A quick look at the games I played at UK Games Expo 2016
Adrenaline
A prototype at the CGE booth at the UK Games Expo 2016. A fast-paced FPS for 2-5 players.
Read my full review of Adrenaline including a How to play Video
Each player has a character and your goal is to score the most points… Points are awarded for getting the first hit on someone. Dealing a majority of the damage to them before they are killed, as well as getting a majority of kills.
For this, you take two actions on your turn and you can take the same one more than once.
One action is to move up to 3 spaces. The board has big chunky spaces like a lot of games now. You still can’t move diagonally, even in a room.
You can move and pick up, and you HAVE to move before you pick up. There are tiles placed around the arena for ammo pickups. These give you various amounts of the 3 different ammo types, currently represented by cubes.
This can also let you draw cards as well as cubes. These cards have abilities like ‘reload for free’, ‘Teleport’ etc Typical FPS stuff.
You can also pick up a weapon from those available if you’re on a weapon spawn space. You can only have 3 weapons so if you pick up more than that you have to drop one. Weapons have 2 values on them, the pickup cost and the reload cost. You have to be able to pay the amount in cubes (ammo) to pick a weapon up.
Combat
The last thing you can do is attack someone. I say ‘attack’ rather than ‘shoot’ because you do have melee weapons. To do this they must be in the line of sight which is a straightforward thing involving doors and corners. It made sense and even gives you the ability to hide behind a door shooting out but they can’t shoot in 😀
You declare the weapon, declare the target and attack. Attacking is usually free for the base attack but most weapons have a special attack. You need to be able to pay a certain combination of ammo for certain special attacks.
You damage an opponent by putting a number of tokens of your colour on their damage track. As you take damage you get extra abilities as the ‘Adrenaline’ boosts you, hence the name of the game. These let you move twice before picking up and most importantly, it lets you move and shoot.
When a player dies you score based on what happened. If you dealt the first damage you get a point. If you deal the most damage to the target you get the point value they’re worth for killing them.
Should you deal the killing blow you put a token of your colour on a track to show you got a kill. Then your token replaces a skull which goes onto the killed player’s board, reducing their ‘value’ next time they die. If you kill them you put 1 token on them. If you overkill them by dealing at least one damage more than their max health you add 2 tokens.
At the end of your turn, you can pay cubes to reload any weapons you have.
Adrenaline Summary
Once a number of deaths have occurred the game ends. You score points for having the most tokens on the kill track, most points win.
As we played, we were the first to play it at the weekend. The demo crew were learning the rules and the recent rules changes as we went along. So, the game felt clunky but as we got going turns were quick. No dice rolls, you just say you’re attacking, spend ammo and hand over your tokens, easy.
It’s pretty good and I can see it selling on the theme but lasting for the components. I’m looking forward to the final version. It will also be streamlined more and more I assume.
One to look for in the future.
Animals On Board
We stopped by to play this at the Pegasus Spiel booth.
An ‘I split, you choose’ type game for 2-4 players.
You win by scoring more points for Animals you get on your Ark than the other players.
Each player gets 3 tiles face down, secretly puts one on their Ark and puts the other two in the middle of the table. A number of animal tiles are added to them depending on the player count, with one more additional tile face down.
Turns
On your turn, you do one of two things…
Either, split a group of animals and take a food token. Once the initial group have been split you can split either of the other 2 groups. Each group will get smaller and smaller and the number of groups will grow and grow.
When splitting you can divide them in any number you like. A group of 5 can be split 1 and 4 or 3 and 2… any tiles in that initial 5 can be put in either new group.
An awful pic I know, I didn’t even take one of the Arks! 🙂 There are 4 groups of animals with each animal numbered 1 to 5… Trust me 🙂
Or, you can take a group of animals by paying 1 food token per animal token in that group and add them to your Ark. You then add a flag to your ark to show you have passed.
This continues until 1 player is left, that player has one action and then the round ends.
Animals are added to the middle to make one group again like the beginning of the game and the player to pass first in the last round is the new start player.
This continues until a round ends where a player has 10 or more Animals on their Ark.
You discard any Animal you have just 2 of, Noah has the Monopoly of animals on an Ark two by two.
Animals on Board Summary
Any Singles are worth their face value and ‘Herds’ of 3 or more are worth 5 points per tile no matter how many are in the Herd.
