Medium-Heavy 7 - Shut Up & Sit Down

Blood Rage

“Life is Battle; Battle is Glory; Glory is ALL”

In Blood Rage, each player controls their own Viking clan’s warriors, leader, and ship. Ragnarök has come, and it’s the end of the world! It’s the Vikings’ last chance to go down in a blaze of glory and secure their place in Valhalla at Odin’s side! For a Viking there are many pathways to glory. You can invade and pillage the land for its rewards, crush your opponents in epic battles, fulfill quests, increase your clan’s stats, or even die gloriously either in battle or from Ragnarök, the ultimate inescapable doom.

Most player strategies are guided by the cards drafted at the beginning of each of the three game rounds (or Ages). These “Gods’ Gifts” grant you numerous boons for your clan including: increased Viking strength and devious battle strategies, upgrades to your clan, or even the aid of legendary creatures from Norse mythology. They may also include various quests, from dominating specific provinces, to having lots of your Vikings sent to Valhalla. Most of these cards are aligned with one of the Norse gods, hinting at the kind of strategy they support. For example, Thor gives more glory for victory in battle, Heimdall grants you foresight and surprises, Tyr strengthens you in battle, while the trickster Loki actually rewards you for losing battles, or punishes the winner.

Players must choose their strategies carefully during the draft phase, but also be ready to adapt and react to their opponents’ strategies as the action phase unfolds. Battles are decided not only by the strength of the figures involved, but also by cards played in secret. By observing your opponent’s actions and allegiances to specific gods, you may predict what card they are likely to play, and plan accordingly. Winning battles is not always the best course of action, as the right card can get you even more rewards by being crushed. The only losing strategy in Blood Rage is to shy away from battle and a glorious death!

Conan, designed by Fred Henry and based on the Conan universe by Robert E. Howard, is a scenario-based semi-cooperative asymmetric miniatures board game. One player is the Opponent, playing the Opposition forces, and the other players (1 to 4) play Conan and his companions: Shevatas the thief, Hadrathus the Priest/Sorcerer, Belit the pirate queen, Valeria the warrior, etc. The game is based purely on Robert E. Howard’s novels and short stories (and not the movies or other non-Howardian material). The publisher has hired Patrice Louinet, a Howard expert, to make sure the art and the scenarios are compatible with Howard’s vision.

Each game is a scenario, played on a map. There will be several maps — Pictish Village, Underground temple, Tavern, Pirate ship, etc. — and each map can have several scenarios set on it. The game is fast, one hour approximately. It’s possible to play several scenarios in a campaign, but you can also play each scenario individually. There is a dozen playable scenarios in the base box.

From the designer of Glen More comes a new title published by Queen Games: Lancaster. In 1413, the new king of England, Henry V of Lancaster, has ambitious plans: The unification of England and the conquest of the French crown. Each player takes the role of an ambitious aristocratic family. Who will be the best supporter of this young king, and the most powerful Lord of his time? In Lancaster the players want to proceed from simply being a Lord to the most powerful ally of the king. They may achieve this by developing their own knighthood as well as by clever deployment of individual knights in the counties of England, at their own castle, and to conflicts with France. In parliament, they try to push laws from which they will benefit themselves most. The player with the most power points at the end of the game is the winner.

Dead of Winter: The Long Night is the new stand-alone expansion for Dead of Winter: A Crossroads game.

Obtain more of everything that made Dead of Winter an epic struggle for power and survival! Experience a new colony full of new survivors and new gameplay elements, each of which is introduced to players through its own game scenario. Fight off bandits from another colony, build improvements to your colony, and most intriguingly, unravel the mysteries of the new Raxxon Pharmaceutical location. It is full of powerful items, but also full of Raxxon’s twisted human experiments that show up in the game as disturbing new enemies.

Dead of Winter: The Long Night can be bought alone and is a fully-realized Dead of Winter experience by itself. You can also combine everything – characters, items, objectives, crossroad cards, etc – between The Long Night and the original Dead of Winter.

