When I was in school there was an interesting sporting endeavor undertaken by students called “in for the boot” played on rainy days. The name is misleading as we all wore running shows in the school. Some eager player would shout out the aforementioned game title and everyone would plaster themselves to the wall staring intently at the center point whilst simultaneously avoiding pushing and general jostling. Well healed students would then start to throw coins into the center until one plucky chap would quickly make their way to retrieve the small treasure pile….. Now (and this is where it gets interesting) players attempting to take the money could be targeted with kicks from the other players and indeed kickers would now also be open to a kicking themselves as they would have to leave the sanctuary of the wall to administer their kick. It generally turned out to be quite… Kinetic. As an aside, the players being teenage kids and therefore build from kevlar and elbow rarely got seriously injured. Rarely.

Kemet is based on this game. I’m sure of it. I wouldn’t be surprised to find the designers went to my school and having taken the prize fund from the center used it to fund the design of Kemet. It makes sense.

I spoke about Kemet some months back having been lucky enough to bag a copy for xmas. It hadn’t seen the table in a while which is a pity because it’s just so much fun. It did once again grace our table last Thur after much debate on what to play. The game plays up to five and I reckon five is the perfect number for it. Odd numbers in conquest games always work well.

Kemet (from the Ancient Egyptian “Ke” meaning “in” and “met” meaning ” for the boot”) sees you and your godlike chums trying to get to either 8 points in a short game or 10 points in a long one. Truth be told you could play to anything you like, but 8 will see a good Larry, Curley and Mo style slapping around for 90 minutes or so. 10 will run to 2 hours plus depending on how you play. Add in smack talk, coffee, food and pauses to laugh at other’s misfortune and you’ve a full evenings entertainment right there

First and foremost this game is all about attacking, none of your namby pamby turtling here, attack attack attack and if it doesn’t work out well then sacrifice your surviving attackers to your god and get your money back.  Repeat again.

The map depicts an Egyptian like region with your cities and pyramids and a dozen or so desert locations on the map some of which contain temples. Temples are like King of the hill spots and give you a temporary victory point IF you control it at the end of the round. Lose or leave the temple unoccupied and you return the temporary point. Controlling a temple also gives a little bit of cash (ankhs) and controlling two at the end of the round will give you an additional more important permanent victory points. Ankhs are used to recruit troops, pay for teleports, upgrades and tech cards.

Like most games, it’s all about the points, winning a battle gives you one (oh err missus) as does controlling the temple of day and night if you sacrifice some of your men to it at the end of the round. Holding onto stuff is tough and everyone else is waiting in the wings to stomp on you when you weaken. Battles are bloody, it’s quite possible for you to win a battle but all the combatants to die. Couple this with a tight map and easy teleportation and it’s domination meets free for all. Every round will see multiple battles but they tend to be quick and simple and don’t hold the game up. Battles don’t rely on dice, a set of Game of Throne style battle cards make it a little more predictable. Divine intervention cards drip fed to you each round can be thrown in to the mix to add bonuses and buffs.

While not busy murdering everyone else you can spend ankhs on upgrading your three pyramids (cleverly depicted by big four sided dice in three colors) which grant you access to more powerful tech cards some of which grant you access to the always popular Monsters. Monsters act like a big brother and accompany your mannish armies into battle and add to you attack abilities. They also grant other boons like increased speed, negation of other monsters, better defense and so on and of course they’re monsters!

What I love about the upgrades is it’s a bit of a grab fest. Each is unique so once you get a tech card it precludes everyone else from taking it. None of them are particularly overpowered, well some of them are better than others for sure but if you lose this game it wasn’t because someone had better cards than you. The tech cards are suitably themed, with three different branches open to you and enough variety in there that every game will play out a little differently.
There’s a nice level of vindictiveness in here. Battle cards picked before a tussle can see you losing but giving the attacker a sufficently bloody nose that they’re now presenting to every other grinning player

The build quality is excellent. The models and cards are on par with anything Fantasy Flight have released, mine could certainly do with a good painting (that said my car could do with a good vacumming out and the grass could do with a good cutting but only two of those are likely to happen anytime soon). The theme is perfect, you can picture the clashing armies, blood and boiling sands and the gods above directing it all and loving the specticle. Artwork is excellent. Each faction features different types of humanoid models. While not on par with say Blood Rage they’re more than sufficent for the job at hand.

