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…
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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!
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Eric M. Lang and Bruno Faidutti have joined forces to create the ultimate prisoner’s dilemma game. Do you cooperate and risk getting outsmarted by a greedy player? Or do you compete and risk losing everything?
You are pirates who just looted a ship and must negotiate how to split the treasure. There are seven types of loot with values from 1 to 3. At the end of the game, you only score the treasure types you have the most and least of.
On each turn, open four new treasures: two in front of you and two in front of your neighbour. Simultaneously decide how to split them. Choices:
Peace (I want the 2 in front of me)
War (I want them all)
First pick (I want just one, pick first)
If both players choose peace, split the loot evenly. If both choose war, lose all treasure. If both choose first pick, lose all treasure.
The game continues until the Dawn Card is drawn. 15 minutes!
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Paul: Oh my word. I have had A Hot Time in Texas and, boy oh boy, I can’t wait to tell you all about it. Do you want to know all about BoardGameGeek Con 2016? Are you settled and ready? Are you prepar- I DON’T CARE LET’S GO.
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“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!
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Quinns: GOOD MORNING everybody! Who’s excited about board games? All of you? Not yet you’re not. Soak up the below news like an high-end paper towel and then we’ll talk.
Fantasy Flight has announced the next big box expansion for the superb Android: Netrunner, and it’s Netrunner Legacy.
The copywriting on the announcement page for Netrunner: Terminal Directive is a bit of a nightmare, but basically anyone who owns a Netrunner core set and the Terminal Directive expansion will be able to play through a narrative campaign of runners vs. corporations. Sealed packs of never-before-seen cards will be opened one after another as a cyberpunk murder mystery plays out, and players will apply new stickers to their faction’s sheet as they win or lose games.
Going into this expansion blind sounds like a delight. Not only do you get the surprise of adding brand new cards to your deck, you then get to surprise your opponent as you unleash them mid-game!
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Quinns: Alright ladies and gents. Today we’re tackling a box of unparallelled size and charisma. The publishers tell me that there are less than 3500 copies of Vinhos Deluxe Edition (the Kickstarted re-imaging of 2010 wine-making classic Vinhos) left, and I want to make sure that you guys have the chance to buy one.
It takes a lot to excite me these days, but Vinhos Deluxe Edition managed it. Contained in this box is nothing less than a torrent of beautifully-illustrated tokens, a board that’s positively threatening in scale, and a fat, clean manual written with wit. It even has nice fonts! In a board game!
But it takes very little to make me nervous, and Vinhos Deluxe did that too. The rules that make sense, like buying vineyards or aging wines, contrast fiercely with the more arcane regions of the board, where players claim score multipliers or manoeuvre their action-selectors.
Any inference you want to draw from the header image of this article is correct. This game’s a beast to play, it’s tougher to teach, and it’s even harder to review.
Obviously, I couldn’t be more excited.
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Vinhos (the Portuguese word for “wines”) is a trading and economic game about wine making. Despite its small size, Portugal is one of the world’s leading wine producers. Over six years of harvests, cultivate your vines, choose the best varieties, hire the best oenologists, take part in trade fairs, and show your opponents you are the best winemaker in the game.
As winemakers in Portugal, the players develop their vineyards and produce wine to achieve maximum profit. The object of the game is to produce quality wines that can be exchanged for money or victory points.
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In what’s surely our most mathematically pleasing podcast ever, today Paul and Quinns discuss 6 games (2 of which they’d recommend) before answering 4 emails and examining 2 folk games. What’s next in this sequence? Why, your enjoyment of course! Games discussed in this cast include the bucolic visions of Dream Home and Cottage Garden. We’ve got two spritely deck-building games, Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle and Aeon’s End. We’ve also got two interesting spins on existing classics, 4 Gods being a wild interpretation of Carcassonne, and Mythos Tales as a Lovecraftian sequel to Consulting Detective. Enjoy, everybody. And credit to Peter Dringautzki for the podcast image, with his beautiful photo of Cottage Garden!
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Paul: Hello hello hello Quinns, what is new with YOU this week? What is new with me is that my phone broke. But then I fixed it again. So it’s fine. It’s like those sitcoms where nothing fundamental ever changes.
ALSO I guess I found a scratch and sniff board game and now I feel funny. Let me tell you about The Perfumer.
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