» Card Games
Monday, August 30, 2010
Happy Birthday to Atlas Games
Atlas Games is 20 years old this month, and founder John Nephew has put out the word that they’re celebrating. If you’re lucky, you may still have time to get a free birthday gift box of Atlas Games stuff – the first 250 folks to order it and pay for their own shipping will get a semi-random assortment of games or game related items from the company. Even if you miss out on the birthday goodies, stop by the website and wish the Atlas crew a happy 20th, with many more to come.
Friday, August 27, 2010
OgreCave reviews – Nile & Knock Down, Drag Out
Our latest new reviews come from Demian, who has tried his hand at a pair of recent card games – several hands, actually. First he describes Minion Games’ Nile, an agriculturally themed game done in a classic style. Then Demian holds no punches in his review of the wild western brawl card game, Knock Down, Drag Out by Interaction Point Games. If you’re craving a dust-up, but aren’t looking forward to bruised knuckles and lost teeth, you’d do well to check this game out.
Sunday, August 8, 2010
This just in from This Just In From Gen Con, Sunday 12PM 2010
Looking forward to the inevitable late-night recap episode, but here are our notes for the supposed last TJI of the year, with guests Monte Cook, Robin Laws, and Eddy Webb.
- The White Wolf party apparently exceeded expectations.
- Again with the Iron Tyrants!
- The 5-2-1 rule, expert mode for the 3-2-1 rule.
- True Dungeon finally gets a mention. It doesn’t seem to be on everyone’s lips as in past years.
- Skulduggery sounds hot.
- Hamlet’s Hit Points
- Mars Colony
- ICONS
- Blood Bowl Team Manager, and acknowledgement that FFG’s announcing things before they have a release date is irritating as all hell.
And that’s Gen Con. Hope you had fun!
Saturday, August 7, 2010
This just in from This Just In From Gen Con, Saturday 11AM 2010
Continuing the TJI adventure:
- Sandstorm, the new publishers-facilitators-whateverers of Eclipse Phase as well as… Poo.
- Apocalypse World
- Steal Away Jordan
- The D&D “Never Split The Party” contest
- GlowFly Games, who I think are set to publish Globalization?
- DC Adventures from Green Ronin. Also Dragon Age and Song of Ice and Fire.
- Artists Echo Chernik, Matthew Stewart and Christopher Shy
- No idea what this sales-skills game is. It certainly sounds like a subject amenable to a teaching game, though. Hell, some people say that’s basically what business school is.
- The Game Crafter, printing board games on demand
- There is a LEGO Games booth??!!?? I DEMAND PICTURES. [EDIT: Done. -A]
- Happy Birthday, Robot!
- Blowback
- Infrno online tools for tabletop play.
- Iron Tyrants! There are a couple of great making-of articles at the site.
Sunday, July 18, 2010
OgreCave Gaming News Update – Colby Dauch
Because we know you can’t get enough, we’re starting the week with another Gaming News Update interview. This time Lee Valentine chats with Colby Dauch of Plaid Hat Games and Hasbro’s Dungeons & Dragons Heroscape line. Colby has several projects in his queue, both freelance designs and new Summoner Wars releases, which Lee quizzes him on for this new episode.
By the way, if you still haven’t familiarized yourself with Summoner Wars we’ve got a review of it right here.
Friday, July 16, 2010
OgreCave reviews – 7 Ate 9, Super Circles, Third-World General
To help keep us up to date on the mass of card gaming goodness available these days, Demian has sent over his thoughts on 7 Ate 9 and Super Circles (both from Out of the Box), and on Third-World General (Battle Bunker Games). As it turns out, at least one of these failed to fully convey its “goodness” to him, while another was selected as part of OgreCave’s Christmas Gift Guide 2009. We trust you’ll figure out which is which.
Wednesday, July 14, 2010
OgreCave Gaming News Update – Petroglyph Games
In our latest Gaming News Update interview, Lee Valentine chats with Chuck Kroegel of Petroglyph Games about the company’s plans to release a card game, a board game, and a PC game in the next few months, all about a single fantasy setting. Kroegel, Petroglyph’s General Manager and one of the company’s designers, goes into the details of their plans to present the world of Graxia to the greater gaming public.
