I spoke about this a few months back and have been slowly chewing through rules and getting games to the table from my stack of Unplayee played stuff. Did I do the clever thing and not buy more games when I already had a stack to play? Of course not, what a suggestion!  

So first world problem. I still have the following to learn and play so what do YOU recommend I learn and play next ?

• Race to the Rhine
• Merchants and marauders
• Marco Polo
• Tournay
• Way out west
• London
• Risk godstorm
• Theseus the dark orbit
• Last night on earth
• War of the roses
• Last will
• Vasca de gama
• Twilight Emperium 
• TE Shattered empire
• Spyrium
• Orleans
• A distant plain

A strange thing happened the first time I read the rules for Evolution…. I understood them. This was novel. It’s usually takes a good half dozen (or dozen) Reads to get me in that zone. 
Evolution has got a really elegant set of rules. When you read them they all solidly clack into place. You would really need to go out of your way to get them wrong. 
The theme of the game is lovely. You and up to five opponents create all sorts of weird and wonderful creatures and try to secure the most food and thereby score before the others do.  

Everyone starts with one tiddler of a creature and a hand of attribute cards. Your creatures have two attributes, size and population. Your creature starts size one and population one and by burning cards you can increase either of these stats or bring in more creatures to play. 
Your cards have a second way cooler ability adding up to a max of three attributes to your little creations. There’s around twenty attributes a key one being carnivore. 

Creatures start as plant eaters and have to share or more accurately try and grab before everyone else, food from the central pile that you secretly contributed to at the start of the round. Certain attributes like foraging and long neck allow you to grab some of it before the others. If there isn’t enough food to feed your creatures it will cause their population to drop. If you don’t get to feed them at all in a round they go extinct. Sad face. 
Now for the good bit. One of the possible attributes is carnivore and if you make one of your lads a meat eater it can attack other people’s creatures gaining you food/points and reducing your opponents population. Win win. Other attributes like hard shell, horns, climbing and so on make it harder to be eaten. Yet other attributes allow your creatures to work together as a group and provide various offensive, food and defensive bonuses. 
There’s a nice line in bluffing and out thinking your opponents here. When it’s a larger group of players it becomes a bit more chaotic. I love that there’s no one route to victory and plans have to be revised on the fly. A big carnivore can be brought low by lack of food. Likewise a big population of small long necked foragers can Hoover up all the plant food before anyone else gets a look in and thrive. At least for a while. 

Production values are excellent. The pieces are solid and the artwork excellent. It’s very shiny and polished. I particularly liked the loot bags and player cheat sheets. 
Kids are going to love this as much as adults. The theme is so strong. All in all I’m delighted with it and want to play more. Not sure I’ll race out and buy the expansion for it. There’s a lot of play in the base game and I like that
Huzzah!
Vic 

I love a clever game app. I like quick, cheap and innovative (oh err missus). I recently bought Reigns which has for a few days has been hoping around in front of me like an excited child on various gaming portals. I dipped in

Reigns is stupendously simple single player ruler game. You play on your phone/device/computer and take the role of a king who exercises their power by making one of two choices from those offered each round by your various cast of minions. 
So for example your general might appear and say there’s Vikings attacking from the North and your options might be to Attack them or Defend against them. Every choice has an effect on your four resources. The church, the people, your army and your gold. There’s a fifth resource as such, your life, which can end very quickly indeed if you make bad choices. 
When the game starts you have a limited amount of event “cards” in your deck and these get turned over each turn and present you with choices. I say limited but there’s actually quite a few in there. Cards are probably a bad description too. They’re more like short pages from a fighting fantasy novel.  
Once you kick the bucket and you will sooner than you think you get go start a new reign as a fresh King and hopefully learn from your earlier mistakes. As the game progresses you might encounter new characters that add additional cards to your deck. These characters are permanent in a legacy fashion. So once you meet the doctor all future Kings will have access to the cards he brings. There’s a good number of these characters so it will take some time for the experience to feel stale. 
The four resources are a clever mechanic. You really need to balance all four. You get an option to build up your army for example and approving this increases your army but reduces your gold. On the flip side not building up your army decreases your population (from attacks I presume). Likewise building a hospital helps the people but decreases the church who don’t hold with new fangled ideas. Choices have other knock on effects too that lead to other cards. So a peasant revolt not quelled might lead to an arson attack on your castle and so on. It’s usually the best worse choice you’re hoping for and every action has a cost.  