What I like about this game is the offensive nature. If you’ve played a lot of map conquest games you may have developed a conservative expansionist play style. This game will shake all that up. It is possible to defend your spots and win, in fact no one path will win, but glory and more importantly points are in attacking. There’s a hard limit on units so having more than two armies in the field is risky but then again in this game what isn’t. A single round can see everyone’s armies knocked down like nine pins and one player standing tall, just to be dragged down the round after by freshly renewed enemy armies.

Games are always close, 8 points for a win leaves a lot of players losing by one point and someone just being pipped at the post is always great in games. For a conquest game there’s unusually a urge to play again straight away and at 90 minutes that’s perfectly ok.

I highly recommend Kemet. It you’ve played Cyclades there are similiarites but this has it’s own vibe going on so buy both (and eat cake) and combine them. You can do that.

Great game, great fun.

Huzzah!

Vic

Stone Age is a worker placement game with dice rolling for 2-4 players. Worker placement games are funny beasts. I’ve played many fine worker placement games all essentially the seem ingredients but all completely different experiences. Stone Age is definitely one of the better ones. 
The game sees you starting with a small group of meeples trying to gather resources and score more points than your opponents. You do this by assigning them to the limited spots on the map. 

These coveted spots allow you to increase your population, your ability to feed your guys, give you tools that add pluses to your die rolls, build point scoring huts in your village, grab point scoring civilization cards or grab one of the five different resources (food, wood, clay, stone and gold) 
Some of the spots allow space for only a single or a single pair of meeples and Jumping on these preclude others from taking that action this round. This is the primary way to cock block opponents. Early on the birthing hut, farm and tool shop is usually chockablock. Equally the scoring spots are coveted towards the end and the ever popular making out hut loses its appeal for many. 

There are multiple routes to victory and doing it before others is key. It IS dice driven and the games we played saw some epic low rolls BUT you can guard against this by investing in tools which add pluses to the role. Like any worker placement it’s a case of keeping all you plates spinning. Get more population and you need to feed them. Get dudes our hunting up food and you take them away from gathering point scorning resources. Don’t feed them and suffer hefty point fines. It’s a fine balance. 
Some people will dislike the dice rolling but I don’t, it all averages out and the last time we played it we laughed from start to finish of the game. In my book THAT’S a great game. Oh and the build quality especially the leather dice shaker (sorry vegans) is out of this world

Huzzah!
Vic 

It’s not so long ago I spoke about Survive! I’m back to talk about Survive! Space Attack which is pretty much the same thing with a different skin and a couple of extra rules and considerably more FUs
I don’t have a copy of Survive and maybe neither do you so this seemed the logical choice to go for. If you own survive already it’s not different enough to warrant a purchase IMHO. 
The new version is set in Space (the final front ear /tugs ear) onboard a disintegrating Space Station. You need to get your chaps off and into the four corners of the map for them to survive. 

The space station is made up of 30+ hexes that get removed one tile at a time by players each turn and unleash all sorts of nasties into the already fraught air space. 
The game comes nicely packaged with all the pieces bagged and tiles nicely seated in the box insert. The bits and bobs are solid and the artwork nice. It’s not quite as nice looking as survive but that’s a matter of opinion. Production values are good. The aliens are wooden meeples and don’t inspire horror but this is a family game (for evil families) and it’s more than sufficient for the gaming ahead of you. 