Monday, July 12, 2010
Dust Games Products to Move from AEG to FFG
Alderac Entertainment Group announced on July 9, 2010 that most of the Dust Games design library they have published or were going to publish (excluding The Adventurers) will be moving to Fantasy Flight Games. Some games involved in the transfer include Dust Tactics, City of Thieves, Arcana, and Mad Zeppelin. The increasing number of games on AEG’s release schedule was going to require the company to grow faster than it was prepared to, and may have forced AEG to release multiple titles per month to keep pace with both its own planned releases as well as those of Dust Games. AEG will cut the total number of scheduled releases to provide adequate playtesting and support for each product they do release. The company also plans to focus on its core product lines that are already doing well (such as L5R and Thunderstone), and may push some other new games back to 2011 release dates. GenCon 2010 events that were scheduled for the affected products will go on as planned, only to be run by FFG staff instead of AEG. (Full AEG announcement copied below.)
Friday, July 2, 2010
Alderac Has a Steady Summer Launch Schedule, Culminating at GenCon
Alderac Entertainment Group (AEG) has big plans for the gaming industry this summer. They have a strong list of games to be released between now and GenCon. All these products will be available at the AEG booth at GenCon, and there will be demos and scheduled events for their new board and card game products at the show. From Legend of the Five Rings to Mad Zeppelin, AEG has a full gaming plate for the next few months.
[EDIT 7/12/10: some of the releases below have changed due to AEG's recent arrangement with FFG to take over Dust Games releases. -Allan]
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Tuesday, June 29, 2010
2010 Origins Award winners announced
Though the news trickled out in other ways, the 2010 Origins Award winners have finally been announced. Among the highlights: the rerelease of Space Hulk beat out Small World for Best Board Game; Looney Labs continues its streak with a Best Party Game win for Are You the Traitor?; the return of WizKids and HeroClix gets a nod for Best Miniatures Line; and Eclipse Phase wins for Best RPG. (Click through to read the full list.)
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Friday, June 11, 2010
Cooperative Space Hulk in the cards
In my high school days, when free time was more plentiful and friends didn’t have jobs or families yet, it was common for us to spend all afternoon on a game of Games Workshop’s Space Hulk. Well, as common as I could make it – after a while, some of my friends grew tired of sending squad after squad of space marines to near-certain doom in genestealer-infested derelict ships. I usually got to play the genestealers, and as such, often ended up winning, which I didn’t grow tired of at all. In any case, years later, the end result has been that we all have less time to game together, and I seem to be the only one always down for some Space Hulk.
Fantasy Flight’s upcoming Space Hulk: Death Angel – The Card Game, due out this summer, may help me get my fix, and convince my buddies to give it another try as well. Playable in 30 minutes to an hour, Death Angel lets each player control a set of two space marines as they try to destroy the alien threat. Location cards will determine how many critters the squad will face, Action cards will determine what marines are doing, and troopers’ facing will still be important. Since cooperative games are the growing trend lately, that’s exactly what Death Angel players will get – if even one marine completes the mission, everyone wins; if not, everyone loses. Up to six players can join in, and even if I can’t find anyone to help me quell the xeno threat, the game can be played solitaire (in which case, I’d control three sets of marines).
It occurs to me that cooperative is what Space Hulk always should have been. Yeah, we could make teams, but it’s not quite the same – if we had all played against the game, against the inscrutable, automatic advance of the game’s genestealers instead of against the genestealer player, it might have been even more exciting and memorable. This iteration of the the Space Hulk theme could be just what I need to entice a few volunteers to go into Overwatch and blast some ‘stealer scum.
Wednesday, May 5, 2010
May a fifth be with you – tequila or something else, doesn’t matter
Catching up with some news:
Green Ronin announces DC Adventures RPG on the Mutants and Masterminds engine. Great for GR, but I’m trying to imagine DC-owned characters I’d want to play with, and the only one coming to mind is the Spirit, which I don’t think really counts. Not feeling drawn to Watchmen, even, unless it had an awesome pirate minigame. Tiny Titans would be fun though.
Looney Labs announces Back to the Future: the Card Game. I’ve played Chrononauts variants that focus on a small set of fictional events, and they’re great – the game can really be a platform for interesting things, in the same way that Fluxx can. Of course, we don’t know yet whether this will be that, exactly.
Some of the LEGO Games line is on Amazon now. I’ve got Lava Dragon and Minotaurus.
That’s right, bring Papa some Roman action. (Link is less dirty than I just made it sound.) As Purple Pawn noted, Arcane Legions has a foot in two worlds but isn’t really finding its footing in either. Pro tip for Wells Expeditions: that booster bundle is pretty pricey. If I could get its contents piecemeal, though, I’d probably have given you that $80 by now. And no, I don’t have a way to give it to you piecemeal.
In other news I’m reading the Dresden Files RPG and it’s hot. If it’s gonna be in Borders (and it is), then it’s mainstream, and this is most of the last ten years of indie innovations in traditionally-structured gaming, brought to the mainstream. Don’t let anyone tell you it’s “indie in mainstream clothing:” as of this book, this stuff is mainstream, simple as that. If I understand correctly, you can now buy the PDF separately from the print preorder, so if an urban-fantasy game is up your street, hit that up.
