PAX West 2016 just concluded on Monday, so for this post I wanted to focus on some independent tabletop games that were on display. There were 2 sections devoted to 10 independent games, some ready for purchase, some in development (one actively being developed as rules were changing over the weekend). I won’t be covering all 10 in this post, but I will cover the ones that most piqued my interest, in alphabetical order.
Breaker Blocks
In this 2-player game, each side is trying to maintain a majority control over 3 circuits, and end the game while maintaining control. You do this primarily by playing blocks of your color that have a certain amount of points associated with them (ranging from 0 – 3). Blocks of 0 power are there to provide spots to hook other pieces into, and blocks of 3 power are always at the end of a circuit (no other blocks can connect to them). Each turn, you will have 2 actions that can be spent on taking pieces from the pool and adding them to your hand, placing pieces you pulling in previous turns on to your side of the main circuits, or rearranging your own blocks. Then there is a pool of special black pieces that both players can pull from. Some allow you to pull any 3 pieces and put them into your hand, and one allows you to rearrange the blocks your opponent played. Finally, there are 4 special black pieces that end the game. When the first of these blocks is played, nothing happens. However, when the second block is played, the game ends. The players then total up their power on each of the 3 middle circuits and whoever has control of the most circuits wins the game.
The games last about 10-20 minutes, and they are simple yet provide depth of strategy. I actually enjoyed it enough that I picked up a copy (as of right now, the creator of the game also laser cuts and engraves each piece, as well as sews and applies his label with ink on each copy of the game). The component quality is great, and I can’t recommend it enough.
Complicated Board Game (The Card Game)
This is a rather silly game about complicated board games. The idea is that you want to be the first person to get all 5 of your pieces (which have been stolen from other games, such as a castle, soldier, hat, etc) out of your hand first. The game starts as a simple tile-placing game, where what you can place next to each other depends on a rock-paper-scissors style of gameplay (hats go on soldiers, sheep are captured by UFOs, etc). However, each turn players can add new rules, which might change the direction that cards can be placed, if they can now be placed diagonally from each other, and even whether it becomes a co-op game with multiple people winning instead of just one. There are also secret objectives, which might be something like “if more than one player wins, then they lose and you win instead”. My wife actually played this after turning it into a co-op game, which meant that while the other team thought they would win, she and she alone actually won.
This is also a very quick game (probably 20-30 minutes), and it is currently in the Kickstarter stage trying to raise money for art work. They are aiming for a spring 2017 release. I would recommend looking this up.
Flapjack Flipout
This is a dex based game all about working as short-order cooks trying to fulfill orders of pancakes. Each turn an order will come in, which might require 2 plain pancakes, a blueberry, and an apple. A bell is rung, and all players frantically flip pancakes until they have enough. To do this, the pancakes are grabbed at random from a center pile, place on their spatula with the side up that tells them what type of pancake it is, then the player starts flipping. If they can flip it so it lands on the spatula and flipped to the other side, then they set it on the table face down. Now they have to remember what they had, and then the process is repeated. If they flip the pancake and it lands on the table or floor, it is discarded face-up to the center.
Once a player feels they have enough to fill the order, they ring the bell and flip the pancakes they think are required. If they flip the wrong ones, they are out that turn, but any pancakes they flipped correctly are added to the order, and now the other players need less pancakes to take the point. Pancakes not used on the turn can be saved for the next round, assuming the player remembers what they have. If they can’t remember, then they can turn them in to get shuffled to the used ones.
There are also several special pancakes, one of which is a moldy pancake. When flipped successfully, the player who flipped it can at any time place it on a stack of another player’s pancakes. Those are now moldy and have to be discarded.
Overall I liked the game, but it proved a bit too difficult for me (I lack coordination). However, if you like dex based games and memorization, give this a shot. I neglected to ask, but I think they are still in development, getting close to done (what we were using looked like prototypes, but good ones).
H.E.A.D. Hunters
The designer behind this game wanted to make the toys on your shelf something you could also play with. So the toy is a game piece used in the game, and its head opens and reveals a set of hex tiles, cards you can play, dice, and a measuring device (string with beads on it). Essentially, they wanted the toy to contain everyone you need to play the game, and they really succeeded on that front.
In this tactics game, you will have a set of cards that allow you to attack or defend as well as some environment cards (that are set out at the beginning of the game) which allow characters to position themselves to get a jump on characters, to use special abilities, or to act as a shield so incoming attacks are less effective. You may also have additional fighters that can attack or prevent the enemy from moving without taking a hit. Each character has 5 health, and it’s possible to do up to 4 damage in a turn, so games are pretty short (not overly so, as up to 4 damage could also be prevented).
I was wishing they would be done with development now so I could buy it right away, but no such luck. They are almost ready for manufacturing, so keep an eye out for this.
Spiredice
The idea behind this game is that each player is a different race with different abilities and ways to score points, but they can only do these things on their own terrain, which is put out by “discovering new lands” (drawing the top disk of your lands pile). These terrains have a die printed on them, and a number on the die. These are places where you can place your dice at the end of each round (the number of dice you have represents the number of turns as one die is placed each round). You can place on other people’s terrains as well, but you have an incentive to place on your own in the form of more points at the end of the game. Each turn you get one action, which could be to discover new terrain, to put up defensive walls, to place your pawn, to place your siege weapon, or to load and fire it (we’ll come back to this). As the game progresses, you will be placing your dice, with an incentive to stack the spires higher and higher as you get more points this way. At the same time, your enemies will be doing the same, and you can watch their point totals increase each time this happens. At some point this will become too tempting, then the siege weapons come out. Right now they look like ballistae, I assume the end product will look the same (side note: it was a cool demo piece, made of a clothes pin, rubber band, popsicle sticks, and spools for the rubber band to wrap around). If a player succeeds in hitting other dice and toppling the spires, they will lower the point total gained by those players, but they may also capture the dice. The area around the terrain is considered “wasteland” and if a die even touches that area when it stops moving, it is captured by the active player. However, the ammunition fired are square blocks the size of a die, so those remain on the board and can be a defensive wall against other attacks (these are also placeable by using a defensive action).
We played this game on Monday, and a new piece had been added that morning, so it is very much still in development. Our first game clocked in at 50 minutes for 4 players, I assume this will come down to about 10 minutes per person once everyone has played a few games. On the bright side, the time seemed to fly by, which is always a good sign.
Thanks For Coming In!
In this game, the active player acts as a venture capitalist, being given an elevator pitch for a new product or company. These could be Yelp, WebMD, Trump University, etc. The active player draws 3 of these company/product cards and chooses the one they want to hear pitched. Players have a hand of cards that have items/people/descriptive phrases on them, and they have to pick a card they will use for their pitch. However, you don’t just play the card, you then have to give the pitch and use the card as part of it. For example, during the game I played, one of the rounds had WebMD as the company, and a player played “ghosts” as the pitch card. The pitch sort of went “You know, WebMD is great, but it currently only markets to live people. What about an untapped market: ghosts. Ghosts could go on, see what killed them, then log on to the forum and warn others about what befell them.”
I thoroughly loved this game and look forward to its release. In other games like this, it seems like the card itself is the joke, but in this game, the joke often comes from the pitch that the players give. It really encourages creativity.
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Well, that’s it for the PAX indie booth roundup. There were others that were also interesting, but these were the ones I most enjoyed and could see myself buying/encouraging others to buy.
More info on the games above can be found at the official site: http://indiemegabooth.com/sponsor-highlight-cards-humanity/
Derrick Discusses... 