Played 2, Won 2 😀
A very fun, cute game, frustrating and fun and I immediately bought a copy 🙂
(Better picture from Board Game Geek)
Imhotep
1000’s of people, only 1 demo copy…
So I bought it…
I had watched reviews and things beforehand so it wasn’t a blind purchase. Also, after seeing how big the cubes are and all the different cards I thought it was worth a go.
Each player will score points by loading stones of their colour onto boats and sail those boats to destinations where the stones will be used.
You start with a couple of stones and you flip over a card telling you how many boats of what size will be used this round.
Turns
On your turn, you can do 1 of 3 things…
Firstly, take 3 stones from the supply and put them on your Sled card. You have a max capacity of 5 and you can’t go over it.
Secondly, put a stone on a boat, any boat and in any position on that boat.
Lastly, if the number of stones meets the minimum requirement printed on the boat to sail, you can move it to one of the ports and unload…
Ports
The board has 5 ports and each is different… (The boards are double-sided too and each is different but we just played the basic) Each boat is unloaded starting with the stone at the front and going backwards, this is important 🙂
The Market lets you draft cards from the 4 made available. Some give end-game scoring while some give special abilities you can use each round or one-off. You draft in the order the stones are unloaded.
The Pyramid sees you building a, well, Pyramid. You place Stones off the ship in the order they arrive in the order the board tells you to. You’re building up 3 layers of a Pyramid and each space is worth a number of points which you score immediately.
The Temple is 4 stones wide and again you place them in the order they come off the boat one row at a time. When a row is full you start a new one on top of it. At the end of a round, you score a point for each of your bricks visible from above.
The Burial Chamber is similar but you’re building columns and you score for connected runs of stones at the end of the game.
Finally, the Obelisk, where each player is building their own tower of Stones and the player with the highest Obelisk will score the most points.
At the end of a round, you put 4 new cards in the Market, draw a new boat card and go again.
At the end of the game, the most points win.
Imhotep Summary
Happy with this one, we only played 2 players and I thought it worked really well so I’m looking to give 4 players a go and compete against 3 other people.
A fun game I’m glad I won right now.
Ice Cool
Flicking Penguins, why not… Then you have that feeling you’ll never be as good as the demo video…
3 of the players are trying to get around the School to collect Fish while one person plays the Hall monitor trying to catch them. Each player takes a turn as the Hall Monitor and at the end of the game, the player with the most points wins.
This is an interesting ‘Box in a Box’ game where the box fits together like a Russian Doll and clips together, it works very well.
Above some of the doors, you clip fish of the player’s colours and you start.
The Student Penguins are trying to flick their Penguins through the doors and collect all 3 of their fish without being caught by the Hall Monitor.
When a Student collects a Fish they draw a card from the deck of scorecards that are numbered 1-3 points.
The Hall Monitor is trying to ‘Hit’ the other Penguins to catch them… If they do they take their hall pass from them.
A round ends when either all the Students are caught or a Student gets all 3 of their fish.
Game End
Then, players each draw a Point card for each Hall Pass they have left.
At the end of your turn you can flip up 2 ‘1 Point’ value cards to take an extra turn, you still keep them for scoring.
After each player has been the Hall Monitor, the player with the most points wins.
It’s good fun with great bits… The penguins are weighted at the bottom like a Weeble so you can curl them around corners and with a bit of practice, you can ‘Jump’ them over walls.
With A LOT of practice, you can Jump AND Curl them in the same move, that’s way out of my capabilities right now.
I’ll be playing this with 3-4 different groups over the next 2 weeks so I’ll be interested to see who finds it fun and who views it as a ‘Kids Game’.
I’m a kid, I like it 🙂
Note: The copy I played was a review copy generously provided by Brain Games, big thanks to them for this game.
Celestia
Push your luck in an Airship, You can always Jetpack to safety though!
You win by pushing your luck and scoring the most points by visiting the higher-value cities.
You start with the player’s pawns in a 3D cardboard airship and you have a hand of cards.
Firstly you choose a captain, they roll 2 dice…
In player order, you have to decide if the Captain can discard cards from their hand that matches the symbols on the dice to ‘defeat’ the challenges.
If you don’t think they can, you put your Pawn on the city the ship is currently on and you’re out the round.
You may think they will in which case you stay in and see what the captain says.
If the Captain CAN defeat the challenges they discard the relevant cards and the Airship moves forward one space. The next player is now the Captain and the number of dice rolled increases as the Airship moves forward to a maximum of 4.
If the Captain can’t defeat the challenges, everyone in the ship loses out on everything this round and everyone that jumped out gets a card from that city which is worth a number of points. The values increase the further the Airship goes.
