New & Upcoming Releases: August & September 2016

Check out some of exciting new games and expansions just released or coming in August and September:

Legendary DBG: Marvel Civil War Expansion (just released)

Its release got delayed a few weeks, but it’s here now!

Following up on the recent movie, Captain America: Civil War, comes Legendary: Civil War, A Marvel Deckbuilding Game Expansion. The Civil War story arc forces superheroes to choose a side. A new type of card is introduced in this expansion emulating the theme of division and duality: Divided Cards.

Divided Cards have two miniature cards printed on the same card. Divided Cards can be recruited from HQ as normal by paying their cost. While a Divided Card is in your hand or HQ, it counts as all its Hero Classes, Teams, and Hero Names. But once you play it, the card only counts as the side you choose. Different sides of Divided Cards often let you choose between Recruit, Attack, drawing cards, and other effects. Choose carefully which side to play!

Cloak and Dagger share all of their cards, as do Storm and Black Panther. Every other Hero in the Civil War set has one Divided Card. Some of these cards feature a special appearance by a character that’s never been seen in Legendary before. Playable characters from both sides of the Super Hero Registration Act bring home the theme and let you play out your own story. Whose side will you choose? Captain America’s or Iron Man?

Archer: Once You Go Blackmail…

Available Now.

Archer: Once You Go Blackmail… is based on the award-winning world-wide hits Love Letter, by Alderac Entertainment Group, and the animated smash hit FX television series Archer!

Your mission is to dig up dirt on Malory Archer and sell it to the highest bidder. To succeed you’ll have to deal with secret agents, the HR department, and a mad scientist.

Color Pop

Available Now.

I first played Color Pop years ago at Game-O-Rama and fell in love with it, only to find out that it was out-of-print. Now it’s back!

Of course I immediately opened one to use for demos. It’s easier to teach this game than to describe it. I will tell you that your goal is to get rid of all the tokens of your secret color. It’s sort of Tetris-like in that you need to get your colored tokens grouped together because you can only pop groups of two or more.
Drop by and let me teach you how to play! It’s addicting!

Dungeons & Dragons: Tyrants of the Underdark

Available Now.

Unlike other recent Dungeons & Dragons board games, Tyrants of the Underdark is a competitive game of territory control with a deck-building element.

Each player leads a house of Drow in a section of the Underdark below the Sword Coast. The Drow house is represented by a deck of cards, with each card being a minion in that player’s deck. Each minion belongs to one of five aspects of Drow society, and those aspects correspond to different strategies in the game, e.g., malice minions excel at assassinating opponents’ troops, while ambition minions are best at recruiting additional minions and promoting minions to your inner circle, which is a special zone that increases their value at game end.

When you set up the Tyrants of the Underdark, you create an 80-card deck by shuffling two 40-card half-decks together: Drow, Dragons, Demons, and Elemental Evil. A central marketplace has new minions that can be recruited through Influence, one of two resources in the game. The other resource is Power, which allows you to place troops, expand your forces across the Underdark, manipulate happenings in the city, and assassinate enemy troops. Players gain points by controlling sites, recruiting valuable minions, promoting minions to your inner circle, and assassinating troops. Whoever ends the game with the most points wins. Just Released.

Mansions of Madness: Second Edition

Available Now.

Mansions of Madness: Second Edition is a fully cooperative, app-driven board game of horror and mystery for one to five players that takes place in the same universe as Eldritch Horror and Elder Sign. The biggest problem with the first edition of Mansions of Madness was that if the Keeper (game master) messed up the slightest thing during setup, the whole game was ruined.

Mansions of Madness: Second Edition removes the need for a Keeper by utilizing an innovative app. Not only does the app take over  the responsibilities of the Keeper, enabling you to play a fully cooperative game, it does so in a wholly unpredictable way: randomly generating the scenario’s map, the monsters that haunt it, and the paralyzing events you will have to endure, all in unique combinations every time.

Eight brave investigators stand ready to confront four scenarios of fear and mystery, collecting weapons, tools, and information, solving complex puzzles, and fighting monsters, insanity, and death. Open the door and step inside these hair-raising Mansions of Madness: Second Edition. It will take more than just survival to conquer the evils terrorizing this town.

Mansions of Madness: Second Edition includes a conversion kit, which is designed to incorporate your first edition Mansions of Madness investigator figures, monster figures, and map tiles into the game. These additional components will significantly expand the app’s choices when generating maps and monsters, as well as the set of investigators from which you can choose. Mansions of Madness: Second Edition is Available Now!

Codenames: Pictures

(mid to late September)

What are these strange symbols on the map? They’re code for locations where spies must contact secret agents! Two rival spymasters know the agent in each location. They deliver coded messages telling their field operatives where to go for clandestine meetings. Operatives must be clever. A decoding mistake could lead to an unpleasant encounter with an enemy agent – or worse, with the assassin! Both teams race to contact all their agents, but only one team can win.

Now, Codenames can be played with pictures! Whimsical, mind-twisting illustrations are used instead of word cards. Each image contains multiple elements. Can you find one word that ties your team’s pictures together?

I’m excited! Codenames: Pictures promises to be as much, or more fun, than the original.