Freshly added to BGG, May 8, 2022
I’m back from another dive into the obscure depths of BGG with plenty of new titles to expose to the lights of Solitaire Times. Starting with Volters Lead the Way! (mostly because the title saved me from wondering too much where to start this time), a solitaire “push-your-luck” wargame by Hermann Luttmann in which you fight aliens on Mars or on the Moon. It’s already available on Tabletop Simulator.
Next, another wargame about fighting against alien invaders: Irish Freedom. This is actually a re-implementation of an older title. What can I say, to me it looks pretty much like any other wargame, but the Irish map looks especially pretty.
And since we’ve got a theme here apparently, let me introduce you to Borikén, another wargame, this time focused on the Taíno people, who got wiped out by the first European Colonists –starting with Colon himself. If you’re strong enough to go through your own genocide, you can re-play their fate in this P500 GMT game.
And finally, we have Bretwalda, a game to be launched on Gamefound in June, that focuses on Dark Times Britain. Fight off the Viking invaders, spread Christianity, and establish your supremacy over the island in this game where “bartering and alliance-building are essential to success”, per the BGG description. Maybe if the AI doesn’t surrender to your terms, you might point out that it relies on you to run even its most basic algorithms? “Let me take that city or I unplug you right away!” (Disclaimer: maybe the solo mode doesn’t feature an AI, but yes, I’m willing to bet on it).
I’ll end the series of the “fight against invaders” games by closing back the loop to Sci-Fi with Defence Net, an “Invader Busting Roll ‘n’ Write game”, which is a PnP that looks quite intriguing in its mechanics.
And now, on to my favorite theme: corporations in space! With In The Shadow Of Jupiter, you’ll build stations on Jupiter moons by managing your resources like any good CEO, for profit and glory, but mostly profit. The goal is to mine the Exonium out of Jupiter clouds because this new completely made-up element would apparently resolve the energy crisis on Earth. Running an affair has never been such a noble cause!
A bit more dream-like, Stellarion, the last born in the Oniverse series, will send you to space as well. Managing resources is also your focus there, but the goal is a bit more naive: to simply go through the immensity of space to explore stars, planets, and nebulas (somebody has to do the job of searching for the Exonium, don’t you think?).
Which leads me to Nocturnally, a co-op memory game, mostly aimed for children. The punch line is that “players help each other remember the cards” so that if you play solo, I guess you’re screwed and all is left is to stare at the dark depths of night, like a disturbing reflection of your own hollow memories.
Another children's game, this time from Phil-Walker Harding, Scribbly Gum! You must scribble a way on your tree diagram to collect as much food as possible to feed your baby moth. If it doesn’t sound clear, please complain to the BGG description. Even W. Eric Martin didn’t know what to write about it.
The next one is Anthromancer, an abstract fighting game where you capture enemy cards and can play special abilities called “harmonies” to, I quote, “dramatically alter the board state”. The game can also be used as an oracle system, and should eventually pop up on Kickstarter.
If you still have some fighting spirit in you, then I offer you Spellstorm, a deck-building, asymmetric game where you battle a powerful monster by using the unique magical powers of your character! It features a ninja, a dragon, a radical activist skeleton, and a disturbing pink fluffy bunny who wonders whether it would be okay to hold your hand (I guess not, you need it to weave magic against your opponent right now).
PnP time! Agents of Adventure, already available on pnparcade (https://www.pnparcade.com/products/agents-of-adventure), is a dice allocation game with pixel art in which you go on adventures with a party of heroes from the 1920s. The game features a large variety of missions to choose from, each with its own specific setup and objectives.
Speaking of adventure, in RuneScape Kingdoms: Shadow of Elvarg, a game based on an old MMORPG, you’ll go through a campaign in the course of which you will complete quests, level up, and encounter bosses, as you would expect to do in an MMORPG. You’ll get to craft weapons as well and, something that I appreciate and that would be faithful to the spirit of a video game, it’s up to you to meander fulfilling every side quest, or to optimize your way to get to the final quest as quickly as possible.
Utterly unrelated, Oink Games, the expert of small-boxed minimalist games, is publishing a new soloable title, Town 66. It’s a tile-laying/pattern building game in which you try to lay the 36 building tiles on a 6x6 square while obeying some strict placement rules, until you either place them all and win, or can’t place a tile and lose.
And because there shouldn’t be any Freshly added on BGG post without an expansion and a game about trains, I present you the On the Road expansion for The Grand Carnival, where you take the show on the road across the USA, the show being basically a bunch of tiles you lay on a grid. Each city features unique scoring conditions (but you only play one every game).
And because, to be honest, the previous title is not really about trains, I have saved a final PnP for you, Paper Railroad. You roll dice and use the results to move your train in this pick-up-and-deliver roll ‘n’ write, the ultimate goal being to bring the maximum profit to your own company.