Each turn sees you moving your dudes towards safety, picking another hex of the space station to destroy, kicking off a mini event on the back of the hex you picked and taking temporary control of one of the marauding aliens to frustrate someone else’s plans. 
In this game is absolutely not enough that your dudes survive it’s key that everyone else’s don’t or at least sufficiently few of them that you beat them. To aid this aside from momentary control of some of the aliens at the end of your turn you also get tiles that allow you to juxtapose two dudes, fend off aliens, bring in escape pods and fighters. 
The new bits come in the form of laser turrets and zippy one seater fighters. These allow you to zoom around like the queen in chess and ram monsters or drawn a LOS and zap them. Once zapped they get taken off the board and placed in front of you to be laid down later in the most inconvenient locations for other players

This is a good solid fun game. The extras add to it but aren’t essential. It reminds me of the Tsuro of the sea versus Tsuro. It’s not a new game it’s more a version 1.1 with the .1 being more screw your opponent options which lets be honest is always a good thing
Huzzah!
Vic 

Being an evil overlord is a thankless job. More accurately it must be viewed as a vocation and certainly not one for the faint of heart. It requires dedication, single mindedness and a deep love of others misfortunes. You must be true to yourself and always false to your enemies. i.e. Everyone, maybe even yourself if the situation calls for it.
I grant you It’s not for everyone. If watching gallant heroes crawl over piss soaked broken glass to ALMOST make it doesn’t beep your jeep than maybe you need to look elsewhere for your jollys buddy. An app will never replace an evil overlord. Never. Never. Never. Enjoy the practice but when you want a real game. I’ll be waiting…. /manic laughter /thunder and lightning

Level 7 omega protocol Is a game that demands an evil mind to run it properly. A team of tooled up marines are trying to achieve some get to the end of the tech dungeon style mission. Along the way the evil overlord (whatever they’re called) is throwing stingers in front of them trying to slow and hopefully kill them. Lose enough guys and it’s game over.
If you’ve ever played any dungeon crawler ever you’ll be in familiar territory. It plays like any other but with more ranged and explosive weapons.

What’s different and interesting with this one is the adrenaline mechanic. Marines start with a certain amount of adrenaline (action points) they can spend each turn. So moving, firing, opening doors and so on takes points. The cool bit is, at the start of the next round you hand over all the action points you spent. So if you’ve really gone for it this round old evil dude really gets to party next round. It works extremely well. It also scales very well for more or less players.
The overlord has a set of evil options he can power with adrenaline. These vary from scenario to scenario with better monsters and more screw yous opening up as the scenarios progress. Each of the evil powers have a cool down period after they get used which prevents spamming of just one option.
Another neat feature is choosing a stance at the start of each round. So you might plant your feet and increase your defence and aim or go reckless advance and reduce aim and armour for speed. Choose carefully
Classes come in the form of leaders who buff other players. Medics. Heavy weapons guys (I liked him), demolition and recon dudes. Pre mission purchases allow you to trick out your boys with grenades, extra armour, medic packs and so on. Then it’s off to certain doom (if I’m the evil overlord)
Rules are clear and concise. Production quality is good but not exceptional. Some of the minis on the version I played were warped and they’re not the most exciting models in the world. The marines models are mostly feature few swat dudes and the aliens you face are a rum bunch of pretty dull, different sized greys with scuba gear.
Setup is pretty quick. Somewhere in between Heroquest and Mansions of Madness. I particularly like the overlord control panel that clips together all your tools of torture for that scenario into one big happy kit.
There’s theme in here and a back story too but it doesn’t matter. You’re here to do a job, chew gum and kick ass.
It’s a lot of fun to play. Games can suddenly go from easy to rock and making it to the end can be a challenge.

It’s a pricey game but it comes with a lot of models and a good selection of scenarios so you’ve quite a bit of to get through if you stick with it. Which let’s be honest you won’t… Come on did you finish any other dungeon crawl? No you did not. But have fun while you play this one. It’s good

Huzzah!

Vic

Most games give you some clue as what they’re about. Diplomacy, Civilization, Merchants and Marauders.  Small World not so much.

