Kurt Pankau Dot Com

🐪 The Spice Must Flow... 2018, 2-4 players Complexity: light/moderate It's hard to talk about Century: Eastern Wonders  without talking about the other Century  games, so let's just get that out of the way. Each game is themed around trade in a given century--hence the title--and each game focuses on exchanging and upgrading four different colored cubes that represent trade goods, which can then be exchanged for points. At heart, they're all engine-builders, but each game uses a different mechanism to facilitate the building of those engines. The first game, Spice Road , is a hand management and deck-building game. The last game, A New World , is a worker-placement game. Eastern Wonders , the middle chapter, is built around grid movement and area of influence. Let's See It In Action In Century: Eastern Wonders , you and one to three friends take on the roles of traders in the "Spice Islands" of Maluku, trading ginger, chili, tea, and cloves...

🏰 Have Fun Storming The Castle... 2011, 1-6 players Complexity: light/moderate Castle Panic  is a semi-cooperative tower defense game set in a pleasant little castle surrounded by mountains, grasslands, marshes, and horrifying monsters. Presently, the castle is under siege by a legion of fantastical creatures and their magical warlords. You have six towers surrounded by six walls, and it's up to you to use your soldiers and fortifications to keep the evil fiends at bay. Walls can be rebuilt, but if the last tower falls, you lose the game. Let's See It In Action In Castle Panic , you and up to five friends are tasked with defending the eponymous castle from the onslaught of orcs, goblins, and trolls. Every turn, more monsters spawn in the outer forest ring, and everything on the board advances towards the center. Monsters take damage as they destroy walls and towers, but it's much better for all parties concerned (except, I suppose, the monsters), if you...

🦑 Run Silent, Run Deep... 2016, 2 teams of 1-4 players each Complexity: moderate Submarine movies are always tense. Thrills are baked right there into the premise: a team of people in a life-or-death struggle where a thin layer of steel is the only thing between them and the briney depths.  Captain Sonar , from Matagot Games, attempts to capture the tension of submarine warfare. It's a head-to-head strategy game in which two teams compete to find and destroy each other that can be played either in turns or in real-time. Let's See It In Action In Captain Sonar , you and your team take on the roles of Captain, First Mate, Engineer, and Radio Operator in a state-of-the-art submarine. You have a chart of the terrain and four hit points, as well as a number of tools at your disposal to aid in the search for your opponent. In terms of gameplay, each crew member has their own mini-game to keep track of while coordinating with the captain to keep systems activ...

⚾ Take Me Out To The Ballgame 2015, 2 players Complexity: light/moderate Bottom Of The 9th  is a two-player bluffing/deduction game played with dice. It pits the underdog home team against the traveling champions in a winner-take-all high-stakes half inning of baseball. The conceit of the game is that by some miracle the underdog home team has kept things at a tie so far, but they're exhausted. If this goes into extra innings, the champions are surely going to beat them. But if they can just score one run in the bottom of the 9th inning, then they win it all. Let's See It In Action In Bottom Of The 9th , you and a friend compete head-to-head, one player as the underdog home team, one as the champions. You each pick a roster of players, six for the batting home team and two pitchers for the champions. Pitching and batting are managed with dice rolls. The pitcher has two dice, one a standard d6, another that has sides labeled "S", "B...

This weekend I went to a small board game conference in St. Louis called Geekway Mini--it's a smaller, more intimate version of the larger con Geekway To The West that runs in the summer. Day 1: New con, new games, new opportunities to meet people and win games! Here's what I played on Friday. Big City 20th Anniversary Jumbo Edition City-building game that uses trade as a balancing mechanic. It was fine. Fun, very thinky, probably plays better with more than two people, though. The Jumbo Edition is unnecessarily huge and componenty. It's cool, I guess, but it feels like a gimmick and I would never pay the $100+ price tag for it. Also, it was my first game of the con and I punctured my finger on a tree on one of the models :( It's A Wonderful World Favorite of the con. It's an engine-builder where you draft cards in order to build your tableau and then use them to produce resources that you use to build your cards  It's easy to learn,...