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| W - map, player aids |
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| Swing state |
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| Map overview |
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| Another map overview |
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| Texas - the most Republican state |
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| The fight for Florida |
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| "I will campaign in California..." |
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| Preparing to roll the dice |
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| Last turn decisions |
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NSKN Games blog has moved: blog.nskn.net
Friday, March 15, 2013
W in images
Last week we play-tested W - the Board Game along with Praetor and, once again, it's easier to let the pictures "speak" ...
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More about NSKN Legendary Games on the website | Facebook | Twitter | BGG | ScoopIT Magazine | Blog
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Tuesday, March 12, 2013
The road to HELL
I've been to Hell and I have pictures to prove it!
It has not been the first time that, on my way from Romania to Poland or back I found directions to Hell on a road indicator, but this time I decided to follow up and see what is this all about.
I stopped and I took a picture of the indicator while the other drivers were just rushing by, some of them looking strangely at the guy who was taking pictures with the HELL sign at dawn. Then I went on to see where the road leads. It turns out, it does lead to HELL, which is a mystery surrounded place where a bunch of people make... energy drinks!
While I was parked in front of HELL taking a few more pictures, a bodyguard came towards me looking angry (this is what most guard do) and shouting "no picture, no picture". I hid my camera and luckily my engine was still on, so I pushed the acceleration and steered away on the gravel before having to answer any questions about photographing a factory at dark and industrial espionage. But I can offer everyone directions to HELL, now that I've been there.
As it turns out, the dark spells from HELL worked. For the first time in my life saw the screen of the camera saying "Card full" (16 GB, not used in at least half a year), so most of my work trying to present hell to the world was lost.
Oh, did I mention that this post has nothing to do with board games? No? Well, here we go... Disclaimer: this post has nothing to do with board games! If you agree, keep on reading!
Where was I? Oh ,yes, the location, so... the last thing worth mentioning is that HELL is in Hungary. For those feeling a bit too Romanian this is a funny fact while for the rest of the world is just ... a fact.
The conclusion is that HELL is not so bad, I pass by, nothing spectacular, I even stopped to take pictures and I am still all right, even at dawn it was no so scary.
More about NSKN Legendary Games on the website | Facebook | Twitter | BGG | ScoopIT Magazine | Blog
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| The sign to HELL |
It has not been the first time that, on my way from Romania to Poland or back I found directions to Hell on a road indicator, but this time I decided to follow up and see what is this all about.
I stopped and I took a picture of the indicator while the other drivers were just rushing by, some of them looking strangely at the guy who was taking pictures with the HELL sign at dawn. Then I went on to see where the road leads. It turns out, it does lead to HELL, which is a mystery surrounded place where a bunch of people make... energy drinks!
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| HELL is an... energy drink!?! |
While I was parked in front of HELL taking a few more pictures, a bodyguard came towards me looking angry (this is what most guard do) and shouting "no picture, no picture". I hid my camera and luckily my engine was still on, so I pushed the acceleration and steered away on the gravel before having to answer any questions about photographing a factory at dark and industrial espionage. But I can offer everyone directions to HELL, now that I've been there.
As it turns out, the dark spells from HELL worked. For the first time in my life saw the screen of the camera saying "Card full" (16 GB, not used in at least half a year), so most of my work trying to present hell to the world was lost.
Oh, did I mention that this post has nothing to do with board games? No? Well, here we go... Disclaimer: this post has nothing to do with board games! If you agree, keep on reading!
Where was I? Oh ,yes, the location, so... the last thing worth mentioning is that HELL is in Hungary. For those feeling a bit too Romanian this is a funny fact while for the rest of the world is just ... a fact.
The conclusion is that HELL is not so bad, I pass by, nothing spectacular, I even stopped to take pictures and I am still all right, even at dawn it was no so scary.
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Thursday, March 7, 2013
Praetor in images
You may wonder what happened, how come we haven't posted anything in so long. And that's a very legitimate question. These days we've been travelling to meet various friends and gaming groups and to play-test our latest prototypes.
I would tell you a lot more, but the testing sessions are not over yet and some say that a picture is worth a thousand words, so ten of them will account for 10,000 words if my maths is right.
This is Praetor, a worker placement city building game...
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| 2-player game after 2 turns |
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| City, player board, available tiles and Caesar tiles |
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| Play-testing with... cats |
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| 4-player game |
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| Workers (dice) in the city |
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| After 7 turns |
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| Thinking hard... |
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| Placing workers in the last turn, fighting hard to become Praetor |
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| The city at the end of the game |
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Tuesday, February 26, 2013
Perfect Storm, yet another board game from NSKN
Do you like fishing? If you do, that's great news, you will enjoy our new prototype. If you're not sure, this is a great opportunity to learn.
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| Prototype of the map |
Perfect Storm is a game for 2-5 player about fishing in the Bering Sea, one of the toughest places on Earth to have a job.