A resource dropping to zero spells the end for your reign as does pushing any resource too high. Too much church power and they rise up and take over and so on. I’m not saying it’s turn based flappy birds…. But It’s sort of turn based flappy birds. 
On top of this there’s a couple of mini games that can kick off like fencing, gambling, walking the dog, navigating a labyrinth and so on. These are fun little distractions and have of course knock on effects. Various events and choices can cause continuous effects (also bad) like famine where your people are reducing each turn so your other choices require you to above all else increase the population. 

Games are always over too quick. You slip up and BOOM! you’re dead. Death is always just around the corner and it’s a tough game to survive in for long but there’s such a “one more go” vibe you don’t get too upset by the loss. 
There’s a great sense of humor in there too. Some interesting references to other games and movies. Weird stuff happens every so often like your alchemist finding mushrooms and suggesting you try them out. A witch cursing you with old age so you can’t read what people are saying. After dozens of plays it’s still not got repetitive although the same themes pop up again and again. I’ve no doubt I’ll bore with it at some stage but for now it’s proving go be a great little mindless distraction. 
It’s not a serious game. Sometimes it’s impossible to continue no matter what choice you take and that’s ok although I would prefer everything based on my decisions rather than luck based. Maybe it is and I’m just a terrible King. 

The meta game across all the reigns is clever too offering challenges of achieving certain things on each reign. Recruit the doctor. Fight the dragon and so on. Building certain things like barns and city walls carry on in the next reign and offer help in different situations 
It’s a slick little app. The graphics are minimal but very effective. It has a lovely style to it. A sort of 2D vector graphic look. I really like it. The theme is very tongue in cheek throughout 
It’s really simple to play and I see the developers are working on updates to it which is great. I can see this style of gaming appearing more in the future and lots of clones popping up 
All in all for the price of a coffee this is great fun and I highly recommend it
Huzzah!
Vic (the wise)

Den Drover’s Age of Empires Three: Age of Discovery was re released as Empires: Age of Discovery with a new coat of paint and the empires expansion built in. It’s a lovely game. It’s also a pricey game but you can see where your money is spent. It’s also got next to nothing to do with age of Empires 3 the video game. Which is probably good 

It’s been a number of years since I played it and taking it back out again at a recent games night made me remember what I really liked about it. The player interaction or in our case name calling, cursing and triumphalism. 

E:AOD sees up to five players (six with the expansion) setting out to discover and exploit the new world in the 1800s. (North and south America). You start with a number of eager colonists and take turns placing them, one at a time on various spots on the mustering board. So it’s worker placement but there’s also a little (or in our case a lot) of skirmishes thrown in there as well.

Key to your strategy is grabbing those key spots before anyone else does. These grant you access to initiative (player order), trade goods (having sets of these generates gold), the docks (allow you to send colonists off to already discovered locations in the new world), civics (allows you to buy age specific bonus yielding events and amenities), specialities (allow you to recruit special colonists like soldiers, captains, missionaries and traders) and finally conflict where you can issue orders for your in place soldiers to fire their weapons at another player’s colonists. 

As the game progresses over eight turns new ages arrive offering new and more powerful (and expensive) civic cards and between age shifts see points scored for having the most and second most settlers in regions. This is where conflict comes in where you want to whittle down the enemy or out settle them to claim control of an area. 

Early on the game is all about building your economy and discovering new regions later it’s about dominating and messing up everyone else’s plans. Well let’s be honest from the get go it’s all about messing everyone else’s plans and what’s great about this game is messing someone else’s plans up doesn’t necessarily detract or retard you from achieving yours. 

Production values for this game are high. It’s full of models none of them particularly good or high detail but more than adequate for the job just like the ones in War of the Ring. I particularly like the nice plastic gold dabloons which are definitely the best coins in any game I’ve seen. I haven’t seen in person the newly released version but from the pics it looks even better it’s also as pricey as all get out. 

The game is fast with little downtime. There’s no dice in here so it’s all down to decisions and there’s just the right level of vindictiveness available to you. Theme is good. It feels right for the era and gameplay is solid and slick. The whole thing reeks of quality and well thought-out-ness. 

