Let’s Summon Demons , first play. Part of a KS (not mine) from Steven Rhodes Games. Steven Rhodes is known for his reimagining of children’s books from the 70s and 80s. The three games in the pack are Let’s Summon Demons, Let’s Dig for Treasure, and Don’t Talk to Strangers. Based on Let’s Summon Demons, these are all quite light games, possibly intended for non-gamers. In LSD, the object of the game is to summon three demons. You collect souls, which allows you to buy cards from the market, which give an ability and a value. Whenever anyone rolls the value, you get the action. You can discard normal character cards to bring out a demon. Nice presentation, with funky round cards (don’t think they make sleeves for that). As I said, it’s pretty light, but doesn’t outstay it’s welcome. Eventually one of the other players got an “I win” card, with an activation value of 2. And in a couple more turns, she rolled it, and winner winner chicken dinner.
Cascadia , first play. Been keen to get this going. For some reason last weekend I chose to play Arkham: Final Hour instead – what was I thinking? Cascadia refers (obviously) to the western North American region, bound by the Pacific on one side, and the Rocky Mountains on the other. Yeah, I didn’t know that either. Game is pretty easy to explain. There are five different region types: Mountains, Forests, Prairies, Wetlands, and Rivers. Tiles can have up to two regions. Each tile will also show the animals that can be on that tile. Animals are Bear, Elk, Salmon, Hawk, and Fox. Every game will have the same five animals, but there are scoring cards for each one, showing how you will score for them. We used the recommended A set for a first game. Basically, Bears scored for pairs, Elk for straight lines, Salmon for contiguous runs, Hawks for being by themselves, and Foxes for unique animals next to them. There are four different scoring cards for each animal, plus one more promo from the KS (I didn’t back it, just bought it). There’s also a family variant card, with simple rules for all five animal types.
There’s always a market of four habitat tiles, with each tile having a random wildlife token. So, you take both, and then add them to your environment. You start with a starter habitat of three tiles. No particular rules for placement, as long as one side connects the new tile. You don’t need to match types – but you will get points at the end for your largest contiguous area in each terrain type. Also, you can get bonus points for having the largest area for each type.
And, that’s about it. Take a tile and a token, add them to your tableau. Simple to play, but there’s a few combinations to run through. There are specially marked tiles, and when you add a token to it, you receive a nature token. Nature tokens will allow you to refresh the display, and also to take any combination of tile and token. Very very useful at times.
So the whole game you’re trying to balance your points, obviously getting as many points as possible from each animal. It was a pretty close game, scores were 94/88/84. Great game, it’s a keeper.
The Crew
Scout! , first play. This is a yet another ladder style game, where you play cards, and the next player has to beat that, and you keep going around. But it’s another of those “can’t rearrange your cards” games (like Dealt, which I played a few weeks ago). Each card has a main value, and another secondary value. If you turn the card, the values swap. When you get your hand of cards, you can turn them all around – just once, and only directly after the deal. There are only two types of hand to play – same value, or sequences of cards. You can only play adjacent cards from your hand. Sets of the same value are ranked higher than sequences of the same size. And that’s about all you have to remember. There’s a power lookup card with the game, but you really don’t need it.
So what’s the gimmick? If you can’t beat the current set of cards, you do a “scout” action, where you take either the first or last card from the current set of cards, and add that to your hand, anywhere you want, and you can swap the numbers. This (obviously) gives you more options, and the current set is reduced, making it easier to play again. The owner of that original set you scouted gets a VP if anyone uses their cards. The round is over when someone plays all their cards out, or (more often), everyone has scouted and it comes back to the same player.
As you play a new set of cards, you take the old one as points. At the end of the round, you’ll score these, and anything still in your hand counts as negative points.
I sort of stuffed up the game, we dealt out the cards and found we didn’t have enough. Turned out I had sleeved two cards into one sleeve – doh! Not just once ever, I managed to do it four times. We were keen to play, so we just continued with some naked cards. I thought the game was worth protecting, since its a Japanese import. I got my copy thru Morethanmeeples, a Brisbane based shop.
Batman:The Animated Series – Gotham City Under Siege , first play. This is a co-operative game, where the players have to defend Gotham City against waves of bad guys. You can play as Batman (duh), Robin, Commissioner Gordon, Batgirl, or Catwoman. There are four Acts, with multiple cards for each act that you randomly select. The act card show you how many story cards are used, how many masterminds, and how many villains to place in the city. Each character has a deck of six cards, you draw two cards, and choose one of them to play in the current act. The game board is quite cool, you have nine cardboard buildings to place. But the game doesn’t really use the buildings, enemies will be placed north, south, east, and west of the city. Your heroes can move to one of these, or take to the rooftops, which allows you to attack any direction.
Normally, each hero will have four dice (you can get bonus dice as well). You roll your dice, place one, then re-roll, until all your dice are placed. Dice can be played on your player board, skill cards, and story cards. Story cards may have a penalty for not defeating them – usually destroying a building.
There is a track for Gotham City, which tracks civilian casualties (you lose if it gets to zero), explosions (again, you lose if it reaches zero), and a bat signal (which allows you to modify a dice roll).
Any enemies left on a battlefield get to attack the city, once per stack of villains. Villains are stacked by rank, thugs are level one, henchmen two, ninjas three, and masterminds have a value of four. So you could have four attacks on the buildings in one go, which I thought would make even the first act pretty hard. But, we got thru the first two acts fairly easily, defeated all the villains, so there was no attack from you. In Act 3 we lost a couple of buildings. The last act was pretty epic, our civilian track was down to one, we lost another building, and we lost. Took a lot longer than I thought – I figured it would be another quick dice roller like Ghostbusters:Blackout (same publisher, IDW). But there was so much more to this game. It was pretty good fun, and not quite as I expected.
Goat ‘n’ Goat , first play, and it’s another Japanese import game. It’s a bit of a filler, not much to it, but we liked it. The cards are all goats, with values from one through five, and in three different colours. On your turn, you play as many cards as you like of the same value (we’re not actually sure if you have to play cards, or if it’s optional). Cards are added to existing cards of that colour, BUT if you play a lower card than one you already have, the entire flock is discarded (and become penalty points), and the new cards replace them. There’s a market of six cards, and you will draw according to the value of card you just played. Played all your ones, you only get to draw one new card. And finally, you can trade your flock of a colour into mountain cards, which are just VPs, from three to nine. So I guess it’s sort of push your luck, do you cash in early and get a lower VP value, or hang on for more. We didn’t get close to the eight and nine point cards. I lost pretty badly, just too many penalty cards at the end.
) within the guilds where goods travel around the guilds in a circular fashion. And since the goods are pushed or pulled by players, you can see high tide and low tide on each guild as you shuffle them around. Now you’re thinking if you wanna stick there long term in your guild or do you wanna switch to an abundant guild and push stuff to get loads of pts.