A Message From the Stars
I must have been sleeping on AllPlay pre-pandemic, or they’ve just grown tremendously since then. Initially a luxury board game table developer, AllPlay has leaned heavily into publishing board games that they describe as “approachable and easy to learn,” which I agree with, except for our first title: A Message From the Stars. Want something more from a word game? What we have here is a game in which alien life is trying to communicate with us, but wouldn’t’cha know it, we don’t speak the same language. So, in lieu of that, we have to give brief clues to one another using logic, simple math, and word descriptions. Even the person who demoed the game with us admitted that many people approaching her table didn’t initially understand what was going on.
Each player cooperatively works with another player, the alien, to figure out what the heck they are trying to say through letter identification. Players use a board with all the letters of the alphabet listed under three sections for addition, subtraction, and multiplication. Each letter has three different colors depending on how often they are used in our language, and each color can only occur a certain amount of times. The alien will write a word that approximates the keyword and write a number under it to signify the numerical value that players must puzzle out. It won’t give the players all the information they need, but it can help them narrow down their choices. Only able to supply a few clues, players must respond with their own word to approach one of three words they need the alien to guess, while also trying to get more information from the alien depending on how they respond to that word with their new clue. Honestly, the whole thing took me a few rounds of play to fully grasp, but the investment was worth it as we all had a great time working together and coming out on top.
9 Lives
AllPlay has also sought to bring some Japan-only titles to the US by localizing their work. One such title is 9 Lives, a game initially developed in 2015 by Taiki Shinzawa. Cat lovers beware, because if you have even the slightest inkling toward trick-taking card games, you’re going to need (not want) this game. No partners here; in 9 Lives, players are tasked with bidding how many tricks they will take. By using an adorable cat figurine, they can lay the cat longways to take two numbers or face toward a single number with intent to earn that many tricks only. Higher risks mean greater rewards (more points) because at the end of four rounds, or whoever gets to a specific point value first wins.
Now, here’s where the magic happens: when a trick is played, the high card, or trump, wins. Normal. The winning player not only gets the trick, but they take one of the losing cards into their hand. Play for the round ends when any one player runs out of cards. In this way, a round can go extremely long or short. Think carefully, as going above or below your bid may sink you, though each bid also has a high bid. So, if you bid 5, for example, that 5 may also be paired with a 12 on the bidding board depending on how the game’s set up. This means if you miss your 5 bid, you can always hit 12, but that will take some fancy play to get there. The other players know that, too. It all sounds simple, but I’ve honestly never played a trick-taking game like this, and it was an absolutely cerebral blast. Also, the cards have cats on them. Maine Coons get the 9 spot, of course.
Keep the Heroes Out
Keep the Heroes Out is a charming cooperative game in which players have to—you guessed it—keep the heroes out. You are the villains trying to keep your treasure safe from paladins, wizards, and all sorts of do-gooders. Card-driven, players set up traps and attack good guys as they come rushing in to take smaller treasures that power them up, or hurt the villains (that’s you). At some point, the do-gooders give up; through strategic play, the villains can survive with their loot another day. Although Keep the Heroes Out came out in 2022, I bring this up not only because it fits our theme here at RPGFan so well, but also because expansions are constantly being released, including right now. Oh, also, the artwork is absolutely adorable and crisp, and almost made me purchase the game by itself.
Little Alchemists
If you’re anything like me, you’re nearing forty, have kids, and can’t wait to brainwash them into one of your favorite hobbies. Little Alchemists will do the trick, and while it’s not fully available just yet, give it a couple months. CGE’s Alchemists is a brain burner in logic, reason, and worker placement hijinks. My wife loves this game, but I still don’t fully understand it. Anyway, if you’re on the slow end like me or have kids who love the idea of smashing mushrooms and bugs together to make elemental potions, then look no further. With seven (yes, seven) difficulty levels, your four-year-old can earn their wings at level one and work their way up to level seven. Or if you have a smart six-year-old ready to enter at level three, start there. If your husband’s an idiot, you can start at level five.
