Who Dares News on February 10th
Well hello there. Its been a while but as there has been such an abundance of news nay an avalanche of the stuff, it’s all over the place clogging up my mailbox and spilling out all over the door mat making a terrible mess.
I’ve been sweeping it into a corner but now I’ve lost one of the kids and I think they might be somewhere in Octobers pile so as I’m digging through I thought it a timely opportunity to share some of these with you.
First out the gate and certainly my most anticipated is SeaFall, yep it’s that legacy game that Rob Daviau left Hasbro 3 years ago to design and then we waited and we waited, well folks that wait is finally almost nearly over.
Rob handed over the finished design to Plaid Hat Games via a sneaky tweet a week or so back and now details giving us more than a taste of what to expect have started to emerge.
Set in a world resembling the swashbuckling period of the 16th century. Players take on the role of one of several provinces, journeying out into the oceans aboard heavily armed capital ships for the first time after a long dark age.
As players explore they will reveal new islands — and other surprises — which they’ll place on the board in the form of small stickers to mark their location. At the top and bottom of the board players will put larger stickers representing big inset maps for each place that they discover.
The meat of the game will be in exploring these places, “like Indiana Jones but in the 16th century,”
Most excitingly some of the mystery over the mechanics have emerged and one of the most tantalizing of these is the inclusion of the Captains’ Booke, a kind of choose your own adventure journal. Whenever players trigger certain in-game events — called Milestones — they’ll read from this book to move the game’s narrative forward. I’m thinking a dash of Arabian Nights with no doubt a stronger narrative drive than the highly enjoyable but random as all get the hell outa here of Nights. As any listeners of the Podcast will know we love a good choose your own adventure so the news that we get one with this game has just made the deal all the sweeter.
Other than that we know that it’ll have twice as many goodies then Pandemic Legacy and if you’ve played that you’ll know there were some great treats in that box and it should equate to around 14 or 15 games-worth of content “if you savor it.” Each session should be around two hours of playtime.
Most interestingly are that players aren’t forced to move the story forward if they don’t want to.
“It’s possible that during one game all the players decide they’re just going to attack each other,” Daviau said. “It’s just war on the open seas. No one reaches any Milestones, no one moves the plot ahead. The game will just politely wait, you have your war and when you want to get back to the Legacy system we’ll continue with the plot.”
Everything is pointing to a limited Gen Con release with it making landfall at retail around August. I have no doubt that Plaid Hat will be announcing a pre-order as they have the past couple of years for all their Gen Con launches and I know for one that I’ll be stalking their site from now until we get more news.
But there’s more.
Greater than Games has just launched their Kickstarter for the final Sentinels of the Multiverse expansion OblivAeon. Sentinels is hugely popular and for good reason its one of the few games to successfully capture the feel of playing a superhero comic book character. I love the game and really dig the story and universe that they have fashioned over the past few years.
Astoundingly in less than 24hrs the project has already hit $450,000 and is showing no signs of slowing down. I would have backed this project in a heartbeat but I’ve had to pause on that pledge button as the postage costs for this are just crippling to us EU customers. If you’re willing to go full fanboy and grab all the promo’s and add-ons and the giant box of emptiness for storing all your sentinels, swag then yes you could just about offset the costs.
Having collected comics since 80’s, I find it amusing that this project is mirroring the 90’s speculators boom with foil enhanced covers epic hero battering storylines and end of the world shenanigans and other superlative nick nacks that will eventually be the worthless nonsense that it is. Maybe that’s all part of the design in which case I applaud GTG for pulling off a moment of Meta genius. Me I’ll wait for this to hit retail.
How about you back Ghostel from Tinkerbot games instead for the around same cost of the postage for OblivAeon you can nab yourself a complete game. I’ve already reviewed Ghostel and it’s a spookily robust and above all fun little gem that looks incredible and could do with just a little extra love to push it over the finish line. I’ll be chatting with Bevan Clatworthy, the designer this week so look for that interview soon.
Elsewhere on Kickstarter Ember:The Magical Card game is very close to reaching its funding goal. I was fortunate to get sent a copy for review and have been tinkering with it over the last week or so. As a 2 player game, it offers a short, sharp hit of filler fun with some mightly handsome art. Its £12 which is practically robbery.
Coming in March on Kickstarter is something that caught my eye Saltlands from Antler Games.
Landing squarely in my wheelhouse with its low-tech dystopian
world plagued by drought. That sees players fleeing from invading Raiders, leaving their desert home in search of three mythical locations.
It features some co-op play with players able to join other tribes, go it alone or, of course, stab a compatriot in the back! Well, this is the post-apocalypse for gods sake what did you expect??
Some of the mechanics sound cool whereas the Raiders are thundering around on gas guzzling machines, the players have adapted to the
environment by using land sails. With the game including a simple wind movement mechanic, of course if all this tree huggings, not for you then you can take the raider’s vehicles and channel your inner Road Warrior.
I’m digging the art and design on this and once it hits Kickstarter, the game will come with every gamers catnip of choice mini’s. Hopefully, I’ll be getting a closer look at this in the coming weeks.
Phew, that was a lot of news, I’m quite tuckered out. I’ve still not found the missing child but did uncover my copy of Time Stories I’ve meant to review and a couple of Charlies RPG articles stuck to some jammy toast, so I’ll be putting them up for your delectation in the coming days.
And if that wasn’t enough I also have a new Podcast episode for you, you people are spoilt. Now where did I put my cup of tea…