I’d have no qualms at all recommending this game. It’s pricey but it’s a game you’ll come back to again and again. Top marks
Huzzah!
Vic 

My Recent games of Epic have made me revisit Ascension and more importantly Star Realms having not played either in a long time. The apps for both of these are really slick. Really slick and very accessible 
Star realms is an excellent game and although some argue Ascension is superior I reiterate the important point that Star Realms has space ships in it. Lots and lots of space ships which I think you’ll agree is a fairly unassailable argument

Since I left it another couple of mini expansions have been added bringing it up to a total of Five. The ones I haven’t seen so far are Heroes and Events. 
Events are just that. When a card is drawn for the trade row and it’s an event,it kicks off. Typical events would be both players draw two cards, both players lose 5 authority. Some of the events offer choices like lose x life or lose a space station and so on. There’s only eight of them btw and it costs €2 for the expansion so make your own mind up on wether it’s worth it

Heroes are a rum bunch of cheap cards that give you one off abilities, a lot like gambits. These selfless dudes and dudettes once sacrificed give you extra cards , a bit of attack some life and so on but more importantly they come in different colours so are a handy way of triggering aligned abilities

There’s an extra few campaigns in there too (that nobody plays) for your buck

At the end of the day Star Realms is still a cracking game. Multiplayer is as popular if not more popular than it was a year back. Games are fast and it’s a hell of a lot more balanced then Epic. That said I’m still really really bad at multiplayer so if anyone wants to up their win percentage I’m your huckleberry 
Huzzah!
Vic 

I’m slowly working my way through the games I picked up at Knavecon 7 (and 6 and 5) no doubt almost in time for more impulse purchases at Knavecon 8 in September. 
Next on my hit list was EPIC a game by the good people who brought us the excellent Star Realms.  
Epic reminds me of a cut down version of Magic the Gathering or Hearthstone Dialed up to 11. It sees you and any number of other players (but probably one) dealing up a random deck of thirty cards each for a game from around one hundred and attempting to knock the stuffing out of your opponent before they do onto you. There’s nothing particularly new or innovative here. Which is fine. It’s good fun while it lasts and it’s not expensive. 

Players start with thirty health and a hand of five and each turn they draw one more and can either kick off an event or two or summon champions (creatures) to do your bidding. The limiting mechanic is one gold per turn and most of the events and creatures cost one to kick off (unused gold doesn’t carry over at the end of a turn). Lesser creatures and events cost zero so you’ll be playing one or two cards at most per turn
Everything you’d expect From a Magic type card game is here. Instants, Interrupts, enchantments and a dozen effects and abilities. If you’ve ever wanted to dip a toe in the water of ccgs this is a great taster. 
Creatures and events are suitably epic. The story is about gods using earthly champions to do their bidding whilst assisting with the odd godly event. Cards come in one of four colours and various events or champions affect “allied” cards in positive or negative ways. 

The game is very intuitive if you have played any collectable card game ever. Raise a nasty army. Attack your opponent and avoid getting hammered by your opponent. It’s absolutely not collectable and everything you need is included in the stout little box of cards. Some bonus cards came with the kick starter but there’s more than enough in the base game. 
All the cards as suitably epic. Creatures are big and Nasty. Events are apocalyptic. Even the weeny creatures sorry champions come with some Nasty sting in their tail. Economy management is simple,there isn’t one. You have one gold and off to the one gold shoppe you go at the start of your turn and choose one epic card over another. 
Cards are a little unbalanced and luck plays a decent part in your game. Some of the champions are ridiculously overpowered. 18 point attack and defense sand worm for example. Equally some of the events are epic. Remove all champions from the game and so on. It’s good fun but definitely not a competitive or balanced game. If you want that there’s plenty of them out there. 
Art work and production values are excellent. The game will well outlast your desire to play it. I’m sure someone out there has put deck protectors on their copy but not me. 
If you want something generic, fun and cheap that you’ll tire of pretty quickly but not feel cheated by the entry cost, look no further, Epic is one of the better also ran card games out there. 

Huzzah!
Vic  

I remember reading some cheesy confuscious parable about a monk showing his master a handheld game and saying it had two levels of difficulty to which the master replied no it had three and demonstrated this by switching it off. 
Something doesn’t sit right with me about a board game you can’t play unless you’re running an app. Call me an old fuddy duddy but when I’m rolling I want manual controls too. 
I have some good games over twenty years old occasionally they still see the light of my table but they’re all self contained. This was one of the reasons I think I got into boardgames, everything you need in one box. Imagine if I had to run an an app twenty years old to be able to play those old games. Now chances are I could. But apps are tricksy. What if in the future the games company has gone out of business? Is the app still available to download? Will the OS I’m going go be running on my future device run a twenty year old app? Will The app be chasing licensing info on a cloud server long since replaced? I don’t like the idea of being held ransom by a virtual key when I buy a game. 

