Marathon is a fantasy race game where
Players take the roles of Gods, secretly influencing six Heroes as they strive to complete the mythical Marathon race. You must be subtle as you influence your Heroes: once a God’s favorite Heroes are known the other Gods will work to thwart them! At the end of the race, the God whose favorites have moved the furthest wins the game!
Good Little Ninjas is a free print-and-play card drafting game. The author writes:
In Good Little Ninjas, players become inhabitants of medieval Japan. Each of the game’s seven rounds represent one day in the life of a bustling village, full of characters and opportunity.
Every day you have the chance to employ Farmers, Carpenters, Merchants and Peasants to harvest rice and construct buildings. The more daring might send Ninjas to raid the Palace Treasury, or recruit Samurai to prevent the predicted raids. You might even persuade one of the more powerful inhabitants to help you: the Daiymo, the Shogun, or even the Emperor himself!
Ultimately, the player who best uses their cunning to gain the most coins wins the game.
I recently got in a play of Cthulhu Wars, with miniatures gloriously painted by my friend David. The play reminded me of what the brilliance of this game.
Cthulhu Wars is an area control, action points management game with strong asymmetrical factions. In it, you play as a faction of one of the Lovecraftian Elder Gods, scoring points by area control, and performing rituals. Action points are used to raise forces (cultists, monsters and summoning the Elder God itself), fight opponents, build gates, capture enemy cultists, cast spells and use your own faction’s special powers.
The rules are quite simple: Spend a point to move. Spend a point to attack. Spend x points to summon a cultist, monster or Old One. Restock your points at the end of the round based on the board state. Score points based on the board state.
What makes Cthulhu Wars so good is the way in which each faction bends, breaks and modifies those rules. For example, in the last game, I played the Ithaqua faction which — among other rule breaking powers — allows you to hibernate and carry action points over from one turn to another. One of the monsters allows you to push a single opposing unit out of a battle before it commences.
In all, there are (as far I know) twelve playable factions. I’ve played six or seven of them, and they all somehow seem simultaneously over- and under- powered. I look at the player board (with the faction rules) at the beginning of the game and think “how the heck am I supposed to win with this?” Then, a turn or two in, a path to victory becomes clear. Unfortunately, the other players are also gaining clarity on their own factions at the same time. The powers seem to balance out; each seems to have a way to offset the others. In the end, every game I’ve played has ended relatively close.
I suppose that if you played the same faction multiple times, you would skip that initial bewilderment phase. However, with 495 (by my calculations) different possible combinations in a four player game, it would be a very long while before one is able to cement a strategy for each of the factions to counteract each of the others.
Every one of my plays of Cthulhu Wars has has been a delightful exercise in exploration and discovery of my faction’s abilities both on their own and in relation to the other factions on the table.
Cthulhu Wars also has a huge variety of maps for various player counts, many of which have unique rules of play.
The miniatures are well-done, and in many cases, huge. Cthulhu Wars is visually impressive.
If you have not played Cthulhu Wars and get the chance to do so, I recommend you jump at the chance.
The Lone Wolf series of adventure game books are available for the downloading. These are not pirate editions, but available through the generosity of author Joe Dever:
“I would be especially pleased if my granting of the rights to distribute my books in this way was seen as my ‘millennium gift’ to all those devoted readers who have kept the Kai flag flying high, through all the good times, and the not-so-good. It would make me very proud indeed if this enterprise laid the foundations of a lasting legacy, securing the longevity of Lone Wolf by making my creation freely and readily accessible to current and future online generations. For them, for us, for Sommerlund and the Kai.…”
Joe Dever 1999
I have in recent weeks played two games of Tea Garden and am itching to play it again.
Designed by Tomáš Holek and published by Capstone Games, Tea Garden combines deck building and hand managment with a hint of area control and track advancement.
Players have cards in their hands of varying strengths and abilities, which they play to do things like buy new cards, expand tea houses on the board, progress down a resource laden river, harvest or ferment tea leaves, sell tea to caravans, study at the university and advance up the emperor track. A turn consists simply of playing one or more cards and taking a primary action whose “strength” is the sum of the values on the card. Depending on the cards’ iconography, a player may also take a secondary action.
And that’s it. Play a couple of cards, do the thing (and perhaps a second thing), and it is the next person’s turn.
This is not to say Tea Garden is simple. There is a lot to think about, particularly regarding the sequence of actions. It is just that you will not be able to daisy chain a bunch of actions into a twenty minute long sequence of: I do this, which lets me do this, which lets me do that, which lets me do another thing et. al
Instead, players need to take one turn to set up their next, while paying attention to a board state that may change in the interim.
Tea Garden plays quickly, with just five rounds in which players will take three or maybe four main actions and perhaps a similar number of secondary actions. The “do a thing; next person’s turn” nature of the game makes it move quickly. Tea Garden does not overstay its welcome. Indeed, my feeling is always “I want one more turn.”
The game has nine pages of well-illustrated rules, three of which are setup. Tea Garden is not a game with a lot of rules overhead. The complexity is emergent, which to my mind is a sign of an excellent design.
Recommended.