Tuesday, April 27, 2010
The Spoils CCG Rescue Mission
Since Tenacious Games went out of business there was some doubt as to whether The Spoils CCG would ever produce a new set. When Arcane Tinmen acquired the rights to produce The Spoils, a limited number of tournaments and casual play sessions restarted for the game. Now, for the first time, Arcane Tinmen is producing a new expansion set release. The new set is called Seed II – Gloamspike’s Revenge. Arcane Tinmen is offering full sets of every card in the release and deeply discounted package deals through participating local game stores and via direct sales.
Tuesday, April 20, 2010
Petroglyph knows how to double-dip
Panzer General: Allied Assault is a card-based wargame, on the abstract end as these things go, for Xbox Live Arcade (published by Ubisoft). Also, it’s a card-based wargame for… cards and a wargame. Both are developed by Petroglyph Games, and the interesting bit is that Petroglyph doesn’t appear to have bought out a tabletop publisher, or subcontracted anything, or… even redesigned the game. That’s right – we now live in a world where an Xbox developer can make a board game, and use the proceeds to make a board game. I mean, I could be wrong but these cats do not look like dabblers to me (and if there’s one thing I’ve seen a few of, it’s dabblers).
The sequel, Panzer General: Russian Assault, is paper only, out in September. Another card-based game, Guardians of Graxia, will hit simultaneously in summer for tabletop and PC. I’m glad to see them branch out beyond WWII theming, which doesn’t really float my U-boat, but I’m also (weirdly enough) glad to see them stick close to home gameplay-wise… this seems like a rich vein.
Friday, April 9, 2010
Convention report: PAX East 2010
PAX East 2010 recently landed in Boston, MA, and being a local, loyal Cave dweller Lee Valentine was more than happy to check out the show for us. From nifty card and board games to big-budget electronic titles, the Penny Arcade Expo doesn’t disappoint, as Lee tells us in his report on the first ever PAX East. There’s even a Wil Wheaton cameo – how can you not give it a read?
Saturday, March 27, 2010
Origins Awards 2010 nominees announced
As per the usual pattern, as the GAMA Trade Show ends, this year’s contenders for Origins Awards get sorted out and announced. As per the selections made by the Academy of Adventure Gaming Arts and Design, the nominees for 2010 are listed below. In Card Games, The Stars are Right is up against Thunderstone and Martian Fluxx for the award; in Board Games, Castle Panic is fighting to beat Small World and the Space Hulk rerelease; and the Doctor Who: Adventures in Time and Space RPG is hoping to snatch the RPG award away before Eclipse Phase or A Song of Ice And Fire can grab it. But we won’t know the results until the Origins Game Fair this summer, where the attendees will vote to decide the winners. (By the way, more than a few of the nominees were part of our OgreCave Christmas Gift Guide 2009. I’m just saying.)
Friday, March 12, 2010
Accumulated things we should mention
Sleep is Death, a two-player game for PC and Mac in which one player acts like they’re playing a basic point-and-click RPG, and the other has 30 seconds per turn to arrange the world’s graphics around them to make it seem like they are. Yes, they get to prepare some of the graphics. Yes, this is as simple and completely awesome as it sounds. Stupid cheap, too.
Iconica, a gorgeous indie card game being sold on Etsy. The linked post is subtitled “Not Just Another Pretty Face,” but frankly doesn’t make much of a case for that; the game seems like it might be a little samey and tough to learn, and the world-building seems pretty generic. But oh, that design. I’m also interested in Etsy as a venue for sales of actual independent games, as opposed to just crafts based on video games.
Deathwatch, the third core Warhammer 40K roleplaying game, has been announced. I only bring it up because I keep seeing threads about it and thinking, “that’s a bit harsh, it seems like the system has plenty of support and I don’t know why anyone would think it was dyi– OH WAIT”
Thursday, February 25, 2010
PAX East on final approach, and selling out fast
One month from tomorrow, on March 26, PAX East, the second location for the Penny Arcade Expo, will hit Boston, MA full force. The new show, a spinoff of the original PAX in Seattle (dubbed “PAX Prime” by many), had already sold out of full-show passes over three weeks ago, and with only a few hundred single day passes currently left for Friday and Sunday – well, if you were on the fence about going, you’d better commit or forget. This inaugural show’s official schedule just went up yesterday, adding to the considerable excitement that resulted two weeks ago when Wil Wheaton was announced as PAX East’s keynote speaker. If you can’t make it out to Boston, OgreCave will have a representative at the show in the form of Lee Valentine, frequent Cave dweller and one of our staff writers. Actually, he’ll be there whether you attend or not, so… yeah.