During the medieval goings-on around Orléans, you must assemble a following of farmers, merchants, knights, monks, etc. to gain supremacy through trade, construction and science in medieval France.

In the city of Orléans and the area of the Loire, you can take trade trips to other cities to acquire coveted goods and build trading posts. You need followers and their abilities to expand your dominance by putting them to work as traders, builders, and scientists. Knights expand your scope of action and secure your mercantile expeditions. Craftsmen build trading stations and tools to facilitate work. Scholars make progress in science, and last but not least it cannot hurt to get active in monasteries since with monks on your side you are much less likely to fall prey to fate.

In Orléans, you will always want to take more actions than possible, and there are many paths to victory. The challenge is to combine all elements as best as possible with regard to your strategy.

In a distant future, scientists were able to build small alternate Earths. The scientists programmed each of these Worlds with an individual set of laws and rules which the residents strictly follow and consider most important for their lives. These may be exploration, consumption, economics, military, etc., and each is unique. You can visit all of these 504 alternate Earths to experience how the people are living, and decide which of these worlds harbors the best civilization. On which World do you want to live?

504 is a game that creates 504 different games out of one box, from nine modules.

Concordia is a peaceful strategy game of economic development in Roman times for 2-5 players aged 13 and up. Instead of looking to the luck of dice or cards, players must rely on their strategic abilities, watching their rivals to determine which goals they’re pursuing and where they can outpace them. Colonists are sent out from Rome to settle in cities which produce bricks, food, tools, wine, and cloth.

The largest Roman city north of the Alps in the late Roman Empire was Augusta Treverorum. Founded in the times of Caesar Augustus and built up by generations of Roman architects, this was the Emperor’s residence and a world city during this period. The remains of these most impressive structures can still be visited today. Foremost of these great achievements in the city is the massive “Porta Nigra”, a large Roman city gate located in Trier, Germany that dates to the 2nd century.

The game Porta Nigra (which translates as “black gate”) is set in that place and time with the players taking on the roles of Roman architects working on the city gate of Porta Nigra. Each player commands a master builder, who moves around a circular track on the game board, enabling you to buy or build only where this master builder is located. Moving the master builder to farther locations along the track is expensive, so players must plan their movements and builds carefully. The number and type of actions that may be performed on your turn comes from cards in your personal draw deck.

Buildings are erected physically at the various locations around the city using 3D building pieces.

Eight years ago Mina Harker and her companions returned home from Castle Dracula believing that they had definitively banished the vampire Count’s evil presence from the earth. They were wrong. The King of the Un-Dead has now risen again to menace mankind. Throughout Europe wolves are behaving strangely, superstitious peasants are growing fearful, and mysterious deaths are proliferating. Tormented by uncanny dreams and haunting visions of nighttime travel and drinking blood, Mina has rejoined her former companions, now even more determined to find Count Dracula and destroy him once and for all.

In Fury of Dracula you undertake their perilous quest, hunting Dracula across Europe and battling him wherever he is revealed. Or you take on the role of the legendary Count Dracula himself as he seeks to thwart these pursuers and plunge the entire continent into an unrelenting and evil darkness.

In Ashes: Rise of the Phoenixborn, an expandable card game, players take on the roles of Phoenixborns, demi-gods and protectors of this world. These characters are the great saviors of their civilizations. Before they came into existence, the humans were plagued by monsters like chimeras that took away their lands and forced them to live in walled-off cities. When the Phoenixborns came, they fought off the chimeras and freed the lands for humans to take over once again.

But the time of peace was short-lived. A prophecy arose that if one Phoenixborn was able to absorb enough Ashes of others, they would ascend into full gods and take mastery over this world. This, as well as humans’ greed for land, fueled the War of Ashes. The great cities now fight among each other, each one of them with a Phoenixborn at its helm, and you will decide who will rise and who will fall to ashes.

Blood Rage

Conan

Lancaster

Dead of Winter: The Long Night

Orléans

504

Concordia

Porta Nigra

Fury of Dracula (third edition)

Ashes: Rise of the Phoenixborn

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