It's New Game Friday! David Wiley (Cardboard Clash) is here to tell us about the new games.
Here’s what is new this week:
- The Abstractionist
- Dungeon Flee
- Ukiyo
This week's new games are all available at https://www.pnparcade.com/collections/new-games
Dungeon Flee
Dungeon Flee is a card-driven dungeon crawl for one person. Each round, you navigate your choice of hero; as you delve deeper in search for the exit, you obtain stronger cards, banish weaker cards to form a stronger deck of cards to play. Meet exciting new encounters, face new dangers, unearth forgotten treasures and rest in empty corridors. Six dungeon corridors await you, filled with monsters, traps, doors, treasures, empty corridors, dead ends and stairs. If you hit a dead end, turn around and continue running. Can you survive long enough to make it through the four stairs heading up, to escape the dungeon and warn your village? Or take too long, and have hordes of monsters overrun you. Never to be heard from again.
This is an interesting one that reminds me of One Deck Dungeon with a smattering of Pathfinder. Move from corredor-to-corredor seeking escape the dungeon while taking out baddies, getting stronger as you go through. Manage the composition of your deck, as it grows with many of your victories to make you stronger as a whole, but also bogs things down since it will take longer to cycle through the entire deck. Plus the addition of a hard mode for the game makes it one that is sure to have plenty of enjoyable staying power for many plays.
The Abstractionist
This game is set against a backdrop of the art world in the first decades just after the turn of the 20th century. As a young aspiring artist you find your motivation in the avant garde abstract art movement and the contemporary art scene of the time. Your aim is to become a celebrated artist.
Who doesn’t like laying tiles down on a board? In this one you’ll always have two tiles to choose from - one you keep in front of you and one drawn from the bag. The catch? There’s six colors, and there are colors that cannot go adjacent to certain other colors. Looking to maximize your scoring? Find ways to be clever with placement, and prioritize the colors going out in order to outscore your friends. A quick, easy-to-learn game with some pretty interesting rules on placement that are sure to make your brain hurt in all the right ways. Just make sure you have a good way of making these tiles thick enough to pull randomly from a bag - paper probably won’t cut it for you!
Ukiyo
Ukiyo is a tactical, puzzle-based card game for 1-4 players.
A puzzle of a game that changes every time you play it. Not only are some of the cards discarded from play (except with 4 players), but what you are trying to achieve is based upon your final card kept in your hand. You’re all playing cards into a center area, trying to be the one who can show their card at the end and be declared the winner - the highest-scoring completed task takes the prize. No one finishes? Then everyone gets to play that final card to try and finish that final task. Still no winner? The highest-numbered card breaks that tie. There’s a fine line to walk between a low-scoring choice you are likely to finish versus a high-scoring one that will win in the event of ties, providing a delightful layer to the game’s decision space.
Check out all of the new games here: https://www.pnparcade.com/collections/new-games
Game of the Week: Visitor in Blackwood Grove
A spacecraft crashes in Blackwood Grove, and the Kid is the only one watching. Federal Agents hunt down the signal, but no one can get near the craft due to its crushing forcefield. Why can some objects pass through it, but others are repelled? Hiding in the craft, the Visitor hopes the Kid can figure out the rule before the Agents and help it escape. The agents want to dissect the Visitor and keep the ship.
Not exactly a social deduction game, but in an adjacent genre for those who enjoy the more interactive aspects of gaming. However, rather than working together each person is trying to piece together the pattern of what the Visitor allows through the forcefield and be the first to make that proper guess. Think you have what it takes to break the code? Well, the Visitor wants you to succeed if you are the Kid...but you have to earn its trust enough to be able to attempt it. An interesting little game, where even when you are guessing the code...it isn’t done with words. Yes, this game could be played in complete silence. My guess if your table won’t be very silent, though...
Check out Game of the Week here: https://www.pnparcade.com/collections/game-of-the-week
See you next week with more information on our newest print and play games!