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Beasts of Balance

Beasts of Balance is a game of strategy and balance in which you build a tower of animals on your tabletop, then help them evolve in a connected digital world.

A cooperative game for one to five players, the aim is to make the most fabulous world you can by strategically nurturing and evolving your creatures and casting skill-based miracles – before your tower collapses.

Players take turns to stack a set of beautifully made artefacts into a tower. As they’re placed they pop onto the connected device’s screen, where they’ll be seen to evolve and grow as players continue to make tactical choices over how they build.

Our in-house designed technology uses a unique combination of sensors to recognise the pieces in play, connecting to the device over Bluetooth to tablets and smartphones running iOS or Android.

A merciless war is raging throughout feudal Japan, fueled by the hunger for power or the desire for peace of its great lords. As one of them, you must defend your territory from the enemy threatening your borders. Now it’s time to command you troops and read through your opponent’s strategy to take over the battlefield and prevail!

Kenjin is a quick and subtle card game of bluffing and tactics. You share two random battlefields with each of the players next to you: one worth 4 points, the other 6.

You get a hand of thirteen cards numbered from 0 to 3. They are your peasants, thugs, lords. On your turn, send two of them to one or two of your battlefields. When all the cards have been played, each battlefield is won by the player with the highest sum of card values there. Some cards are always played face up, others always face down. Some of them also have a special power: Use your peasants (0) to lure your opponent’s troops to a battlefield, or to score more points if they survive. Play a Lord (2) early as it’s strengthened by each new reinforcement thereafter.

Terrains also impact a battle’s outcome: Peasants take arms to protect their rice fields, while military strength is not always enough when you fight over a palace. Once each battlefield has been scored, the player with the most victory points wins.

Hey quiz slingers!

If you love ya quizzes and like yer lists, then welcome to my game – it’s like an old-style Western shootout but with brains for guns.

First, someone’s gonna ask y’all a question with a ton of correct answers. Find an answer and live to play another day. Get it wrong, and you’re out. But find a golden answer and you’re into the shootout.

The survivors of a long-ago invasion have taken refuge in the forgotten underground city of Gravehold. There, the desperate remnants of society have learned that the energy of the very breaches the beings use to attack them can be repurposed through various gems, transforming the malign energies within into beneficial spells and weapons to aid their last line of defense: the breach mages.

Aeon’s End is a cooperative game that explores the deckbuilding genre with a number of innovative mechanisms, including a variable turn order system that simulates the chaos of an attack, and deck management rules that require careful planning with every discarded card. Players will struggle to defend Gravehold from The Nameless and their hordes using unique abilities, powerful spells, and, most importantly of all, their collective wits.

Quinns: You and I need to talk about Not Alone. There are more exciting card games out there, and funnier ones, and ones that are sharp as a tack, but Not Alone is the most deliciously playable little game we’ve encountered since Crossing. This box might as well be full of popcorn.

Between 1 and 6 players are the survivors of a crash-landing on a wild alien world. This team (possibly made up of just one nervy player) is opposed by one final player controlling the beast that lives there. A long, thin board measures the progress of each team: The humans win if they can survive until help arrives, the beast wins if it can wear down the humans and absorb them into the ecosystem like beer into a shag carpet.

Each turn, each human player plays a card face-down showing where they’re going, and the beast has to second-guess their movements and slap fat poker chips onto those locations, invalidating your turn or worse. If the beast itself catches you then it devours a precious “Will” cube.

Do I have your interest? Of course I do. You’re a weak-willed human, and this game is a seductive new land. Let’s go exploring.

It is the 25th century. You are a member of an intergalactic expedition shipwrecked on a mysterious planet named Artemia. While waiting for the rescue ship, you begin to explore the planet but an alien entity picks up your scent and begins to hunt you. You are not alone! Will you survive the dangers of Artemia?

NOT ALONE is an asymmetrical card game, in which one player (the Creature) plays against the rest (the Hunted).

If you play as one of the Hunted, you will explore Artemia using Place cards. By playing these and Survival cards, you try to avoid, confuse or distract the Creature until help arrives.

If you play as the Creature, you will stalk and pursue the shipwrecked survivors. By playing your Hunt cards and using the mysterious powers of Artemia, you try to wear down the Hunted and assimilate them to the planet forever.

NOT ALONE is a light immersive card game resting on guessing, hand management, and a pinch of deck-building.

Paul: Quinns. Quinns I have a strange comment from you here in the Games News notes. It just says-

Quinns: DO NOT READ THAT OUT.

Paul: “Where did the boobs and swinging dicks go”?

Quinns: Ok, I can explain.

Paul: There’s no need! It’s a question all men must eventually ask themselves.

Quinns: I don’t doubt that, but that note actually refers to the Kickstarter for Kingdom Death: Monster, version 1.5. Not only has Kickstarter’s most ambitious board game made a comeback, it seems to have been de-sexed.

Who wants to get extravagant! Inspired by his own Chinatown review, Quinns has published a negotiation triple-bill. Three new smallbox games, each one telling the story of dividing up loot after a cool crime, but each with a radically different approach.

At the time of writing H.M.S. Dolores looks like it has some European stock availability, but Millions of Dollars and Gentleman’s Deal aren’t yet broadly available for purchase. If you want these games and can’t find them, simply call your friendly local game shop (or your friendly regional game shop) and put in an order.

Every division of booty is a tense situation. Will you be the Mastermind, the Driver, or the Snitch?

Millions of Dollars is a hidden role game with no elimination and non-random distribution of roles in which you negotiate and talk your way into as much loot as possible. Choose your role well and disguise your duplicity until the moment that you can play your cards just right…

In this game, you turn into one of the influential citizens of a small but very wealthy town. Gathered together with others authoritative persons like yourself in some hidden place, you share money earned from another shady business. You need to use all your diplomatic tricks to make deals to determine how much money everyone collects. Can you be silver-tongued enough to please everyone, including yourself? You should because the player with the most money wins the game!

Gentleman’s Deal is a diplomatic party game about sharing money. Each turn, one player becomes a dealer and receives a secret card with the amount of money they must share. They make offers personally to each player, then those players simultaneously vote “yes” or “no”. If a deal was accepted by a majority of players, they gain all offered by dealer and the dealer takes the rest! The dealer must balance between being too generous and too greedy because if a majority of players vote to decline their offer, the dealer heads to jail and must skip their next turn.

Acquiring money isn’t the only goal of the deals. Players also share useful contacts represented by the cards of different accomplices that give powerful benefits, and everybody wants to obtain them.

The game ends after several rounds depending on the number of players, and whoever has most money wins!

Beasts of Balance

Kenjin

Mr Lister’s Quiz Shootout

Aeon’s End

Review: Not Alone

Not Alone

GAMES NEWS! 28/11/16

Triple Review: H.M.S. Dolores, Millions of Dollars AND Gentleman’s Deal!

Millions of Dollars

Gentleman’s Deal

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