testament review~
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I generally don’t like the idea of a board game requiring an “app” to play, but I’ve played The Search for Planet X a few times now and enjoyed it a lot. And the app is not technically required but I think you need an additional player to run things and not play if you don’t use it (or play the online version).
The game is basically a logic puzzle. You run a telescope and try to figure out what’s in different parts of the sky based on hard rules and your own observations. Figuring out what’s in certain spots gets you points. It’s a clever design.
The designers also have a “sequel” due to come out this year.
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https://juniorgeneral.org/naval/pearl/pearl.htm
Tora! Tora! Tora! is a game played in two parts – a strategic planning phase followed by a tactical attack phase. US players must decide how to employ limited forces in and around Pearl Harbor over the 10 day vulnerability period. Japanese players must select the timing, direction, and composition of the attack in order to inflict enough damage to prevent the US Pacific Fleet from interfering with future Japanese war plans in Southeast Asia. Game file downloads are located at the bottom of the screen.
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Today I find out 2 epoch mods with fully English rules for Tabletop Simulator, after google the username, coincidentally, the mod creator is Nathan Altice, his blog was recommended on SB2 once before, yes, he wrote a post about this electronic wargame.
http://metopal.com/2018/01/03/epoch-electronic-war-game-battle-of-dan-no-ura-1984/
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Cinder wondering how playing Spirit Island could be more interesting than paying attention to him. (I brought him along when visiting family over the weekend.)
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in first impression
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I’ve never read anything from Gamelords, is it good Traveller material?
Me neither. 
I just read Grognardia, and found this post: My TOP 10 traveller Adventures, he mentioned Duneraiders and one comment makes me curious
“Duneraiders” always gave me more of a Lawrence of Arabia vibe than a Dune vibe.
google lead me to this bundle, I think that’s a good deal in wishlist (still has 20 days for decision).
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free pnp games from a spanish boardgame club
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Yesterday I played Nemesis for the second time. The theme is, you and your fellow players are crew members in a knock-off Alien situation. You have to fight off the aliens invading your ship and do what you can to survive and escape.
It’s one of those games that’s co-op trying to manage an ever-worsening board state. This one’s got secret objectives that can be pro-social or anti-social, so you never 100% know whether to trust your fellow players, but generally you’re mostly on the same side. There’s a clever twist built into the game though: when a player dies, they take over control of the aliens. This allows for character elimination without player elimination, and it also results in an interesting mid-to-late-game difficulty spike for the remaining human players, who now have to contend with much smarter enemies on the board.
My problem with this game is that it’s just too grim and stark. You get the constant, worsening stress of something like Arkham Horror, but without that game’s silly maximalism, sense of humor, and the pleasure of buffing up your characters in all sorts of ways over time. In this game you can get items that increase your strength, but they are few and far between. You spend the vast majority of your time just struggling to move between rooms on the spaceship, because every time you move you have to drop little noise tokens that persist forever and cause huge consequences. This means that you feel like you’re trudging through mud the whole game. You start the game with 5 small, incredibly mundane tasks you want to get done, and then you spend 4 hours barely getting two of them done. One of the other players had a secret objective that was just sending an email, and they spent the entire game stuck on the wrong side of the ship unable to even get to the computer. It’s not satisfying at all, it’s just a slog.
That being said, in this game I was the last surviving human and I just barely made it into the cryosleep pod in time after succeeding on several improbable dice rolls, so the game did happen to provide me with a very exciting finale. I still would have rather played almost anything else.
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New issues from punched interviewed with Mark Simonitch