Medium 11 - Shut Up & Sit Down

Nothing Personal

The Capo is getting old and about to retire. You think. Maybe it’s time for you to make your moves from behind the scenes, to put the gangsters into play that support your goals. Will you gain the most respect?

Nothing Personal is a game for 3-5 players. Players attempt to gain the most respect in five turns (five years) by amassing respect amongst the mafia through influence, negotiation, blackmail and bribery.

Players take turns playing influence cards to take control of gangsters and work them up the chain of power. Each position and gangster has their own special abilities that give players the edge they need to accrue the respect they deserve – to become the Boss of Bosses.

Sekigahara is a simple 3-hour block game based on the campaign in 1600 that unified Japan. Hidden information on blocks & cards, but no dice. Cards are not events (this isn’t a typical “card-driven wargame”) but rather motivation (suited by clan). Units fight only when a matching card is produced.

Get ready to enter the poor and dreary Whitechapel district in London 1888 – the scene of the mysterious Jack the Ripper murders – with its crowded and smelly alleys, hawkers, shouting merchants, dirty children covered in rags who run through the crowd and beg for money, and prostitutes – called “the wretched” – on every street corner.

The board game Letters from Whitechapel, which plays in 90-150 minutes, takes the players right there. One player plays Jack the Ripper, and his goal is to take five victims before being caught. The other players are police detectives who must cooperate to catch Jack the Ripper before the end of the game. The game board represents the Whitechapel area at the time of Jack the Ripper and is marked with 199 numbered circles linked together by dotted lines. During play, Jack the Ripper, the Policemen, and the Wretched are moved along the dotted lines that represent Whitechapel’s streets. Jack the Ripper moves stealthily between numbered circles, while policemen move on their patrols between crossings, and the Wretched wander alone between the numbered circles.

In the far future, humanoid empires of the universe turned to an intense study of ancient civilizations that existed on a planet known as Earth. They learned that these ancients simultaneously built pyramids towards the sky and had an extensive knowledge of the stars. It was rumored that perhaps they were the original colonizers and space-farers of the first human age.

Now, at the edge of a colossal black hole, a pyramid-craft known as the Zoneplex has emerged with legendary markings and glyphs of the deep past. The known empires have sent their elite warrior-monk mystics on a one-way mission to gain control of the Zoneplex, to emerge victorious and ultimately control the pathways of the universe and time itself.

Zoneplex is a game that combines a tile-laying/exploration mechanism, a collaborative battle system and a zone control system to create an intriguing adventure in an alien pyramid.

In Renaissance Man, each player is an example of the title character – skilled as a scholar, a merchant, a knight, and a baker – and throughout the game will hire, recruit and train others with the goal of producing a Master of one of these four areas of study. Each round consists of players creating actions by combining a worker in play with a card from hand:

Merchants hire new workers.
Knights compete to recruit workers from the common pool.
Bakers offer their goods in exchange for workers’ actions.
Scholars train others in the ways of the Renaissance Man.

Instead of providing these actions for a player, a worker in play can be assigned to support higher-level workers. Two workers are required for support, and they are laid out as such in a pyramid-fashion. Five workers create a player’s foundation, and the first player to complete a pyramid structure of fifteen workers creates a single Master of study, thus winning the game. A little luck will help along the way, but the day will surely go to the player who finds the most clever ways out of the trickiest situations in Renaissance Man!

Winter Tales is a narrative board game of storytelling and fairy tale adventures for three to seven players, set in the grim chill of Wintertown. Players control the lives of their favorite fairy tale characters as they seek to complete quests, creating a new fable. In the course of the tale, players tell the story of soldiers battling in the streets and plazas, and rebels laying cunning traps. Can Spring return, or will Winter reign eternally? Craft a new story in Winter Tales!

Police Precinct is a cooperative/semi-cooperative game where players are tasked with solving a mysterious murder while simultaneously working to keep crime on the streets under control, and to keep the city from falling into chaos.

Players take on the role of police officers with different areas of expertise. The players work together to solve the mystery by collecting evidence and eventually arresting the suspect.

Complicating matters is the fact that there may or may not be a corrupt officer that is being paid off by the murderer to suppress evidence, the same evidence everyone else is trying to uncover.

Players move around the city searching through randomly shuffled investigation cards for evidence in relation to the murder. The number of investigation cards drawn depends on the character’s rating as well as how many player cards are added by other players to boost the character’s rating for the current “search”. There are four decks of investigation cards (Interview Witness, Collect Crime Scene Evidence, Examine Body and Locate Murder Weapon) to be searched. These decks are shuffled and placed in different locations. So, a player might search the cards in one area and not find any evidence at all… or maybe the bribed cop, if there is one, did the searching and just said no evidence was found.

Players have to find all of the evidence cards from the investigation decks to be able to arrest the murderer.

