Tag: Variable Player Powers

Best of the West

| T3d-1978

Best of the West is an open-world game set in the Wild West! It features asymmetrical gameplay where you can go it alone as a Pioneer or join up with the co-op Bandit Gang. Since the game is heavily player vs player, it requires both Pioneers and Bandits in similar numbers. A single Round consists of the Pioneer turns (rotating player order) and then Bandit Gang’s turn (any order). Either the Bandit Gang team or the Pioneer with the highest Reputation at the end of 25 Rounds wins the game.

For Pioneers, Reputation is mostly earned by doing a job (Panning or Mining for Gold, Herding Livestock, Trapping for Furs). For Bandits, Reputation is primarily gained by robbing the Pioneers. Additional cash and Reputation can be earned by robbing the Train, Saloon, and Bank or by performing a Jailbreak. Cash allows you to load up with Weapons, Items, and Pets. Power Cards that grant extra abilities, upgrades, and utility bonuses can be collected around the map at the Indian Village, Saloon, and Ghost Town.

Pioneers move using Movement Cards and can also ride the Train that travels around the map every Round. Bandits move either by using Movement Cards or Ambush Cards. Ambush Cards allow a Bandit to secretly hide on a space on the board. Battling is primarily dice-based, but also includes Power Cards and character abilities.

Game Mechanics:

  • Bribery
  • Dice Rolling
  • Hidden Movement
  • Team Based
  • Variable Player Powers

Game Specifications:

  • 2 – 6 Players
  • 120 – 180 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 4.00

Barrage

| T3d-1978

In the dystopic 1930s, the industrial revolution pushed the exploitation of fossil-based resources to the limit, and now the only thing powerful enough to quench the thirst for power of the massive machines and of the unstoppable engineering progress is the unlimited hydroelectric energy provided by the rivers.

Barrage is a resource management strategic game in which players compete to build their majestic dams, raise them to increase their storing capacity, and deliver all the potential power through pressure tunnels connected to the energy turbines of their powerhouses.

Each player represents one of the four international companies who are gathering machinery, innovative patents and brilliant engineers to claim the best locations to collect and exploit the water of a contested Alpine region crossed by rivers.

Barrage includes two innovative and challenging mechanisms. First, the players must carefully plan their actions and handle their machinery, since both their action tokens and resources are stored on a Construction Wheel and will only be available after a full turn of the wheel. The better you manage your wheel, the earlier your resources and actions come back to you.

Second, the water flow on the rivers depicted on the board is a shared and contested resource. Players have to intercept and store as much of the water as they can, build dams (upstream dams are expensive but can block part of the water before it reaches the downstream dams), raise the dams to increase their capacity, and build long tunnels to channel the water to their powerhouses. Water is never consumed — its flow is just used to produce energy —, it is instead released back to the rivers, so you have to strategically place your dams to recover the water diverted by you and the other players.

Over five rounds, the players must fulfill power requirements represented by a common competitive power track and meet specific requests of personal contracts. At the same time, by placing a limited number of engineers, they attempt to enhance their machinery to acquire new and more efficient construction actions and to build and activate special unique-effect buildings to forward their own developing strategy.

Game Mechanics:

  • Economic
  • Network Building
  • Solo / Solitaire Game
  • Variable Player Powers
  • Worker Placement

Game Specifications:

  • 1 – 4 Players
  • 60 – 120 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 4.12

Arkham Horror: The Card Game

| T3d-1978

Something evil stirs in Arkham, and only you can stop it. Blurring the traditional lines between role-playing and card game experiences, Arkham Horror: The Card Game is a Living Card Game of Lovecraftian mystery, monsters, and madness!

In the game, you and your friend (or up to three friends with two Core Sets) become characters within the quiet New England town of Arkham. You have your talents, sure, but you also have your flaws. Perhaps you’ve dabbled a little too much in the writings of the Necronomicon, and its words continue to haunt you. Perhaps you feel compelled to cover up any signs of otherworldly evils, hampering your own investigations in order to protect the quiet confidence of the greater population. Perhaps you’ll be scarred by your encounters with a ghoulish cult.

