The Festival International des Jeux de Cannes is a large board game convention based in the south of France.

Here are the interviews and game overviews for this event.

Age of Towers

A very pretty and nicely produced Tower Defence game.

Read my Age of Towers review

Dragons

A set collection game from Bruno Faidutti about Dragons getting treasure.

War of the Buttons

A game based on a French book about school kids fighting and building a den.

Read my War of the Buttons review

Kingdomino: Age of Giants

An expansion to Kingdomino that adds Giants and other things.

Princess Jing

A unique game of hidden movement that uses mirrors so you can see multiple directions.

Iquazú

A unique game where you control areas within rows and columns within a moving Waterfall.

 Darwinning!

A card game of evolving animals with new traits.

Brothers

A 2 player game of fencing in animals after building the board.

Small Detectives

A cute little deduction game from Charles Chevalier and Bruno Faidutti.

Kang

An abstract game of moving kangaroos across a board, bouncing off of other ‘Roos.

CIV: Carta Imperia Victoria

A simple Civ building, set collection game.

Arenabots

A team vs team arena combat robot game.

Ilôs

An exploration and research management game that plays in 45 minutes.

Magic Maze Kids

The classic co-op game Magic Maze made simpler for kids.

Kingdom Run

A fun and hectic game where players control a team of runners trying to win a race. Watch my review of Kingdom Run.

Micropolis

A tile laying game of building an ant colony and trying to get certain things in certain places to score points.

Paper Tales

A drafting and tableau-building game of building a fantasy kingdom. Learn how to play Paper Tales and read my review.

Attack of the Jelly Monster

A real-time dice game of fighting off an invading Jelly Monster.

Perdition’s Mouth: Abyssal Rift

A card-driven, dungeon crawl game.

Karuba Junior

A simplified version for a younger audience. Learn how to play Karuba.

Immortal 8

A drafting game with phenomenal artwork.

Time Arena

This arena combat game is driven by sand timers.

Jurassic Snack

Control cute Dinosaurs in and try to collect tokens.

Zombie Bus

At the Festival International des Jeux de Cannes 2018, I got to play a prototype of the upcoming game, Zombie Bus.

(Translated from French) Save the cheerleaders from certain death: they are locked in the school bus … Ah, and watch out for the zombies. If it smells too much, do not hesitate to take refuge in the News truck!

So as this is a prototype art and graphic design will change… It HAS changed on a copy they have for show and not for play but you… I forgot to take pictures of it so… SORRY!

So you have a Bus full of Cheerleaders and your job, as a teenager armed with bats and whatever, is to rescue them all before they get overrun.

This is the bus, those tokens are Cheerleaders, the star value is important.

This is a Yahtzee-style game, you roll the dice, you get two rerolls (mostly) and you use the symbols to do things.

The stars can be used to rescue those Cheerleaders if you roll enough of them you can take their token.

Most of the rest of the symbols are used to deal with the zombies. At the start of each turn, one Zombie is revealed from the deck and placed next to the bus and your job is to kill it.

To do this, match the symbols…

Symbols

The Zombies have a number of symbols depending on their strength and you match them with the dice. If you match all of them, the Zombie goes into a discard pile.

Match a few and just cover those symbols with disks ready for later attacks…

Doing this comes with risks though. As the Zombie above has 2 disks, that symbol in the bottom left has 2 disks icons and an arrow. That means that Zombie will come into your play area and for each Zombie you have, it reduces your rerolls by that many!

Killing a Zombie in your area though allows you to pick up their stuff (You draw a tile with a one-shot ability)

So save all the Cheerleaders and win or if I THINK there are 4 Zombies around the bus at the end of your turn, you all lose.

There is a semi-coop element where if you think you’re going to lose you can try and escape on the news bus 🙂

Zombie Bus Summary

As it’s a prototype I will withhold any comments as the game is subject to change. But we DID win and I DID enjoy playing it so look for it coming later in 2018.

Jesta ThaRogue