What you’re trying to do is essentially guess-and-check by choosing two elements to discover what kind of potion they make, which is randomized every game. If you make enough discoveries, you win. Sounds like just plain old luck, right? Well, if you’re paying attention, taking notes (on the higher levels), and able to rule things out based on what other players are taking and creating, you can use information on other players’ turns to snag a potion before they do, earning yourself more points. Brewing potions at the right time can boost players, as offers are intermittently made in the game to incentivize concocting an air potion, for instance. Everything is app-driven, so no mistakes can be made trying to figure out what ingredients actually create. The whole thing pops off the table with colors and artwork that is sure to charm your kiddo.
Natera: New Beginning
Here we are at our promising and entertaining prototype. Natera: New Beginning is a card-driven worker placement title that found humanity getting a little too big for their britches as its pursuit for intellect accidentally turned the entire world into animals. Oops. Fortunately, you’re still pretty smart and can turn this post-humanity world into a thriving cityscape again. Not sure we learned anything here, BUT that’s okay, because we have an engrossing, meaty game reminiscent of other hits like Terraforming Mars and Ark Nova. In fact, I got a chance to play the prototype with Eric Fugere and he told me he got this idea from Terraforming Mars, one of his favorite games. But don’t worry; this is no mere copycat.
While every deck in Natera is unique, the card anatomy is like nothing I’ve seen in any other game, specifically with regard to cost. Every card has three different costs using three different resources, but the resources are not always weighted the same way. One card may cost five brains, two arrows, and one heart, while another costs two brains, eight arrows, and nine hearts. In many games with multiple resources, they are typically valued sequentially, such as wood being the weakest and gold being the most valuable; not so in Natera. I assume every card costs a seemingly random value because different animal tribes have different leanings and ease of access. So, for bears, getting arrows may be no problem, but they could have trouble getting brains, while the reptiles may have the exact opposite situation. So, a cost of nine hearts may be effectively cheaper than four brains for some clans, but maybe that card is less useful for the bears than it is for the beavers.
Cards aren’t all Natera has going for it, though: the board boasts typical worker placement tendencies, such as putting one of your three workers on a five-heart space to get five hearts, or two batteries to get two batteries. To spice things up, the board is divided into four quadrants with loyalty tracks, and a central area with no loyalty track. The center district offers larger rewards for placement, but doesn’t benefit from loyalty and requires players to discard a card. However, if you’re the bears, you don’t have to discard, yet bears are also large and can bully other players out of sought-after spots anywhere on the board by virtue of their size. On the other hand, reptiles may be excellent at gathering food and have an easier time recruiting specialists with an abundance of food, something the bears struggle with. This description may make it feel like each tribe is forced into a pathway, but upon our initial experience with the game, I found decision-making much more complex and nuanced. I couldn’t simply ignore food as the bears, and found some specialists would help my strategy, so I had to find a way to get more food. Fortunately, if I gathered enough crates, I could build a house on one of those worker placement spots I had seen my opponents going to frequently, forcing them to provide me food every time they went there (from the bank, not the player). Loyalty tracks lead to unique placement areas that only a player with high enough loyalty can access, and these are randomized every game.
While we didn’t get to play a full game, Fugere told us that a Kickstarter is pending and will launch later this month. He has been working on this game full-time for two years, and has a spreadsheet he has labored over to achieve some semblance of balance. He can’t wait to push his baby out there, as he believes it is finally in a good place. What we got to experience at Origins was a gameboard that draws the eye, lovingly crafted game components, and an artist who brings these anthropomorphic critters to life. Although it’s not technically in its final stages, Fugere clearly took pride in what he could show us, and we would have had no way of knowing of its existence if he hadn’t set it up in the free play area after exhibitor hours. Only at Origins!