You then all start back at the beginning with a new round.
When a player gets to 50+ points at the end of a round the player with the most points wins.
Celestia Summary
Some of the cards give you abilities like being able to Jetpack out a ship that’s crashing to score points, or passing a failed test, or re-rolling dice…
We demoed this at the booth AFTER I bought it, it was on my Wishlist on BGG and it wasn’t expensive so I thought why not.
Overall I like it, it has quick playtime, wide appeal, lots of laughs and most importantly, is better than Incan Gold.
Codenames: Pictures
Check out my Codenames Review here before reading about Codenames, with Pictures…
Same game, fewer words…
That’s it really. You have pictures instead of words, the rest plays the same.
There are fewer cards on the board, 20 instead of 25.
While it’s a prototype and the rules haven’t been nailed down yet for what you can and can’t say about the pictures, the ‘Don’t be a Dick’ rule will be in play.
More of the same, just hope this isn’t as overplayed as the first one but I’ll have it in my collection regardless.
Nine Worlds
Sliding Beads on a board to control the Nine Worlds.
Oh, and counting action points in your head.
To win, you need to score the most points throughout the game after 9 rounds of play.
So this is an action point game, the start player gets 1 more action point than everyone else and you can take beads from your supply to your player board, put beads from your player board onto the main board on the world where your Obelisk is or move your Obelisk to a different World all for 1 point each.
There are other things you can do and you get a handy reference sheet for all the actions.
If there are ever more than 5 beads on a World you fight. This is done by removing 1 bead at a time until you get down to 5 on that world but they are removed in turn order starting with the start player.
After a round, you go through each world in number order performing their ability which is controlled by the player who controls that world.
After 3,6 and 9 rounds, you score points for controlling worlds, having beads on the board etc
Most points win.
I like it, it’s simple yet very competitive and quite take-that for a simple game. With a bit of dev work and top-end components, I can see this being a popular game.
One to look for in the future to see how it’s developed.
Unusual Suspects
Technically, we played this when we got home but it was purchased at the event so I’m counting it.
A game of stereotyping.
Eliminate all but one card in as few rounds as possible to score the fewest amount of points you can.
So people’s faces are laid out in a grid…
One person knows which picture you’re trying to get the rest of the players to find, they wear a cap so you can’t see their eye-line.
Players flip over a question and read it out, the capped player flips over a card for yes or no as the answer to that question.
Then, the guessing players eliminate people based on that answer by tapping the card, the capped player will flip them over if they should be correctly eliminated.
The more you flip over the more points you score but the earlier the round the fewer points you earn. So if you eliminate 4 in Round 1 you get 4 points, Eliminate 4 in round 2 you get 8 points. Remember, you’re trying to score the fewest points.
So you push as much as you can trying to get a good score, but push too much and pick the ‘Suspect’ and you lose as a team.
Unusual Suspects Summary
It’s good fun, very similar to Codenames but often referred to as Racist which is kinda true, but it’s more stereotyping than Racism or Sexism.
For example, the intelligent-looking woman who looks shy, does she watch Horror films? If you say no… you’ve just pigeon-holed her as someone who hides behind the sofa but she may have a full Hammer Horror collection for all you know. She doesn’t, she’s just a picture but that’s what this game is about.
It’s good fun, probably best played with people you know in a private room, just in case 🙂
Legends Untold
A co-op dungeon crawl game in a small box.
All cards and a few dice (dice not included)
Bit of an awkward one this ’cause we joined the demo midway through so got taught the rules as we played… But there are so many symbols and things I didn’t exactly get what was happening, I just rolled dice n stuff… But I do know a few things…
The dungeon is made up of cards and grows as you explore…
Some areas are dark, some are light and this has effects on your character. Your character is also made up of cards and you have the main card, skill cards and equipment…
See all the symbols? The colours mean something to and it made sense at the time but I can’t remember now 🙂
Combat and Skill checks are done via dice and you have a spread of effects on your weapons which you check against your roll including any pluses or minuses.
Roll high and you hit, roll very high and you hit harder. Roll low and you miss and may even hit a party member.
The enemies deal damage etc which I believe you mark by discarding/flipping equipment cards you own.
Overall, I think the game will be good when I’ve explained the rules fully and it’s just cards in a small box so I expect the price will be favourable.
I’ll definitely give this a go if/when released, look for this on Kickstarter.
Jesta ThaRogue
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