of “decline” and lead a new one to rule Azeroth.

In more detail, on each turn either you use the multiple tiles of your chosen fantasy race to (normally) occupy adjacent territories, possibly defeating weaker enemy races along the way, or you give up on your race and let it go into decline. A race in decline is designated by flipping the tiles over to their black-and-white side. At the start of the game or after you go into decline, you choose a new race/power combination at the start of your turn, with the 16 races and 20 powers being paired randomly each game.

At the end of your turn, you score one coin for each territory your races occupy. You may have one active race and one race in decline on the board at the same time. Your occupation total can vary depending on the special abilities of your race and the territories they occupy. After the final round, the player with the most coins wins.

Game Mechanics:

  • Area Control
  • Area Movement
  • Dice Rolling
  • Team Based

Game Specifications:

  • 2 – 5 Players
  • 40 – 80 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.50

Small World

| OTSG Staff
Small World

Small World

In Small World, players vie for conquest and control of a world that is simply too small to accommodate them all.

Designed by Philippe Keyaerts as a fantasy follow-up to his award-winning Vinci, Small World is inhabited by a zany cast of characters such as dwarves, wizards, amazons, giants, orcs, and even humans, who use their troops to occupy territory and conquer adjacent lands in order to push the other races off the face of the earth.

Picking the right combination from the 14 different fantasy races and 20 unique special powers, players rush to expand their empires – often at the expense of weaker neighbors. Yet they must also know when to push their own over-extended civilization into decline and ride a new one to victory!

On each turn, you either use the multiple tiles of your chosen race (type of creatures) to occupy adjacent (normally) territories – possibly defeating weaker enemy races along the way, or you give up on your race letting it go “into decline”. A race in decline is designated by flipping the tiles over to their black-and-white side.

At the end of your turn, you score one point (coin) for each territory your races occupy. You may have one active race and one race in decline on the board at the same time. Your occupation total can vary depending on the special abilities of your race and the territories they occupy. After the final round, the player with the most coins wins.

Game Mechanics:

  • Area Control
  • Area Movement
  • Dice Rolling

Game Specifications:

  • 2 – 5 Players
  • 40 – 80 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.35

Risk: Call of Duty Zombies

| OTSG Staff
Risk: Call of Duty Zombies

Risk: Call of Duty Zombies

The legendary zombie demolition crew is back in a classic game of strategic conquest. This custom RISK edition features factions led by “Tank” Dempsey, Edward Richtofen, Takeo Masaki, and Nikolai Belinski as they vie for control over familiar maps. Use Pack-a-Punch cards to gain an advantage against opponents and fend off wave after wave of zombie threats. Experience one of the first Call of Duty table top games that combine the legendary atmosphere of the license with the strategic competition of RISK.

Game Mechanics:

  • Area Control
  • Dice Rolling

Game Specifications:

  • 2 – 5 Players
  • 30 – 120 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.00

Renature

| OTSG Staff
Renature

Renature

Renature is a majority game with dominoes for 2-4 players.

Each player gets a board with large pieces of wood in the form of turf, bushes, pines and oaks. These plants are used for the majorities on the large valley board and are available in a neutral color and in the respective player color. In addition, each player gets a stack of dominoes with two out of ten animal motifs on each of them.

On your turn, place one of the three dominoes in your hand on two brook spaces of the valley board. Of course, the domino must be adjacent to another domino that shows the same animal. If the placed domino borders a free space of a brown area, you can decide whether a tuft of grass or any other of your plants should be placed on that space. Tufts of turf have a value of 1, bushes of 2, pines of 3 and oaks of 4. After placing the plant, you score points for it and every plant piece that is already in this brown area and has the same or a lower value.

Once a brown area is framed with dominoes, the majority is scored and the player with the highest total plant value in the area gets the points that are printed as a large number on that area’s flower token. Whoever has the second highest value gets the lower number. Two things make this especially tricky: The neutral pieces count as their own color and not among the majority of the player who has used them. Also, if colors are tied, they a treated as though they are not present at all in the area. After the area has been scored, the player who framed the area receives its flower token, which will give them extra points at game end.

In the course of the game, you may run out of plants, but these can be bought back from the game board with clouds. Clouds can also be used to buy another turn and to appoint a new joker animal. This animal then counts as all animals and makes it easier to put on. At the end of a player’s turn, a domino is drawn and it is the next player’s turn.

Once all players have run out of dominoes, the game ends with a final scoring.

Game Mechanics:

  • Area Control
  • Hand Management
  • Tile Placement

Game Specifications:

  • 2 – 4 Players
  • 45 – 60 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.20