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City of Horror Review

By on December 14, 2012 with 2 Comments

City of Horror art

Zombie board games tend to focus, like the films they emulate, on the players surviving by putting up barricades and beating the undead to death with whatever they can find. But if you’ve seen enough horror movies you’ll know there’s a second string, a darker theme where cooperative groups mercilessly pick the weakest member to sacrifice to the shambling hordes so that the others might survive. That’s the grim base on which City of Horror rests.

And grim is the word. There are few games more callous than this. It’s not a game to play with relative strangers. It’s not even a game to play with friends that you can’t rely on not to hold grudges. Players control a variety of characters, spread around a zombie-infested city. Each turn there is a vote in each board area that’s accumulated sufficient zombies. Each character in that area gets to vote for who dies, and the character with the most gets eaten. Gone. No second chances, no dice, nothing. Eliminated.

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Fluxx Out for iOS

By on December 13, 2012 with 3 Comments

Fluxx, the latest iOS game board joint from Looney Labs and Playdek is currently available in the App Store for the low, low price of $2.99. I haven’t paid much attention to this game while in the toy section at Target, my eye unerringly drawn to Transformers and Skylanders but the mix of weird cards and shifting rules sounds interesting. Offline and online modes support between two and four players with a single player mode against AI opponents, pass and play local multiplayer and asynchronous online play. No idea if all of the expansion decks will be coming to iOS but I wouldn’t be surprised.

Christmas time is soon upon us. Plenty of time to spend at home ignoring one’s family to play iOS card games. Hmm…

Space Hulk!

By on December 11, 2012 with 4 Comments

Seeing that I am out of the videogaming news loop these days, I have no idea how much play this is getting elsewhere but for me — and Barnes and Matt — this is a big deal. Space Hulk is coming to PC and iOS. I know nothing of the developer , Full Control, but Space Hulk is coming to PC and iOS!

Feature set:

Based on the best-selling board game and set in the Warhammer 40,000 universe, Space Hulk is a 3D digital turn based strategy game that recreates the classic claustrophobic board game experience for single player and multiplayer cross-platform play between PC, Mac and on iOS.

Space Hulk is set in the isolated corridors and tomb-like chambers of an ancient vessel lost in the graveyard of space. Players lead a small army of fearless Space Marine Terminators to battle in a ferocious fight for survival against hordes of predatory alien Genestealers.

The main features are:

Blood Angel terminator squad
Fearsome Genestealers with challenging AI (sorry, still no free rides)
Thematic 3d environment
Single player campaign based on the “Sin of Damnation” hulk
New coop multiplayer levels against the Genestealer AI
Multiplayer head-to-head recreating the board game experience against a friend
Cross platform multiplayer between PC, Mac and iOS
Level editor with ability to share creations
Game expansions in the future as DLC

In. Oh, so in.

VGA Trailer Explosion

By on December 10, 2012 with 3 Comments

So I guess the VGAs were this weekend. I had no idea. I tend to tune that stuff out, not because I’m morally opposed to them or because I think it represents the selling out of games. Marketers gonna market. I just don’t need to spend my evening taking part in it when I can watch all of the trailers in the following days.

Speaking of trailers, there was some interesting stuff shown. The above BioShock Infinite trailer has some people complaining about the frame rate and all of the shooting, but mostly it has me excited over the prospect of stabbing a crazed pig man with my skyline, arm hook thingy. I will say that I called the game not making their February release date some time ago. Yes, I am that good.

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Calendar Man – Week of 12/10

By on December 10, 2012 with 9 Comments

Ok, there’s pretty much nothing coming out this week. I mean, sure, there are some PC releases, a new map pack for Halo 4, some Assassins Creed 3 DLC and a terrible James Bond game for the Wii U, but the real reason to head out the store this week is the retail release of Telltale’s The Walking Dead. All five episodes are collected and sure, at thirty bucks it’s five bucks more than buying the episodes individually online, but hey, at least you get a swanky case for your game and, uh, I don’t know, the satisfaction of propping up brick and mortar establishments everywhere? Whatever. Go play it. It’s awesome and if you’re an achievement/trophy junkie, you can get all of the awards just by playing the game.

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Time to Kickstart Tomorrow

By on December 6, 2012 with 11 Comments

Our third project is now online at Kickstarter.

This is the project that I have most likely had the most direct input in its development. I urged Dirk to do the game — it was a project he had on the shelf for a while and a few months ago when we were discussing the project schedule for Conquistador, I inquired about a game that was at the time called The Next Superpower.  When Dirk started to describe the idea behind the game I was immediately interested in doing it. It’s really unlike anything I have played before.

