Blog Archives
Drafting Deep Space Nine
Among the Stars seems to have been designed to push nearly every one of my nerd buttons. An alliance of aliens working together? Egalitarian Future Button! Assembling a unique space station? Deep Space Nine Button! Card drafting? Drafting Button! Designed by a dude whose name is so unpronounceable to my thick English tongue that it might as well belong to an alien? Alien Board Game Designers Button!
Zombie Fifteen Apostrophe
Real-time games hold a special place in my heart, mostly because many of my best gaming memories revolve around the absolutely bonkers Space Alert. My family played through the campaign mode from the expansion, and even bought my dad a captain’s shirt one Christmas. “Listen up,” he’d say at the beginning of each run. “Emilie, you’re taking care of energy? Son, you’re going right? Somerset, left? Who’s going to jiggle the computer mouse? Remember to say if you need cards.” Then we’d press play on the CD player and proceed to panic like a chicken with its head, legs, and wings chopped off and rearranged at random.
Suffice it to say, Zombie 15′, which pits a pack of fifteen-year-old kids against a zombie horde, with only fifteen minutes to escape each of its fifteen scenarios, sounded exactly like my sort of thing.
Get Ready to Make an Impulse Purchase
“Impulse” doesn’t feel like a very good title for Impulse, the newest game by Carl Chudyk, whose previous games I didn’t play but probably will now that I’ve played Impulse. While I realize they’re going for the “driving force” definition, especially since the game’s impulse track is what enables all of your potential actions, “Impulse” makes it sound like a game about making snap decisions. And that couldn’t be further from the truth.
“So if you’re such a title genius,” you’re probably thinking, “what’s your title?” Well, yeah, I’ve got one. It’s perfect.
Space Deliberation.
Boom.
Beep. Beep. BEEPBEEPBEEP!
There are a few reasons why I’m not the ideal person to review Legendary Encounters: An Alien Deck Building Game. For one thing, I didn’t play Legendary: A Marvel Deck Building Game (because I don’t really read comics), so I can’t talk about how this version compares. Second, I don’t like most deck-building games all that much. And third… Alien³ is totally the best Alien movie, right after the utter perfection that is Alien: Resurrection.
Okay, go ahead and scrub that last sentence from your memory.
I Survived Quartermaster General
Behold him, standing there, bewildered and exhausted, wild eyes casting about. He whispers something, though you cannot hear until you lean in close. Closer, he beckons. Then, from between cracked lips: I only am escaped alone to tell thee.
What could it mean? Possibly that this poor dude had to spend a weekend playing Quartermaster General.
City of Turnips & Engines
Today, you are privileged — privileged — to receive a guest review from Somerset, who is possibly Space-Biff!’s most dedicated reader. Today, she’s going to tell us about an expansion to one of her favorite board games, City of Iron, which we reviewed over a whole dang year ago, which makes this sort of a special event.
Always been convinced that srikas are the sure way to victory, but never quite been able to prove it in gameplay? Well, here’s your chance to show everyone your srika strategy is now totally viable. Experts and Engines, an expansion for Ryan Laukat’s City of Iron, spices up the game with four new elements. Each nation becomes more diverse, steambots arrive on the scene, Kraxian Pirates make their debut, and new buildings and towns are up for grabs. Take a look after the jump.
Kemble Was Actually Just Some Dude
Every now and then, a board game comes along with an idea that makes me think, “Why didn’t someone else come up with that sooner?” In the case of The Battle at Kemble’s Cascade, the topic is classic arcade shmups. Don’t know what a shmup is? It’s a—
Hold on. This is the internet. Go look it up yourself, slacks.
What I will tell you about is The Battle at Kemble’s Cascade, which mostly — mostly — captures the spirit of those arcade classics.
Alone Time: Darkness Returns Twice
When you’re a force for righteousness like myself, there’s nothing quite so satisfying as driving a holy relic through the eye socket of a foul necromancer. Ah! The splash of his brain-ichor, cold and rancid, soaking the cuff of my tunic!
There are very few games that provide necromancer-slaying goodness quite so well as Darkest Night, one of my favorite solo and co-op games from last year. Its first expansion, With an Inner Light, which added the incentive of quests to get you roaming the map more and just hanging out in the mountains and forest less, was too.
So the question: are the two newest expansions for Darkest Night, On Shifting Winds and From the Abyss, as good as we’ve come to expect from Victory Point Games?
Hyperboringa
I’ll come out right and say it: Hyperborea isn’t actually hyper-boring. That was just too good a pun to pass up.
Rather, Hyperborea is interesting. Interesting and also, unfortunately, a disappointment to its mother. She tells people it’s an investment banker.
Dead (But Not Sick) of Winter
We’re all sick of zombies, right? I mean, unless you’re one of the hundred million people who keep buying all those zombie-themed games, the ones with the ludicrous quantity of undead minis, and the dice games, and every single thing with a dismembered hand on the cover, the zombie thing feels pretty played out?
I understand. And I agree. Zombies have run their course. Down with the undead. Long live the living.
But you’re going to have to take my word on this one: Dead of Winter from Plaid Hat Games is another game with zombies in it, but even so, it’s pretty much the best game of 2014. So buckle up, keep that shotgun close at hand, don’t trust anyone with a bleeding bandage on their arm — no matter how many times they insist they just snagged it on a broken window — and get ready to see how good a zombie game can be.
SPACE-BIFF! 