No matter what compels you, no matter what haunts you, you’ll find both your strengths and weaknesses reflected in your custom deck of cards, and these cards will be your resources as you work with your friends to unravel the world’s most terrifying mysteries.

Each of your adventures in Arkham Horror LCG carries you deeper into mystery. You’ll find cultists and foul rituals. You’ll find haunted houses and strange creatures. And you may find signs of the Ancient Ones straining against the barriers to our world…

The basic mode of play in Arkham LCG is not the adventure, but the campaign. You might be scarred by your adventures, your sanity may be strained, and you may alter Arkham’s landscape, burning buildings to the ground. All your choices and actions have consequences that reach far beyond the immediate resolution of the scenario at hand—and your actions may earn you valuable experience with which you can better prepare yourself for the adventures that still lie before you.

Game Mechanics:

  • Campaign
  • Cooperative
  • Deck Building
  • Hand Management
  • Limited Communication
  • Push Your Luck
  • Role Playing
  • Solo / Solitaire Game
  • Variable Player Powers

Game Specifications:

  • 1 – 4 Players
  • 60 – 120 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 3.55

Arkham Horror

| T3d-1978

The year is 1926, and it is the height of the Roaring Twenties. Flappers dance till dawn in smoke-filled speakeasies, drinking alcohol supplied by rum runners and the mob. It’s a celebration to end all celebrations in the aftermath of the War to End All Wars.

Yet a dark shadow grows in the city of Arkham. Alien entities known as Ancient Ones lurk in the emptiness beyond space and time, writhing at the thresholds between worlds. Occult rituals must be stopped and alien creatures destroyed before the Ancient Ones make our world their ruined dominion.

Only a handful of investigators stand against the Arkham Horror. Will they prevail?

Arkham Horror (Third Edition) is a cooperative board game for one to six players who take on the roles of investigators trying to rid the world of eldritch beings known as Ancient Ones. Based on the works of H.P. Lovecraft, players will have to gather clues, defeat terrifying monsters, and find tools and allies if they are to stand any chance of defeating the creatures that dwell just beyond the veil of our reality.

Game Mechanics:

  • Cooperative
  • Dice Rolling
  • Modular Board
  • Variable Player Powers

Game Specifications:

  • 1 – 6 Players
  • 120 – 180 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 3.36

Cosmic Frog

| T3d-1978

Cosmic Frog is a game of collection, combat, and theft on a planetary scale. Each player controls a two-mile-tall, immortal, invulnerable frog-like creature that exists solely to gather terrain from the Shards of Aeth, the fragments of a long-ago shattered world. The First Ones seek to use the lands from the Shards to reconstruct the world of Aeth, and your frogs are their terrain harvesters.

At the start of the game, your frogs descend from the Aether, the cosmic sea between the worlds, onto a terrain-rich Shard of Aeth. Once on the Shard, you harvest land and store it in your massive gullet. When your gullet is sufficiently full, you leap into the Aether and disgorge your gullet contents into your inter-dimensional vault for permanent storage, then return to the Shard to collect more land. Although your frogs’ collective mission is to gather as much land as possible for the First Ones, your private goal is to prove yourself to be the greatest of their harvesters by delivering to them the most valuable vault. To do this, you have to fill your vault strategically in a manner that both maximizes linear sets of identical lands and maximizes the diversity of lands in your vault at the end of the game.

Throughout the game, you’re free to keep to yourself and focus on harvesting at your own pace…or you may attack other frogs and try to take lands directly from their gullets. You may even raid another frog’s vault and steal the lands they have gathered if they have been knocked into the dreaded Outer Dimensions. As you are all immortal and invulnerable, no frog is ever wounded or killed — just irritated and inconvenienced.

But don’t ever get too comfortable with your carefully crafted plans as the Aether is a chaotic and unstable place. Waves of Aether Flux will prompt you to mutate, and you may have to change your strategy in accordance with your new powers. And Splinters of Aeth, tiny slivers of the old world that swirl madly about in the Aether, will periodically fall from their orbit and crash into the Shard, destroying large areas of terrain and blasting apart the very Shard itself!

