Heavy Games 15 - Shut Up & Sit Down

Caverna: The Cave Farmers

Caverna: The Cave Farmers, which has a playing time of roughly 30 minutes per player, is a complete redesign of Agricola that substitutes the card decks from the former game with a set of buildings while adding the ability to purchase weapons and send your farmers on quests to gain further resources. Designer Uwe Rosenberg says that the game includes parts of Agricola, but also has new ideas, especially the cave part of your game board, where you can build mines and search for rubies. The game also includes two new animals: dogs and donkeys.

Tash-Kalar: Arena of Legends is a game played by masters of magic. Two to four summoners encounter each other in the Tash-Kalar arena, either in teams or each on his own, and prove their skill and strategy in a short but intense battle. By clever deployment of their minions, they create magic patterns for summoning powerful beings, and then use those to destroy their opponent’s forces or to prepare patterns for the ultimate legendary beings.

The game includes three different factions (but two copies of one of them), each with a unique deck of beings to summon. There is also a deck of legendary creatures. Players take turns placing their common pieces on the board, and if they succeed in creating the pattern depicted on one of the cards in hand, they may play it. When played, the card summons a specific being and allows the player to perform an effect described on the card.

Tash-Kalar: Arena of Legends offers two game modes. In the standard mode you score points for fulfilling various tasks set by the Arena Masters: controlling certain points or areas of the arena, destroying a number of enemy pieces in a single turn, performing a certain combination of summonings, etc.

In the other mode of play, your only goal is to entertain the crowd. You do that by primarily destroying your opponents.

Across the globe, ancient evil is stirring. Now, you and your trusted circle of colleagues must travel around the world, working against all odds to hold back the approaching horror. Foul monsters, brutal encounters, and obscure mysteries will take you to your limit and beyond. All the while, you and your fellow investigators must unravel the otherworldly mysteries scattered around the globe in order to push back the gathering mayhem that threatens to overwhelm humanity. The end draws near! Do you have the courage to prevent global destruction?

Eldritch Horror is a cooperative game of terror and adventure in which one to eight players take the roles of globetrotting investigators working to solve mysteries, gather clues, and protect the world from an Ancient One – an elder being intent on destroying our world. Each Ancient One comes with its own unique decks of Mystery and Research cards, which draw you deeper into the lore surrounding each loathsome creature.

Discover the true name of Azathoth or battle Cthulhu on the high seas. With twelve unique investigators, two hundred-fifty tokens, and over three hundred cards, Eldritch Horror presents an epic, world-spanning adventure with each and every game.

Japan, 1605 – Hidetada Tokugawa has succeeded his father as the new Shogun, ruling from the great city of Edo (a.k.a. Yedo), the city known in present times as Tokyo. This marks the beginning of the golden age of the Tokugawa Shogunate and the so-called Edo Period that will last until 1868. Naturally, the most powerful families in Edo immediately try to curry favor with the new Shogun – and this is the opportunity our clan has been looking for, our chance at power and glory. Our clan will prove ourselves to be indispensable to the new Shogun. We will work from the shadows to acquire information about our rival clans. We will kidnap those who might oppose our ascent and assassinate those who prove a threat. We will use cunning to prevent our adversaries from doing the same to us. We will find glory and honor in the eyes of this new Shogun – or failing that we will end his rule by any means necessary.

In the strategy game Yedo, players assume the roles of Clan Elders in the city of Edo during the early years of the Tokugawa Shogunate. The object of the game is to amass Prestige Points, mainly by completing missions. To do so, players must gather the necessary assets and – most importantly – outfox their opponents and prevent them from completing their missions.

There are several ways to reach your goal. Will you try to complete as many missions as possible and hope that your efforts catch the Shogun’s eye? Or will you choose a more subtle way of gaining power by trying to influence the Shogun during a private audience? You can also put your rivals to shame by buying lots of luxury goods from the European merchants. It’s all up to you – but be careful to make the right choices, for in Yedo, eternal glory and painful disgrace are two sides of the same coin…

Nieuw Amsterdam was founded by the Dutch West Indies Company in order to encourage the lucrative beaver pelt trade with the local Native American hunters along the Hudson River. To establish a trading post there, they needed a town and a fort, which was built on the tip of Manhattan Island. To encourage European patrons – that is, settlers of means or noble birth – to populate the colony, they granted them both land and indentured servants. The patrons became the lords of a new feudal system not unlike that seen in Europe.

