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Phantom Leader

Phantom Leader places you in command of a US Air Force or US Navy Tactical Fighter squadron in Vietnam between 1964 and 1972. You must not only destroy the targets but you must also balance the delicate political repercussions of your attacks. If you strike too hard, your air offensive might be put on hold, strike too light, and you’ll be blamed for losing the war.

Welcome to the Vietnam Air War!

Each of the campaigns can be played with either an Air Force or Navy squadron. The targets assigned to each service are different and change the complexion of the campaigns. Each campaign can be played with three different durations of: Skirmish, Conflict, or War.

Each mission takes roughly 30 minutes to set-up, plan, and resolve.

Each of your pilots has their own skills. Selecting the right pilots and weapons for a mission is vital to its success. As you fly missions, your pilots will gain experience and fatigue. With experience, their skills improve, but as their fatigue increases, their skills decrease and they might not be able to fly for several missions.

In Dungeon Lords, you are an evil dungeonlord who is trying to build the best dungeon out there. You hire monsters, build rooms, buy traps and defeat the do-gooders who wish to bring you down.

Have you ever ventured with party of heroes to conquer dungeons, gain pride, experiences and of course rich treasure? And has it ever occurred to you how hard it actually is to build and manage such underground complex filled with corridors and creatures? No? Well now you can try. Put yourself in role of the master of underground, summon your servants, dig complex of tunnels and rooms, set traps, hire creatures and try to stop filthy heroes from conquering and plundering your precious creation. We can guarantee you will look on dark corners, lairs and their inhabitant from completely different perspective!

Each turn, players use a hand of cards to choose where to place their worker. Actions vary from mining gold, hiring monsters, buying traps etc. Each action has three spots available – with each spot having different effects (e.g. mining gold lets you mine more gold in each spot). When using the cards, two cards will become locked and will not be able to be used next turn.

There are 4 turns to place actions for each game “year” and two game years in a whole game.
Each turn is identified as a “season”. Each season, players will get to see the heroes and events to come in the following season. Thus allowing them to prepare.

At the end of each season (after the first), heroes will be allocated to each player according to their level of evil. Heroes range from mighty heroes to sneaky thieves. Each hero has their own power for which the player needs to prepare for. Finally, at the end of each year, the heroes will travel down into the dungeon to fight.

Scoring in the game is based upon what you have built, the monsters you have hired and the heroes you have captured.

Once again, the hunter prowls the forest. All the animals flee in terror! Well, not really. Only a dumb animal would call attention to itself. In our forest, the animals are smart, otherwise their heads would be decorating the hunter’s mantelpiece. Our animals just casually saunter away, while convincing the hunter that he must be looking for something else. “Are you hungry for rabbit, Mr. Hunter? Well, you see, I’m a moose. Oh, no, not a moose with antlers like that…”

In this merry game, players take on the roles of rabbits and moose. While the hunter strolls through the forest, players are trying to look like an animal the hunter won’t shoot. And because they do so by making rabbit ears or moose antlers of various shapes on their heads, the spectators enjoy the game as well as the players.

The year is 1926, and it is the height of the Roaring Twenties. Flappers dance till dawn in smoke-filled speakeasies drinking alcohol supplied by rum runners and the mob. It’s a celebration to end all celebrations in the aftermath of the war to end all wars.

Yet a dark shadow grows in the city of Arkham. Alien entities known as Ancient Ones lurk in the emptiness beyond space and time, writhing at the gates between worlds. These gates have begun to open and must be closed before the Ancient Ones make our world their ruined domination.

Only a handful of investigators stand against the Arkham Horror. Will they Prevail?

Arkham Horror is a cooperative adventure game themed around H.P Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos. Players choose from 16 Investigators and take to the streets of Arkham. Before the game, one of the eight Ancient Ones is chosen and it’s up to the Investigators to prevent it from breaking into our world. During the course of the game, players will upgrade their characters by acquiring skills, allies, items, weapons, and spells. It’s up to the players to clean out the streets of Arkham by fighting many different types of monsters, but their main goal is to close portals to other dimensions that are opening up around town. With too many portals open the Ancient One awakens and the players only have one last chance to save the world. Defeat the Ancient One in combat!

In Dominion, each player starts with an identical, very small deck of cards. In the center of the table is a selection of other cards the players can “buy“ as they can afford them. Through their selection of cards to buy and how they play their hands as they draw them, the players construct their deck on the fly, striving for the most efficient path to the precious victory points by game end.

Dominion is not a collectible card game (CCG), but the play of the game issimilar to the construction and play of a CCG deck. The game comes with 500 cards. You select 10 of the 26 Kingdom card types to include in any given play—leading to immense variety.