Friday, February 12, 2010
OgreCave review – Thunderstone
Before I head off to DunDraCon for the weekend, I’ve posted Lee’s latest review. This time, Lee has provided us with his thoughts on Thunderstone by Alderac Entertainment Group. This new card game is a deck-construction title along the lines of Dominion, and hopes to tap into that game’s large fanbase. Have a look, or browse through our other reviews for more gaming recommendations.
Thursday, January 28, 2010
Wizards not planning to renew Star Wars license
Earlier today, Wizards of the Coast made an announcement on the company’s message board confirming what has been rumored for a while now: when the Star Wars license comes up for renewal this May, Wizards will not seek to renew it. In the announcement, Greg Yahn, WotC’s Director of Marketing, states “We had a long and fantastic run, but with the economic downturn, we have made the tough decision to discontinue our Star Wars lines.” WotC products for the Star Wars Miniatures Game and Star Wars Roleplaying Game will be available through August, with multiple new releases scheduled through April. Wizards had first taken over the Star Wars license from Decipher back in 2002, starting with WotC’s version of the Star Wars CCG.
Tuesday, January 5, 2010
OgreCave review – Summoner Wars
Lee has provided us with another review to add to the Cave’s stockpile today. This time, we hear all about Summoner Wars, a card-based wargame from Plaid Hat Games. How does it compare to other wargame choices you’ve tried over the years? You won’t know until you read it.
Thursday, December 24, 2009
OgreCave’s Christmas Gift Guide 2009, part 4
This is it – Christmas looms on the horizon, just one day away. But say you’ve forgotten to get a gift for someone, a fellow gamer, and there’s no time to get to the stores anymore. Fear not, for the Cave dwellers have compiled one more list of gift suggestions in our OgreCave Christmas Gift Guide 2009. This fourth and final list provides An Aetheric Guide for Christmas, our traditionally last-minute PDF/downloadable product list. Just read through the list, select a few pre-screened OgreCave recommendations, and download your gifts as needed. You don’t have to risk wading through last-minute shoppers – they’ll be like a pack of sugarplum-crazed elves by now.
Here’s wishing you a safe, happy holiday season, from the staff of OgreCave. Seasons greetings!
Sunday, December 13, 2009
OgreCave’s Christmas Gift Guide 2009, part 3
If you plan to give gifts this holiday season – or better yet, receive them – you’ve surely been perusing local stores and forming a list. The Cave dwellers have done the same, in the third section of our OgreCave Christmas Gift Guide 2009. This portion, the Twelve Boxes for Christmas, focuses on board games, in the hope of guiding some of your big-ticket expenses toward enjoyable gaming choices.
All that remains is our traditionally last-minute PDF/downloadable product list. We’ll be sure to drop it down your chimney when you’re least expecting it. … No, that’s not a euphemism for anything! Sheesh!
Thursday, December 10, 2009
AEG’s Thunderstone, Infinite City get lost in transit
Getting a product to market can be problematic in any industry, but the game industry gets more than its share of complications. Today AEG revealed that its shipper, currently in the throes of cutbacks, has misplaced Thunderstone and Infinite City, which were due to arrive last month. Todd Rowland, AEG’s Senior Brand Manager, summarized the chain of events in a forum post. Here’s the relevant bit:
The shipment of Thunderstone and Infinite City has been lost. It was due to arrive in Mid November and we have been told it was “in transit” or clearing customs for 3 weeks. Yesterday the shipper admitted they could not find it and after a long night of waking people up we have located the missing shipment. For some reason it had been diverted to Charleston SC and will not arrive until next week. To make matters worse it has been flagged for customs check and that will take an additional number of days.
Rowland goes on to admit it seems unlikely either game will reach stores before Christmas, but hopes gamers will consider them a “great way to ring in the New Year.” More precise release dates will be announced once AEG has a delivery date.
I remember when Godlike arrived in the states from being printed in China, and then the container remained locked down in customs for a month. This was extra frustrating for the publisher, as the warehouse it was to be stored at and distributed from was literally right across the street from the customs office. But darn it, those games sure look suspicious – better double and triple check them for contraband.
Saturday, December 5, 2009
Beware of lurking ninja
Today is the Day of the Ninja, December 5th, and we nearly failed our Spot check. We didn’t manage to get a Games of the Ninja mini-feature put together this year (feel free to check out last year’s page, though), partly because we couldn’t think of any new ninja-related games we’re dying to play. So, here’s the question: if you were to celebrate the stealthy assassins today – and who wouldn’t? – what game(s) would you be throwing down with?
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