Once again UKGE (UK Games Expo) has been and gone, and was by all accounts bigger and better than ever.
This year the Press Preview was on the Thursday evening just prior to Open Gaming, so having been delayed by traffic on the drive up to Birmingham, it was a mad rush to get there in time.
Every year there seem to be more tables with more publishers and designers vying for attention, so with only an hour and a half to look around, these are the games that piqued my interest:
- A’Writhe
- Blood Red Skies
- Noggin The Nog: Tales of the Northlands
- Wreck and Ruin
- Miremarsh
- Kingdomino: Age of Giants
- Serengeti: Roll For Life
- Heroes of Dominaria
- Solomon Kane
A’Writhe: A Game of Eldritch Contortions
Publisher: Wizkids
Number of Players: 2–6
Play time: 30mins+
Age Guide: 14+
“It’s like Twister… with Cthulhu!” beamed the Wizkids rep as I took an glance at the brightly coloured tiles laid out before me.
“Like what? You can’t be serious! FFS, is nothing sacred? Surely we haven’t scraped the bottom of the Cthulhu barrel this thoroughly yet?”
At least that’s what my mind was screaming as a nodded politely and replied “Oh, really? Sounds… fun!”
Perhaps not the kind of fun my regulars will be expecting when they turn up at my house on a Wednesday evening, promised an evening of Lovecraftian entertainment. Or maybe I’m just being a Cthulhu-weary curmudgeon?
That said, at least it’s not yet another offering revolving around the acquisition/removal of sanity/health tokens. I’m just not convinced how into contortion the average board gamer is, or how into Cthulhu the average contortionist.
Blood Red Skies
Publisher: Warlord Games
Number of Players: 2
Play time: 30–60mins+
Age Guide: 12+
I grew up in the 70s and 80s, when it was still perfectly acceptable to run around with your mates, shooting each other with gun-shaped sticks, making machine gun sounds and adopting German accents straight out of an episode of ‘Allo, ‘Allo!
In my day if someone mentioned Warlord, they weren’t talking about a world-renowned miniatures gaming company either. They were talking about a popular (and vaguely xenophobic) comic featuring chisel-jawed uber-soldiers with names like Union Jack Jackson, who pretty much shat bullets, killing Nazis who only spoke English unless they were screaming “Achtung!”
Thus, wandering past a table of little Spitfires and Bf-109s I predictably paused for a gander, and was promptly (and easily) coerced into a quick round, which turned out to be the entire 4 plane dogfight. Which makes it quite quick. Which I quite liked.
It deals with the whole ‘altitude-problem’ inherent to all these dog-fighting air simulations with a clever “advantage” mechanic, that seems to just make sense. Plus I condone giving money to designer Andy Chambers solely for showing us his awesome Skaven army in White Dwarf all those years ago.
However, all the planes do feel a bit samey, and the game is of course a whopping great dice fest. I was also a little disappointed to discover the planes weren’t pre-painted. But it was quick and manic and fun, and a campaign would be great strung out of these small, rapid scenarios.
Noggin the Nog: Tales of the Northlands
Publisher: A-Muse-Ment
Number of Players: 1–4
Play time: 120–150mins+
Age Guide: 8+ (Seriously? Rules mod only!)
“In the lands of the North, where the Black Rocks stand guard against the cold sea, in the dark night that is very long the Men of the Northlands sit by their great log fires and they tell a tale…”
Oh dear. I’m back in nostalgia land, regressing to even earlier years.
My fascination with Vikings didn’t actually start with Blood Rage, but with the Tales of the Northlands: stories of Noggin the Nog and his companions, embarking on heroic quests, hanging out with Dragons and dwarves, and defeating the machinations of Noggin’s evil uncle Nogbad.
Happy days.
I’ve actually just introduced my 5 year old daughter to Noggin (preparing the ground for Blood Rage once she’s 6), so was eager to check out this offering, despite only spotting it just as everyone was packing up (sorry, got distracted playing with Spitfires and Messerschmidts).
I was actually expecting something fairly kid-friendly so was surprised to see a game that looked, and seemed to play, more like a medium- to heavy-weight euro game.
Players, taking the role of Lords of the North (a bit like the Game of Thrones type, but less ee-by-gum and considerably less slaughter-happy), offer resources and council to Noggin to aid the completion of saga quests and thwart the ever-lurking Nogbad. So I guess it’s kind of semi-cooperative.
There is apparently a cut-down version of the rules that is more kid-friendly, but I’m still not convinced that this isn’t just a huge nostalgia-fest designed primarily for kids of the 70s.
Which is absolutely fine by me.
Wreck and Ruin
Publisher: Dream Big Games
Number of Players: 2–4
Play time: 90mins+
Age Guide: 12+
The other thing that was a feature of fiction in my youth was the whole post-apocalyptic petrol-and-violence-fuelled wasteland. Movies like Mad Max and games like Car Wars and Battlecars.
Wreck and Ruin from first-time designer Mark McKinnon is an unashamed champion of all the things that made those movies and games great as you control a roving band of violent petrol-heads shooting and ramming their way across a hex-based wasteland map.
I won’t say too much about this game right now as I caught up with Mark later in the evening for a quick game, so I’ll post up a review in the next few days.