Nightfall – a new fast, furious and fun deck-building game from Alderac Entertainment Group. Featuring direct head-to-head combat, amazing art, a new AEG world, and unique mechanics by designer David Gregg, Nightfall will be the deck-building game to own.

Before the game begins, there is a draft to determine which cards are available for purchase, and by whom. During this draft players select two cards from the set for their personal archives, and they also select cards to put into the common area. The cards drafted into personal archives may only be purchased by the player who drafted them.

After the table has been set with the private and common cards, players begin play.

Each card has a main color and two linking colors. If you can match the main color of a card to one of the linking colors of the previous card, you can chain those cards together. Once a chain is started, players all get an opportunity to link additional cards onto the chain during that turn.

Cards in the chain resolve in reverse order: first in, last out. Instant effects fire off as cards come off the chain, doing damage to your opponents or bringing characters into play to defend you and attack your opponents.

The object of Nightfall is to put wounds into your opponents’ decks and end the game with the least amount of wounds in your deck. But beware: the more wounds a person has, the more enraged they become and the faster their deck works, meaning more cards and bigger chains will come your way!

The Resistance> is a party game of social deduction. It is designed for five to ten players, lasts about 30 minutes, and has no player elimination. The Resistance is inspired by Mafia/Werewolf, yet it is unique in its core mechanics, which increase the resources for informed decisions, intensify player interaction, and eliminate player elimination.

Players are either Resistance Operatives or Imperial Spies. For three to five rounds, they must depend on each other to carry out missions against the Empire. At the same time, they must try to deduce the other players’ identities and gain their trust. Each round begins with discussion. When ready, the Leader entrusts sets of Plans to a certain number of players (possibly including himself/herself). Everyone votes on whether or not to approve the assignment. Once an assignment passes, the chosen players secretly decide to Support or Sabotage the mission. Based on the results, the mission succeeds (Resistance win) or fails (Empire win). When a team wins three missions, they have won the game.

DungeonQuest is a fast-paced game of dungeon exploration and looting for one to four players. You take on the role of a hero who sets out to explore Dragonfire Dungeon and claim more treasure than your rivals. Along the way, you’ll need to evade traps, battle monsters, and find your way through the labyrinthian dungeon, all while trying to avoid waking the dragon who sleeps atop the treasure heap at the dungeon’s heart. The player who gathers the most loot – and makes it out of the dungeon alive — is victorious!

Quinns: Myself and Paul don’t talk much about how Shut Up & Sit Down’s episodes are made, for much the same reason that we don’t talk about times when we’ve fallen over while trying to climb stairs two at a time. We have, in the past, spent whole afternoons thinking we were turning the camera on when we were really it off, resulting in hours of captivating footage of our crotches floating around rooms with the alien purpose of jellyfish.
So we find a kindred spirit in Red November, a little co-operative game about Stuff Going Wrong. Up to eight players act as the Gnome crew of a submarine so fantastically broken that you won’t see a problem with downing entire bottles of grog, because it grants the courage you need to put out fires. You won’t see a problem with swimming outside to battle a squid, because the oxygen pumps were failing anyway. And you won’t see a problem with flooding the ship, because it puts out fires.

Wait. Why did you start drinking again?

Merchants & Marauders lets you live the life of an influential merchant or a dreaded pirate in the Caribbean during the Golden Age of Piracy. Seek your fortune through trade, rumor hunting, missions, and of course, plundering. Modify your ship, buy impressive vessels, load deadly special ammunition, and hire specialist crew members. Will your captain gain eternal glory and immense wealth – or find his wet grave under the stormy surface of the Caribbean Sea?

In Merchants and Marauders, players take on the role of a captain of a small vessel in the Caribbean. The goal is to be the first to achieve 10 “glory” points through performing daring deeds (through the completion of missions or rumors), crushing your enemies (through defeating opponents and NPCs in combat), amassing gold, performing an epic plunder or pulling off the trade of a lifetime, and buying a grand ship. While some points earned from performing various tasks are permanent, players earn points for amassing gold, which can be stolen or lost (or at least diminished) if their captain is killed. Points due to gold are hidden so there’s some uncertainty about when the game will end.

A big component of the game is whether (or when) to turn “pirate” or remain as a trader or neutral party. Both careers are fraught with danger: pirates are hunted by NPCs (and other players) for their bounty and blocked to certain ports while traders are hunted by non-player pirates as well as their opponents and generally have to sacrifice combat capability for cargo capacity. Although players can kill each other, there is no player elimination as players may draw a new captain (with a penalty) so it’s possible to come back from defeat.

Phantom Leader

Dungeon Lords

Bunny Bunny Moose Moose

Arkham Horror

Dominion

Nightfall

The Resistance

DungeonQuest

Review: Red November

Merchants & Marauders

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