You are a young entrepreneur with a fishing boat and dreams of getting rich. So, you will hire a captain and a crew and send them fishing in those dangerous waters.
The weather in Bering Sea is the greatest challenge. It can be sunny today, but tomorrow your boat will face 25 ft tall waves and a storm you only get to see once in a lifetime. But it's not all bad news, the bigger the waves, the easier it is to catch the best seafood in the region, the Alaskan King Crab.
Perfect Storm is a game of risk management and every player will have to calculate his decision to fish for the most valuable prey without exposing his crew and cargo to unnecessary danger. In the end, the winner will be the player who will find the best balance between his boat, crew and captain, the place to fish and the risk to face bad weather.
More news after a few sessions of play-testing.
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Friday, February 22, 2013
A review of Exodus by Michael Barnes
Michael Barnes from No High Scores has written a review of Exodus: Proxima Centauri and he also agreed that we share his thoughts with all of you.
There’s a new contender for the space 4x board game throne, and it’s called Exodus: Proxima Centauri. Designed by Andrei Novac and Agnieszka Kopera, Exodus is on some levels exactly what you are expected from a game quite directly descended from Twilight Imperium and Eclipse. Start from a home planet, take over neighboring planets, manage resources, do a little politicking, tool up with technologies, and blow up spaceships. It’s certainly not an unexpected design and it’s definitely a little more ramshackle than either of its ancestors, but after a couple of games of Exodus I’m convinced that there is room for this game in the marketplace and I wouldn’t be surprised if it becomes something of a cult hit, luring longtime TI3 players and recent Eclipse acolytes away to engage its particularly aggressive, more direct style of play.
If you’ve played either TI3, Eclipse, or pretty much any other 4x style space conquest game you’ll be on familiar terrain. It’s driven by an action card selection mechanic, wherein players concurrently pick an action (twice a round, or three times with the right tech) and execute it with a follow-up round enabling other players to perform a secondary action at the cost of a population cube pulled from their home planet. The actions are typical fare- research a technology on the game’s four-branch tech tree, roll a die to take some income, buy ships or upgrades to ships, or trade resources on a shifting market scale. There are three resources in the game- a general currency and rarer materials used to build ships and ship components. In a neat twist, players are taxed any time they gather those from one of their planets, all of which have finite resources available.
Movement is handled in an entirely separate phase. Each player plays face-down movement chits to each of their ships, which may have a number or be blank. What’s more, a ship that can move three spaces may have just one chit played on it, but with its full movement allotment or it could have three blanks. This all adds a neat- and really kind of unexpected- bluffing element to maneuvers, especially since the movement is simultaneous and not turn-based. There is no actual exploration element, but more on that later.
The political component is simple- every round three political cards that have various one-time, round-lasting, or environmental effects are displayed and everyone bids in an all-pay auction round to vote which of the cards is enacted. Combat is a basic “fives and sixes” scheme, with players tallying up the number of weapon icons on ships to determine their dice allotment. Shields absorb hits, better shields absorb more hits. There are also neutral Centurion forces on the map from the beginning, defeating them often gives you a chance to instantly learn a tech, gain resources, acquire ship equipment, or victory points.
Yes, winning the game is a victory point thing, but the victory points are mostly earned through fighting and conquest. There’s no technology or political victory, everything is geared toward awarding conflict with very few exceptions. Every ship destroyed in battle yields points as does every planet held by a majority of your population cubes, which must be shuttled out to distant worlds by capable ships and landed. This makes for a very aggressive game that rewards the bold and punishes the turtlers. I find this to be a marked difference from Eclipse and TI3 in particular, where games far too often denigrate into Cold War scenarios of limited conflict eventually culminating in all-or-nothing battles in the last quarter of the game.
One of the key reasons that Exodus unfolds like it does is along such a violent path is because there is no exploration element- so let’s call it a 3x game. The map is already defined, there are no buffer zones of neutral planets to take over that add an hour or more of playtime before anybody starts shooting. Ships have a great deal of mobility and there are no complicated movement schemes, so it’s always easy to get your fleets into position to kick some ass. But above it all, one of the things that distinguishes Exodus from the rest of the pack is that it has a WMD phase.
Once the applicable techs are researched, players can station WMDs on planets where they are the majority. These have a range of up to five, so they can usually hit a good percentage of the map after determining range with a die roll. If they hit, depending on the weapon used they can take out resources, population, or- tell me this isn’t awesome- the entire planet. Yep. Flip the tile and flush everything that was on it. Because of the nature of this game, it’s not and idle threat, either. So yes, if you were one of the folks that felt Eclipse was too much of an economic game, this one may be more to your taste. If you hated waiting four hours to blow somebody up in TI3, Exodus wants to get you to the bloody meat of the game much quicker, even if it lacks the world-building narrative and flavor text of Fantasy Flight’s game.
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