The other thing I dislike and this is a big one for me is the bad guys role being removed from a dungeon crawler. Anyone who’s read my blog (and I’m pretty sure they exist) will know I do not like Co-op games. I DO like being The evil overlord in dungeon crawls and torturing players, I do like being Dracula. I do like being the spectre. Don’t take this away from me. At least give me the option of not using the app. A statement from Fantasy Flight on their new release of Mansions of Madness that the game cannot be run without the app sets alarms bells going for me. 
Playing against an AI in anything other than a story based game is not anywhere near as much fun as beating your GM or visa versa. Even with the best efforts AIs have not improved all that much over the last twenty years. Playing “against the computer” in a skirmish becomes a game of outsmarting the AI and figuring out its weaknesses, something far inferior to playing a human (well most humans). Yes there are exceptions but when I play a video game I play a video game when I play a board game I’m looking for a way different experience. I have no issue with an app enhancing the experience but I draw the line at hijacking. 
Don’t get me wrong we’ve all enjoyed some amazing gaming experiences on all manner of electronic devices. some of the best being ones you would never play a second time. I want more from my board games. I don’t want to be restricted and my gut is telling me apps are the thin edge of a wedge that will change my gaming experience. I shudder to think of what things would be like if some of the big video games companies got onboard (they won’t) and started charging for apps with deluxe and season passes. 

Mansions of Madness is something new and a little worrying. It’s a classic game that’s been reworked to operate only with an app. With all the vunrebilities outlined above. What happens if the next version of Dracula only allows you to play with an AI app? What about Descent? What about other classic games you love? And no I don’t want to buy an out of print copy of a game that’s non AI. 
It’s early days. Games companies are sticking their toes in the icy waters of nerdy opinion. I expect more of this not less and I’m sure for now it’s with the best intention they’re doing it and I for one welcome the evil overlords but be warned I’m watching you. Don’t mess with my hobby because I won’t take it sitting down. Xcom was an ok game that required the AI to operate. Fair enough. In played it once liked it but didn’t buy it but please don’t go reimagining games I love as new app only versions. 
I get it btw this is going to reduce the drudgery of setting up and playing games but in the words of Mrs Doyle from Father Ted “maybe I like the drudgery”. Time will tell how this progresses. Apps are not cheap to develop and only the big games companies will be able to deliver them. For now. Let’s see how it goes. 
Huzzah!
Vic 
Having said all that chances are it will all be grand. I’ll review mansions once someone in the group buys it….

I really like the cut of Pirate’s Cove’s jib. It’s straightforward, polished and well produced. It’s also a lot of fun to play. 
The game sees you and up to four run soaked chums setting sail as pirates in your very own jellopy pirate ship. Your ship is made up of four stats. 

Sails : initiative in a fight. 

Cannons : how many dice you roll in a fight. 

Crew : how many cannons you can operate 

Hull : how much treasure you can carry. (Also a city in the UK were the very worst of humanity comes from) 

Four of the islands each allow you to buy increases in one of these stats. They are cleverly named Sail, Cannon, Crew and Hull island. The fifth gives you a spot to bury money and treasure (guess the name) and the last one is tavern island where you can visit the brothel and pickup something nasty or more accurately buy pirate cards that give you one shot bonuses in combat, some bonus game points or something nasty to unleash on your opponents when they’re down and you feel it your piratey duty to administer a swift kick. 
Each turn treasure cards are turned over on each island which show varying amounts of gold, fame, treasure and pirate cards. Players secretly pick which of the islands they wish to sail to and they’re all revealed and pirates move there in one go. If more than one pirate lands at the same island it’s Fightin Time!

Battles are pretty simple affairs and let players hammer each others ship into submission. When it’s your shot you pick a section to target (sails, crew, cannon, hull) and blaze away hopefully reducing on of these. Bad things happen when you get hit getting hit in these sections reduce your initiative, firepower or loses you valuable treasure. Reduce any of these stats to zero and blub blub they lose the battle and wind up at the seventh island I didn’t mention before, Pirate Island a sort of pirate quick fit that patches your ship back up just enough to get you back on the sea. Coming back from Pirate island straight into another battle is painful. If you’re unlucky or the other players are vindictive (of course) you could see it several times in a game. 
Those left standing at the islands grab the aforementioned booty and (at least with my group) lord it over the other players who didn’t fare to well this turn. 