At the end of each player’s turn they draw an event card. These cards represent growing crime and emergencies that are happening in the city. Each one piles on top of the other, and if the cops don’t stay on top of things, they will be buried in crime! These Event cards are placed on the game board at the locations where they occur. Some of them have “unknown circumstance” tokens placed face-down upon them, adding even more tension.

If too many criminals are located in one area, a gang is formed. Each gang has it’s own power and can cripple the police efforts if not handled quickly and carefully.

So, not only are the players investigating the murder, but they must also arrest street criminals and handle emergencies.

Sometimes when a character successfully completes a task, that character is rewarded with a doughnut token. These tokens can later be used to help with tasks. However, if the character does not complete the task in time, the city crime track advances. The track can also advance if street crimes grow so large that no more street criminals can be placed, when called for. If the Crime Track advances to the end, the murderer escapes justice and the good cops fail the game.

To add to the tension even further, The good cops only have so many days to complete the investigation. If time runs out, once again the murderer shall escape justice!

The pressure is great and the stakes are high!

Risk Legacy represents what is if not a new, at least a rare concept to boardgaming: campaigning. At its core, the game, particularly at first, plays much like regular Risk with a few changes. Players control countries or regions on a map of the world, and through simple combat (with players rolling dice to determine who loses units in each battle) they try to eliminate all opponents from the game board or control a certain number of “red stars”, otherwise known as victory points (VPs).

What’s different is that Risk Legacy’ changes over time based on the outcome of each game and the various choices made by players. In each game, players choose one of five factions; each faction has uniquely shaped pieces, and more importantly, different rules. At the start of the first game, each of these factions gains the ability to break one minor rule, such as the ability to move troops at any time during your turn, as opposed to only at the end.

What makes this game unique is that when powers are chosen, players must choose one of their faction’s two powers, affix that power’s sticker to their faction card, then destroy the card that has the other rule on it – and by destroy, the rules mean what they say: “If a card is DESTROYED, it is removed from the game permanently. Rip it up. Throw it in the trash.” This key concept permeates through the game. Some things you do in a game will affect it temporarily, while others will affect it permanently. These changes may include boosting the resources of a country (for recruiting troops in lieu of the older “match three symbols” style of recruiting), adding bonuses or penalties to defending die rolls to countries, or adding permanent continent troop bonuses that may affect all players.

The rule book itself is also designed to change as the game continues, with blocks of blank space on the pages to allow for rules additions or changes. Entire sections of rules will not take effect until later in the game. The game box contains different sealed packages and compartments, each with a written condition for opening. The rule book indicates that these contain the rule additions, additional faction powers, and other things that should not be discussed here for spoiler protection.

The winner of each of the first 15 games receives a “major bonus,” such as founding a major city (which only he will be allowed to start on in future games), deleting a permanent modifier from the board, destroying a country card (preventing it from providing any resources towards purchasing troops in future games), changing a continent troop bonus, or naming a continent, which gives that player a troop bonus in future games. Players who did not win but were not eliminated are allowed to make minor changes to the world, such as founding a minor city or adding resources to a country.

Initial games take approximately 30-90 minutes to play, which includes a brief rules explanation and setup.

Welcome to the fictional comic book world of Sentinel Comics, where powerful heroes fight dastardly villains to protect the entire Multiverse!

Sentinels of the Multiverse is a cooperative game in which players control heroes with powers and abilities in the form of cards. Two to five players control three to five heroes who must work together to defeat the villains and survive the dangerous environments in which the battles take place.

Ultimately, either the heroes will successfully defeat the villains and foil their plans, or the villains will triumph, and the heroes will be forced to regroup to fight another day.

It Never Snows is a Standard Combat Series (SCS) game covering the pivotal Market Garden offensive in September, 1944. Using a system based on the well-received SCS Game Bastogne, It Never Snows covers the landings and ground offensive endeavoring to link up with them at 600m per hex with units generally companies. Each turn is half a day making for a 17 turn campaign game (uniquely playable among Market Garden games).

The expansive five map area allows each of the airborne division fights to be geographically isolated and separate, as was the case historically. What this does is that it allows each situation to be gamed as its own little tactical puzzle—making it such that a player might be “winning” in one region while “losing” in another, at the same time. Both players are always “in the game.”

While the Allied player is busy dropping paratroopers, establishing bridgeheads and running a ground offensive to link up with them, the German player must devastate the airborne forces clinging to Arnhem, defend the various river crossings and counterattack to sever the Allied supply lines. Both players are attacking and defending at the same time, every turn.

Following on the heels of Bastogne, It Never Snows uses a tactical model with a minimal amount of rules overhead which shows both set-piece as well as “on the fly” attacks and the effects of indirect fires and air support.

A fantastically detailed OOB shows the insane array of German units being scratched together to defeat the Allied offensive—from displaced sailors to the deaf, from elite armor to barely trained school units, from highly motivated SS to penal units being pushed into battle at gunpoint. Against the elite airborne troops of the Allies, this menagerie is hardly the German army many wargamers envision when they think of World War II.

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