13 Days. The Cuban missile crises is very like a cut down version of the mighty Twilight Struggle.  
Unless you couldn’t guess it, it’s based on the 13 days of the Cuban missile crisis in 1962 where JFK and Krushev “oh yeah’d?” each other to the brink of nuclear war. You get to do the same with a chum. 
The game is VERY similar to Twilight Struggle but plays out in 45 mins or so. It happens over three rounds on nine locations with four moves per round. (As opposed to roughly 30 odd locations, 10 rounds and 7 turns) 

At the start of the round you draw three and choose one scoring agenda card. You mark the three locations of these so your opponent has a clue what you’re up to. You then draw five strategy cards and play them out twilight struggle style either kicking off the event or using the control score to dominate battlegrounds. Strategy cards are either neutral (UN), USSR or USA. use a card with your opponent’s flag on it and they get to trigger the event while you get the control points. 
You also squirrel away one card for the end game. When the dust settles you add all of the USA and USSR points allocated to this at the end and the highest gets a bonus couple of points. 

While this is happening you need to keep an eye on your position on the defcon track. While as a rule it’s better to be ahead of your opponent you don’t want to wind up in Defcon one and the have the whole world go Alderan and you remembered as the button pusher. Adding troops to a location raises your defcon level. Removing them reduces it so choose your battles carefully and more importantly con your opponent into committing force to the wrong places. 
There’s a shit ton (a scientific measure) of strategic options here. I like that there’s no dice. It’s not required. It’s all about out guessing your opponent. The game is fast. It demands replays and that’s exactly what I plan to do
Huzzah!
Vic 

You’ve NEVER played Risk? We recently found a player who hadn’t played it and like the plants from planet of the apes there has to be more.
Risk just like Diplomacy is as old school as it gets. A lot of players started on their gaming odyssey with this very game. Bless you Parker brothers.

The first thing that strikes you about Risk is how small the map is. We’ve become so used to big boards for our games and the need for some more real estate for our own game boards and bits and pieces. Not Risk! It will fit snugly on your granny’s fold out table with lots of space for cups of tea. You start with your counters on the map, gain a few more each turn and if you’re lucky gain a card each turn. That’s it.

The game is the quintessential map based conquest game. There are multiple variants, versions, themes and house rules but the classic base game sees you drawing a secret mission like “wipe out blue” or “conquer Asia and Africa” (good luck with that) and off you go dominating the world or at least the bits that matter to you. Bonus points for paranoia from never quite knowing what your opponents mission is until the final slap down. Interestingly I believe the expression “goddammit I would have won next turn” originated from Risk and has been popular ever since.
The map of the world is made up of around two dozen locations which you can solely occupy with your armies. The more locations you occupy the more reinforcements you gain at the start of your turn. On top of that you gain bonus armies for controlling whole regions. Owning all the territories in Australia gives you two bonus armies. Controlling North America five and so on. Don’t bother with Asia for its dizzying seven bonus armies. It’s wayyy too hard to hold. If you conquer at least one territory in your turn you get a cards. Cash in three and more lovely armies for you.
Combat is simple and dice based. As a general rule bring more armies to a fight and you’ll win but not always. There are many exaggerated stories of one army holding off a dozen with lucky rolls.
The game is quick or it can be. I’ve seen games over in half and hour. I’ve seen them run for two.
Alliances rise and fall, usually extinguished after the sentence “why are you sticking so many armies next to my border?”. It’s fun it’s quick it’s simple. It’s been around longer than Adam’s apple and there’s a very high chance you’ve played it to death. If you haven’t it’s definitely worth trying. Don’t go looking for the greatest game ever designed (that’s Diplomacy). Enjoy it and move on. It’s definitely worth your time
Huzzah!
Vic

Coup is a great filler game, unfortunately like a lot of good filler games you play too much of it and you tire of it. G64 is good but it never stuck with my group. Hoax from Fantasy Flight has possibilities at least for a while until like Ming the Merciless we tire of it and blast it into space

Hoax is pretty similar to Coup. Each player gets a role card (one this time) but can CLAIM they are anyone and use their ability. An ability might be to take stuff from opponents, claim certain tokens from the central pool and so on. The goal of the game is to correctly identify a player and knock them out (last player standing) or have someone accuse you of NOT being a claimed role and prove them wrong by proudly showing the card to them.