In Nieuw Amsterdam, players are those patrons, and they bid on action lots in order to build businesses, work land for both food and building materials, compete in elections, ship furs to the Old World, and trade with the Lenape Indians – a process that gets more complicated as players claim more land and push the Lenape camps farther up the Hudson River.

The latest volume in Volko Ruhnke’s COIN Series takes 1 to 4 players into the Afghan conflict of today’s headlines, this time in a unique collaboration between two top designers of boardgames on modern irregular warfare. A Distant Plain teams Volko Ruhnke, the award-winning designer of Labyrinth: The War on Terror, with Brian Train, a designer with 20 years’ experience creating influential simulations such as Algeria, Somalia Interventions, Shining Path: The Struggle for Peru, and many others.

A Distant Plain features the same accessible game system as GMT’s recent Andean Abyss and upcoming Cuba Libre but with new factions, capabilities, events, and objectives. For the first time in the Series, two counterinsurgent (COIN) factions must reconcile competing visions for Afghanistan in order to coordinate a campaign against a dangerous twin insurgency.

A Distant Plain adapts familiar Andean Abyss mechanics to the conditions of Afghanistan without adding rules complexity. A snap for GMT COIN Series players to learn, A Distant Plain will transport them to a different place and time. New features include:

Coalition-Government joint operations.
Volatile Pakistani posture toward the conflict.
Evolution of both COIN and insurgent tactics and technology.
Government graft and desertion.
Coalition casualties.
Returning Afghan refugees.
Pashtun ethnic terrain.
Multiple scenarios.
A deck of 72 fresh events.

… and more.

As with each COIN Series volume, players of A Distant Plain will face difficult strategic decisions with each card. The innovative game system smoothly integrates political, cultural, and economic affairs with military and other violent and non-violent operations and capabilities. Flow charts are at hand to run the three Afghan factions, so that any number of players—from solitaire to 4—can experience the internecine brawl that is today’s Afghanistan.

The object of Power Grid is to supply the most cities with power from your ever-improving collection of power plants. As each player buys power plants, new and better plants come onto the market, forcing you to upgrade as you and your opponents try to spread your power networks across more and more of the country.

Power Grid is one part territory control, one part plant expansion and one part economic management, as players compete to buy the raw materials they need to fuel their ever more demanding power plants.

A perfect balance of cooperative gameplay and back-stabbing goodness.

An artifact of untold power lies in your hands. To claim it, you must escape the caverns alive. No less than nine horrific beasts stand in your way – that, and the greed of the other players.

In this game of kill-stealing, you decide whether to swing for a whopping 50 points of damage – or hold back, awaiting a more opportune time to strike. Only the final blow matters if you are to score the kill. Hold back or sabotage other’s plans too much – and the entire party will die, without a winner.

In 1960: The Making of the President, you take on the role of Kennedy or Nixon, protagonists vying for the right to lead their country into the heart of the Cold War. However, it is not just foreign policy that poses a challenge to American leadership; this is also an era of great social turmoil. As the United States continues to build upon the promise of its founding, candidates must contend with the question of civil rights and balance their positions on social justice against the need for valuable Southern electoral votes. Of course, the ever-present issue of the economy also rears its ugly head, and both Nixon and Kennedy will compete to be the candidate with the voters’ pocket books in mind.

A STORYTELLING BOARD GAME SET IN THE 1970s COLD WAR ERA.

SMERSH is a portmanteau of two Russian words that translates to “Death to Spies.” It operated as a counter-intelligence agency by the Red Army during the 1940s. Despite having had a large number of paid employees, little was known about the agency until recently when Russia opened their archives.

Agents of SMERSH is a cooperative Storytelling game that pits players as UN Secret Service Spies set in an alternate 1970s timeline against a newly formed and independent SMERSH. The game will be able to accommodate play with either The Encounter Book that contains over 1500 written encounters with a similar reaction matrix to Tales of the Arabian Nights – or played more simply with only encounter cards with shorter encounters and no matrix. Agents of SMERSH includes custom dice to determine success or failure of encounters, and more strategic play from what is typically expected of a Storytelling board game. There are plenty of James Bond gadgets, guns, cars, pop references and detailed artwork – not to mention a touch of humor. The game features the artwork of George Patsouras (The Resistance & Flash Point).

Caverna: The Cave Farmers

Tash-Kalar: Arena of Legends

Eldritch Horror

Yedo

New Amsterdam

A Distant Plain

Power Grid

Cutthroat Caverns

1960: The Making of the President

Agents of SMERSH

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