The Kickstarter campaign for the game is live at the time of writing and has just funded, so congrats to Mark, and if you like your future dark and spikey and smelling of burnt fuel and charred corpses, then head over and pledge your support.
Miremarsh
Publisher: Room 17 Games
Number of Players: 1–4(?)
Play time: 60mins+
Age Guide: 12+(?)
I’m a bit of a sucker for gloriously characterful art in a game, more so than funky miniatures, but this appears to have both.
Players control horrible little (expendable) goblins exploring their swamp home, slaying critters, avoiding traps and collecting shiny things. They work their way from their warren at the centre of the board to one of four spots at each corner, where they can complete a quest, become Goblin King and win the game.
Hurrah!
I like games that put you in the boots of unconventional characters (I once ran a Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay adventure from White Dwarf of dubious political-correctness, where all the players were pygmies), so this is now definitely on my watch list.
Let’s hope the gameplay lives up to the fantastic artwork and goblin minis.
Kingdomino: Age of Giants
Publisher: Blue Orange
Number of Players: 2–5
Play time: 15–20mins+
Age Guide: 8+
Both Kingdomino and Queendomino have garnered accolades the world over, so it’s hard to see how the publishers can go wrong with a modular expansion box for both titles.
For a start it contains a castle and king meeple to add a welcome 5th player to the game, and a dispenser tower for the tiles. More importantly there’s the titular giants, who players can move around in order to stomp all over their rivals’ hopes and dreams.
This works via special giant tiles that add giants to your kingdom, costing you points in the process by negating crowns. However, once you have these unwelcome residents, you can outcast them to another player’s kingdom. Ha!
Also included are objectives that make end scoring a little more interesting, and create the opportunity for additional tactics, which is never a bad thing.
Compatible with both King and Queen versions of the game, it’s hard to see this not flying off the shelves on release, although some may not favour the rather take-that giant element, or an added layer of complexity to a rather elegantly simple game.
Serengeti: A Roll For Life
Publisher: HAL-13
Number of Players: 2
Play time: 30–45mins+
Age Guide: 10+
The beautiful pencil sketches of animals are the things that first caught my eye, and the enthusiasm of the designer and artist kept me at their table for a while.
Serengeti: A Race For Life, was a 2-player card game released last year, featuring deck-building, dual-power cards, multiple ways to victory and a tug-of-war type scoring system.
The game revolves around tracking various creatures across the Serengeti, but it’s fairy abstract and quite a brain-burner thanks to the choices you’re required to make with regard to gaining majority control for some animal cards whilst also requiring them for their individual powers.
The new game brings dice into the mix (hence the name!) but with the same thoughtful gameplay and superb animal portraits. If you like your 2-player card games to be deeper than Jaipur and Shotten-Totten, you might want to check this out.
Heroes of Dominaria
Publisher: Wizkids
Number of Players: 2–4
Play time: 90mins+(?)
Age Guide: 10+
Wizkids bring Magic: The Gathering’s most iconic plane to the board game arena, where players build sites, rediscover lost artifacts, and confront the sinister Cabal in order to gain the resources needed to save the multiverse before rival heroes do.
It seems a little strange to me that the heroes wouldn’t work together to save the multiverse, rather than wanting to hog all the glory for themselves. It’s obviously all ego. Typical bloody heroes.
Like M:TG, players will draw mana to power abilities (and recruit heroes), and will construct sites in order to magnify these energies, channelling their power through various ley lines.
I only saw a very rough prototype of the game, and I’m not much of a M:TG fan (Jyhad FTW!), so it remains to be seen what sort of board game Wizkids can wring from the licence, or whether fans of the CCG will dig the kind of euro-style gameplay it seems to offer.
Solomon Kane
Publisher: Mythic Games
Number of Players: 1–4
Play time: 120mins+
Age Guide: 12+
Mythic Games launched the highly successful Mythic Battles: Pantheon at the end of 2016. So successful in fact that their partner on the project, Monolith went on to secure the sole rights from them, launching a new Kickstarter for version 1.5, with a Viking Mythic Battles (dubbed Ragnarok) planned for 2019.
Mythic themselves went on to release the equally successful Joan of Arc, and hinted at a licensed title in the works. That licence turned out to be Solomon Kane.
For the uninitiated, Solomon is a character birthed from the mind of Conan author Robert E Howard, and seems to exist solely to wander the earth, wallowing in Puritanical angst and defeating evil in all its forms.
As with previous Mythic titles, Solomon Kane is heavy on the miniatures, and the boards look quite similar to Mythic Battles and/or the Monolith titles Conan and Batman.
The game will be co-operative and narrative, meaning that players will relive the original Solomon Kane stories, but will be able to alter the story-line and outcome during play.
Rather than playing Kane himself or some similar Puritanical ass-kickers, each player embodies one of the four cardinal virtues (Courage, Temperance, Prudence and Justice), giving aid to Kane’s righteous fire when needed. If he succeeds, the players win, otherwise Evil triumphs.
It’s an interesting slant on the usual co-op play, and Mythic have a reputation for being as interested and excited about game-play as they are about cool minis, so this might end up a classic.
[EDIT: The Solomon Kane Kickstarter campaign has just launched and funded within a few minutes.]