Unlike Coup there are now three resources, the always popular Cash, Evidence and Prestige. During your turn if you have a set of all three you can directly accuse a player of being a particular role and knock them out. Equally during your turn when a player claims to be a certain role you can shout “PULL THE OTHER ONE!” or something similar and everyone votes with thumbs up or thumbs down if they agree with your surmise.

This is a dangerous gamble because if they ARE the role they claim and everyone votes they’re not they automatically win the game. After your first few games of automatic wins you’ll lose your coup instincts and take a more slow route to victory. If someone isn’t who they claim to be they get a marker on their card showing them as not being that role and blocking them from using that ability again and narrowing down whom they could be

Getting a set of three tokens together allows you to do a fuzzy check of whom they are. The target draws three cards whom they aren’t and one whom they are and shows them to the questioning player so you can narrow down who they could be.

Rinse and repeat until you win. Hopefully.

Games last anything between a minute and ten. It’s good clean fun while it lasts and there is a real urge to play again. I can see this as a worthy successor to Coup if you’ve had enough of that.

Huzzah!

Vic

Remember playing dots when you were young? Welcome to Android Mainframe! It’s a light, fairly short area control game, playable by up to four, set in the android cyberpunk universe. 

A better analogy would be the old arcade game Qix If you remember it….. No? Ok doesn’t matter. It’s like that if you do. 

There’s a theme in here too but I can’t be bothered digging into it. Each hacker starts with eight control tokens, a hand of three special cards and eyeballing the other players across an empty (very nice click together) plastic grid. To score points player have to do the following, stick down their control points then surround them with little (Catan road like) blue sticks. To facilitate this players draw from a face up spread of four cards. Each card shows either a Tetris shape of blue sticks the player can place or a tricksie move sticks/move control point one. 

Once a player surrounds one of their control points it’s locked in place and cannot be changed. At the end the more space you control the more points you get. More so if you have multiple control points in it. 
It’s quite tactical. You can’t capture an area of someone else’s control point is in it with you so cutting people off, moving their guys, changing their almost complete zone, basically being a dick is all fair game. Obviously I like it 

To add a little variety each hacker starts with three unique one shot fairly powerful cards from a pool of six. The game rattles on for twenty minutes or so until all the cards run out the it’s count your points. 
Production wise it’s Fantasy Flight good. I really like the click together board with recesses for pieces. Art work is on par with the android card game. Pieces and cards are solid 
It’s a good filler game. As always I’ll have it at the next Knavecon. Well worth a look 

Huzzah!

Vic

Onwards to Venus is a fairly new game by his holiness Martin Wallace set in the Steampunk world of Doctor Grordbort. Five mustachioed nations set out to be the most points dominant amongst equals. The map consists of a half dozen planets or so each seeded each round with a number of random one use tokens. 
The game plays out over three rounds and sees players raising troops and traveling out to planets to claim tokens and execute their respective actions. These actions could be build a mine. Build a factory. Start a fight. Grab some cards. Up your score or selflessly fight an uprising. 

Building stuff increases your income and having the most presence on planets gains you victory points. It’s standard enough stuff but where it gets interesting is the uprisings. Planets don’t like your type around here and as time progresses are more likely to rebel and wipe out your great works and everyone else’s there. Going against your lifelong principles you may find yourself quelling these and helping others by helping yourself or more comfortably sitting back and letter someone else do the dirty work and gaining the benefits. Quelling uprisings is key and a real gamble. It’s a sweet mechanic. (There’s also a third option of ignoring them and having everyone on the planet burn with you when the moon men (or whomever) rise up)
Theme is strong here. It’s all daring do. Steam powered contraptions and outlandish WW1 styling, larger than life heroes and death rays. I love the vibe. Games are close run with plenty of cock blockery and the occasional rumble. It whizzes along at a jolly old pace and it scales well with more players (max 5)

There’s going to be a few copies floating abut at Knavecon 8 (Sept 17). It’s good clean jolly old fun. Perfect for ladies and gentlemen of good standing
Huzzah what what!
Vic