The game ends when the Shard is stripped of all harvestable land or when a Splinter shatters it. When the game ends, the player with the highest valued vault wins, and the frogs move to the next Shard to gather more land for the First Ones…

Game Mechanics:

  • Dice Rolling
  • Pattern Building
  • Pick-Up and Deliver
  • Set Collection
  • Take That
  • Tile Placement
  • Variable Player Powers

Game Specifications:

  • 2 – 6 Players
  • 45 – 90 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 3.06

Caylus 1303

| T3d-1978

A classic game is back! As one of the first worker placement games, Caylus stands among the true board game classics of the 2000s. The original designers’ team, together with the Space Cowboys, have now created a revamped version!

The mechanisms of Caylus 1303 have been streamlined and modernized for an intense and shorter game. Don’t be fooled, though, as the game has kept both its depth and ease of play while a lot of new features have been added:

  • Variability of the starting position for a virtual infinity of possibilities. No more pre-set strategies!
  • Characters with special abilities, with a wavering loyalty, offer their services to the players.
  • And of course, brand new graphics!

The King calls you again, so it’s time to go back to Caylus!

Game Mechanics:

  • Open Drafting
  • Take That
  • Tile Placement
  • Variable Player Powers
  • Variable Set-up
  • Worker Placement

Game Specifications:

  • 2 – 5 Players
  • 60 – 90 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.88

Ankh: Gods of Egypt 🟡

| T3d-1978

Play as a god of ancient Egypt, competing to survive as society begins to forget the old ways, so that only you and your followers remain.

Build caravans, summon monsters, and convert followers in your quest to reign supreme in Ankh: Gods of Egypt. Deities, monsters, and the people of ancient Egypt have been lovingly reimagined and interpreted in beautiful illustrations and detailed miniatures, and players will truly feel like gods as they shake the very foundations of Egypt. All gameplay in Ankh, including combat, is streamlined and non-random. Compete and win solely on your godly wits alone.

Game Mechanics:

  • Area Majority / Influence
  • Auction: Sealed Bid
  • Grid Movement
  • Player Elimination
  • Race
  • Variable Player Powers

Game Specifications:

  • 2 – 5 Players
  • ~90 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 3.12

Crusaders: Thy Will Be Done

| T3d-1978

Move your knights, erect buildings, and go crusading to spread the influence of your Order. When the Orders get too strong, King Philip will become nervous and disband all Templar orders, ending the game.

Crusaders: Thy Will Be Done uses a combination of rondel and mancala mechanisms. Each player has their own rondel, which they can upgrade over the course of the game, that controls their action choices during the game. Your faction gives you a special power to control your rondel, and the buildings you erect will help you form a strategy.

Game Mechanics:

  • Grid Movement
  • Rondel

Game Specifications:

  • 2 – 4 Players
  • 40 – 60 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.43

Cosmic Encounter

| T3d-1978

Players represent alien races that are seeking to spread themselves onto five foreign worlds. To accomplish this, they make challenges against other players and enlist the aid of interested parties. But alien powers, which are unique to each race, give players ways to bend or outright break some rule in the game.

The game continues until one player occupies five planets in other systems to win. Shared victories are possible, and a player need not occupy one’s own system to win.

Game Mechanics:

  • Bluffing
  • Hand Management
  • Negotiation
  • Racing
  • Take That
  • Trading

Game Specifications:

  • 3 – 5 Players
  • 60 – 120 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.58

CoraQuest

| T3d-1978

CoraQuest is an exciting and accessible co-operative dungeon crawling game for one to four people, aged six and up.

In CoraQuest the players work together to guide four adventurers exploring a dungeon, avoiding traps, finding treasure, fighting monsters, and sometimes rescuing a gnome called Kevin.

CoraQuest is a game that kids and grown-ups can play together and get equal amounts of fun from. It’s also a game that sparks creativity – providing encouragement and guidance on how to create heroes, monsters and adventures to make CoraQuest your own.

All the artwork in CoraQuest is based on kids’ drawings, much of it sent in to us from all over the world by the wonderful CoraQuest community. The art has been brought together by our “chief-colourer-in”, Gary King, to make a unique and charming-looking game.

Game Mechanics:

  • Cooperative
  • Dice Rolling

Game Specifications:

  • 1 – 4 Players
  • 45 – 60 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.04