Kickstart Your Week! Vikings Gone Anachrony

Vikings Gone Wild

Vikings Gone Wild

“Right! It’s time to teach them blues a lesson lads. We’re ‘ere to giving their village a good smashing. Elf archers, I want you attacking the breweries. Bone Crusher, we want your might against the village hall.”

“Dough bud I wanded da beer!”

“I know, but you’ll get the beer after-”

“Elves always ged da beer ids nod fair…”

“Look I promise to make sure you get the beer tonight ok?”

“Okay…”

“Right everyone! Land ho! Get ready!”

Pufft… Baaaaaaaaaaaa – splat

“Oh God they’ve got sheep cannons! Run everyone run!”

OLYVikings Gone Wild Playerboard

Vikings Gone Wild is a very neat game that we recently reviewed. It is a deck builder but also featuring tableau building elements as you develop your village in front of you, adding to your resource economy and helping you manipulate your deck in preparation for the meat of the game: beating on each other’s stuff! A major way of gather victory points is to coordinate playing attack cards on your opponents’ buildings, yet you’ll need to chose your targets carefully as players can also stockpile defence cards (like the aforementioned sheep cannon). This keeps you focussing on everything your opponents buy outside your turns and makes the game inherently interactive, offers up scope for bluffing and blocking your opponents since each player can only be attacked once each turn.

While the attacking sounds like potentially brutal take-that mechanisms, the attacks don’t actually harm that players’ ability to use their buildings, an element I really appreciate! There are also many more ways to gain VPs in this game too, focussing on economic or defensive strategies can really pay off, with personal and global missions to chase down. Vikings Gone Wild really quite impressed me and I definitely recommend you check it out!

Vikings will have gone wild on June 9th.

 

Anachrony

 

Anachrony

 

*Shuddering*

*Lights flickering*

So you have some fascinating mechanics at play here, with some cool art and an interesting world and some massive walker/exo-suits that I don’t fully understand but the thing with time travel mechanics is they are notoriously difficult to integrate elegantly into a board game (thus far). Perhaps, though, the team who were behind the very well regarded Trickerion might be in with a chance!

Anachrony ends June 7th.

Anachrony Stuff

*Lens flare!*

Phwha!? What happened? Was the conclusion just sent back to us from the future!? Amazing! Why it’s just like that game Anachrony!

Set in a grim sci-fi future in which humanity has divided into 4 different ideological paths, Anachrony tells the story of their battle to survive or perhaps even profit from a coming cataclysmic event. At its core, we have a worker placement/resource management style game with a unique time travel twist. You’ll be able to reach forward in time to take resources from those eras to spend in the present. But if in that future you are unable to complete the causal loop and deliver it back to the past when required, then terrible paradoxes might ensue!

Wait… does that mean I have to deliver the conclusion to the past now? But surely nothing serious is going to happen if I don’t right? Right…?

 

Cosmic Kaboom

 

Cosmic Kaboom

 

Not just the inevitable result of messing with paradoxes, Cosmic Kaboom is also a new game, featuring even more planetary destruction than the most trigger happy Death Star owner’s week! I’m not sure that is a meaningful comparison but never mind! This game is going to be too explosive for regrets and corrections!

CosmicKaboomBoard

I suppose you can describe Cosmic Kaboom as a dexterity based pick up and deliver game. You’ll each have a ship, attempting to collect the pieces necessary to power the ultimate planet destroying weapon: a big cardboard disc! Once you’ve collected the 4 elements from the 4 corners of the planetary swarm by flicking your little ship disc between them you’ll get to throw this disc onto the board and capture any planets it hits. Kaboom!

Destroyed planets are worth points at the end so the most aggressive player will become ruler of the universe. A light game to not be taken too seriously, as most dexterity games are, Cosmic Kaboom is certainly worth checking out.

The cosmos goes kaboom on June 9th.

 

Other Great Games

 

Fallen Angel
Fallen Angel – An asteroid city is falling towards Earth… slowly! You all still have time to compete over its resources, battle for control of different regions of the board as the literal asteroid tile moves down the board towards land. Seriously, this is a cool way of tracking turns! Ends June 6th.

 

 

3Seeds3 Seeds – Players are investing their time, effort and money into growing crops, and that will pay off if the crop is good. However, you won’t know that for sure unless you spend turns checking the value of the harvest, and in the meantime others might be moving stuff around. So you’re not only betting on the value of the crop, but where the most valuable crops will end up! A neat-sounding card game. Ends June 9th.

 

OneDeckDungeonOne Deck Dungeon – A dungeon crawler featuring an all female cast of properly clothed warriors!? My God this game is ground breaking and we haven’t even got to the gameplay! Featuring cards that function as both encounters, spell, experience or stat boosts, they have crammed the dungeon crawl experience into a single deck of cards for 1-4 players. Worth checking out! Ends June 9th

 

Blend OffBlend Off! – Competitive smoothie making! Real time dice rolling, collecting ingredients in your blender to try and match target mixes. Die has sides corresponding to each ingredient. Really captures that idea of running around the store cupboard searching for the right ingredients. It looked great a couple of weeks ago too so definitely give this a look! Ends June 9th.

 

 

Darkest NightDarkest Night: Second Edition – A co-op board game pitting a band of heroes (there’s lots to choose from!) against the dark machinations of the necromancer. Must search the kingdom for powerful equipment while keeping the minions of evil from overwhelming the various realms. As the game goes on, the Necromancer gets ever more powerful! Hurry up and save the world! Ends June 11th.

 

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