edwahn

Target audience: avid/hardcore gamers. Definitely not suitable for children/casuals/parties

Game mechanics: card drafting, dice rolling, modular board. Each turn you take is sort of a mathematical puzzle in how to most efficiently do something.

Game play: competitive or cooperative play through generic scenarios (e.g. “conquer 3 cities”) where players achieve victory points through many different feats. Be careful of game length – the 60 minutes quoted here is for the most basic and boring scenario. Generally speaking even a 2 player game takes 2~3 hours long, and you can linearly increase game length with player number.

Components: mostly cards, a modular board and plenty of tokens.

Players start with a nearly identical starting deck. Each card performs an action, such as “move”, “attack”, and “block”. However, they can be played inefficiently to perform any other basic action.

Each turn you play any number of cards in your hand to achieve something, whether it be something as simple as move and explore, or conquer a city.

Your deck grows in size and power as you “level up” and obtain stronger cards, but you can also accumulate injuries (in the form of cards) that slow you down.

The 4 characters in the game all have a different style of play, but in all honesty because the bulk of the level ups are from a shared pool, it tends to play out quite similarly.

Whilst the bulk of the game is monster slaying, there’s even a PvP mechanic to further increase the competitiveness of the game.

tl;dr
* Card game with a few tokens & individual player boards
* Easy to learn, suits casuals as well as strategic gamers
* Very quick game play (7 players in 30 mins)
* 75% strategy, 25% luck, but depends on the no. of players

The premise of this game is that it lasts 3 rounds, or “Ages”, where you have a hand of 7 cards, pick one to play and pass the remainder to your neighbour. This continues until you run out of cards, which is the end of an “Age”.

Play through 3 Ages with increasing rewards and win through accumulating victory points in several different ways.

Each time you pick a card it’s a toss-up between building up your future capability, immediate bonuses, flexibility, so on and so forth. The game is less in your control with high card variability but it still has plenty of strategic elements to keep things interesting.

One of my favourite things about this game is that you can easily finish a 7 player game in 30 minutes. Most games that involve this many people tend to last a very long time but not this! And it achieves this without robbing the strategic element… although with the large number of players, the variability aspect increases even more.

Pretty easy to learn and suits gamers of all sorts. The most hardcore gamers can keep themselves busy card counting, predicting opponnet’s moves and optimising their plays, the casuals can just plop cards down and come up with a score that isn’t downright embarrassing and I’m sure kids will enjoy the ample usage of primary/rainbow colours of the cards.