I strongly pushed for us to make this game and wanted to help develop it.  It’s right in my wheelhouse. It has a lot of tough decisions to make and almost demands that the players at the table talk to one another. I really don’t know how you could play Tomorrow quietly. It’s a game of, “You’re hitting me with Maelificum’s Whisper Flu? OK, here ‘s a nuke.”

You can try to play the game in the shadows, trying to appease everyone but sooner or later the players will look at your country and at your population and decide that it’s time some of your people need to die. And the thing is — they are probably right. That’s when the negotiation, the pleading, the deal making, and the backstabbing kicks in.

Anyway, I posted the first run of the rules on BGG. Give them a look.I’m really excited about it.

I’d also like to once again thank Jason McMaster for doing the video editing work!

Bill’s Top 10 Boardgames of 2012

By on December 3, 2012 with 22 Comments

Once again it’s that time where I lay out my picks for the best boardgames of the year. Keep in mind that this isn’t the “best games of 2012″ but rather the best games I played over the past year or so. Boardgames, being the beautiful hobby that it is, tend to age better than, say, a 10 year old PC game.  I loved High Heat Baseball to death back in the day but I’m not breaking out the Sammy Sosa classic anytime soon.

So here we go: a list of my personal 10 from 2012. My list is certified to be better than anything Barnes posts because everyone knows he likes terrible games.

You can trust me. Also, I won’t add any of our own games on the list because that would be a clear violation of some kind of rule.

Last year’s list can be found here. Looking back I still recommend most of those games even though I think I overrated the Blood Bowl card game and A Few Acres of Snow has run its course.

So let’s get to it.

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Calendar Man – Week of 12/3

By on December 3, 2012 with 9 Comments

Apparently Far Cry 3 didn’t get the memo that last week was the last week of holiday releases. Bad Far Cry 3! No cookie!

Seriously though, that game looks badass. I’ll have to add it to the ever increasing list of backlogged games. Seriously, this is getting ridiculous. The Ni No Kuni demo releasing this week on PSN certainly won’t help either. Curse you Level 5 for making a demo for a game I am incredibly excited about! This week also has the Lord of the Rings MOBA thingy as well as another Skyrim expansion and a turn based Uncharted card game, um, thing. Yeah, I dunno either.

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Merchant of Venus Review

By on November 30, 2012 with 7 Comments

Merchant of Venus box shot

In this glorious age of reprints, there are very few remaining classic titles from the eighties that haven’t seen a rebirth in some form or other. Of those left stranded in the past most of any consequence were by designer Richard Hamblen. Known for his intricate and fiendishly detailed designs, one game in his oeuvre was relatively simple and short and cherished fondly for those exact reasons. And now Fantasy Flight Games has brought it to join the ranks of the resurrected.

Thanks to an amicably resolved licensing dispute between Fantasy Flight and another publisher, Stronghold, Merchant of Venus actually offers two games in one box. One is the original version, re-skinned with lovely new components and some minor rules tweaks and the other has been worked over by Fantasy Flight’s design team. The differences are not minor. While they share the same theme and inspiration the bulk of the components used are distinct even down to providing a double sided board.

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The New Science Rolls Out, Tomorrow Rolls In

By on November 26, 2012 with 7 Comments

I spent the week before Thanksgiving in Dallas, Texas at Board Game Geek Con. It was my first trip to this con and also my first trip to Dallas — not that I saw any of the city. I did go to dinner at a place called Love & War in Texas. A lot of large hats. People in Texas really do seem to love them some Texas. I’m from Ohio. We just like the Buckeyes and various forms of awful chili.

Anyway, the convention was a great time (and an extremely well organized show) and the first chance many of the unclean masses got to sit down and play The New Science. I have grown accustomed to demoing our games to people but this was a continuous stream of patrons. I demoed the game so much that I could recite my 5 minute demo in my sleep. By the end of the show I could literally say it word for word every single time.  My voice was gone.

It’s easy when people show a genuine interest in what you are selling/demoing, though. I ended up playing several full games of TNS at the show and didn’t get a chance to play much else. Such is life of a developer. But I was really in the zone demoing the game with a crowd of people around.

Those who know me seem shocked that I’d enjoy being the center if attention. (Straw time.)

Based on the reaction of gamers both at BGG Con and Buckeye Game Fest I am confident that the reaction to The New Science will be positive. I have no way of knowing how well it well sell, but I’ll be shocked if people who play it dismiss it. It’s a tight game and I’m proud of the work we did on it from the graphic design to the mechanics.

But while I am genuinely excited about The New Science, our next game, a game I am in the middle of developing as we speak, is something I can’t wait to share with everyone.

Our next game is called Tomorrow.

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