Treasure island in the middle of the map is like a highlander holy ground. Multiple ships can be there but you can’t have a fight. The central island lets you bury treasure and gold for fame points. 
In addition to running into other players you can also bump into (if you’re stupid) the Legendary pirate who moves around from island to island one at a time and at the start of the game way outclasses you. Later in the game it’s possible to have a ship good enough to beat them but it’s a close run thing that’s sometimes worth the victory points. Kill that legendary pirate and another one appears (probably worse) at the start
This is a lovely little game. It’s fairly fast maybe 90 mins or less. The production values and artwork are spot on. Game play is smooth with little downtime. Battles are quick and always fun. Games are close run and the rules are straightforward and unambiguous. I’ve had a copy of this game for the longest time and it appears every so often. It’s one of those games that is worth having in collection because you’ll play it again and again and it works well for kids as well as adults
Yargh! As we pirates never said ever 
Vic

“I’ve SEEN things you people wouldn’t believe. Level 4 gyms on fire off the shoulder of Ballina. I’ve seen Charmanders glinter in the dark near two mile gate. All these, Pokemon will be lost in time like.. tears.. in rain.”

I can’t lie, I find Manga a bit weird (and this is coming from a gamer). I liked Akira. I liked My Neighbour Totoro, I liked Final Fantasy. After that it all seemed a bit precious and pervy in equal measure. way too many tentacles and school girls. I was never really into Pokemon but I was aware of it in my peripheral vision and I admit I did get hooked once on the very first one on someone else’s black and white Gameboy. They were lean times. Flash forward to today and I’m battling a couple of school kids at traffic lights for control of the pub down the road… (I lost BTW)

Pokemon Go has exploded like skateboards, Frisbees and zogabongs as this summer’s craze and I have no doubt it will disappear in a few months but while it’s here, it’s proving to be a LOT of fun. What’s more I have no doubt whatsoever Pokemon Go is the harbinger of better and probably more fatal things to come. Sure there have been multiple attempts at GPS based games before, geocaching has been around for decades but it took a big name like Pokemon to break on through to the other side (you’re singing it aren’t you?). People and more importantly school kids are waking up to the possibilities of Augmented Reality games.

I’m not going to get into a detailed or more correctly any type of review of the game. Chances are you’ve read all about it already or you’re already playing it, maybe as we speak. There’s loads of stuff about the game out there, it’s not super complex. The main thing to think about is, it’s just so much fun and it’s making people act differently. I’ve spotted dozens of players out there playing in spots where I’ve arrived. It feels real and there’s a huge visible presence. We’ve all seen the videos of central park where mobs of people rush to get a particularly rare Pokemon. The game is fun for any number of reasons. Exploring and finding new spots with gyms or pokastops is fun. Better still if you find one that no-one else has. leveling up is fun, it doesn’t feel like you’re grinding. Attacking a gym is fun even if you lose. just checking places you’ve been to before and seeing the balance of power shifted is fun.

Niantic have done a fantastic job on this game. In case you’re interested Pokemon Go is not new per se. It’s based on another game by Niantic called Ingress and in which the developers combined goggle maps and points of interest with GPS usage data to come up with a fairly simple map with nodes of high activity used as spawn and key locations. I understand 90% of the data from Ingress was used reused for Pokemon Go so gyms appear in areas with high physical footfall and pokestops appear on points of interest on the map. I’d love to see the code behind it because so far it’s been pretty much perfect in my explorations. Ah the dark gods bless Google and their big brother data gathering ways.

Now since this is relatively new and some people don’t understand it it’s inevitable that Sun newspaper readers and their peers with embarrass themselves on Facebook saying how stupid it is before they go back to whatever it is that challenges their little intellects. I like it, it doesn’t affect you, please don’t infect me with you’re stupid.

Pokemon Go is a first step. By the end of the summer only a few die hards will still be playing, everyone else will have figured out the economic model and moved onto something else maybe even a different AR game.

I see big things in the future for this. BIG things. Since it’s my rant Here’s what I want. I want a AR wargame. I want to ‘fly’ a bomber with my buddies shotgun and in other cars/bicycles more buddies flying fighter escort. I want to penetrate the air defences of a village someone has setup virtual Anti Air Defences in under the orders of a general who controls a whole county. I want to dump chaff when I the missile warning lights on my phone go on, I want to see missile streaking towards me. I want to time my bomb run just right, take out the primary target and escape up some back road, avoiding fire and punching the air and turning up the volume on flight of the Valkyries. (It’s possible the guard that arrests me up the road will be a classic music fan and let me go Or more likely the commander of the village and he slaps me with penalty points). I want this and more and it’s coming, Pokemon Go is just the start. The era of people living on different AR frequencies and working in gameified jobs is just beginning.

The Genie is now out of the bottle and there’s no putting him/her back in.  Welcome to the future…..

What’s this got to do with boardgames? not a lot just yet, but hey, Made you look!

Huzzah!

Vic

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