A Deckbuilding Look at Asgard’s Chosen

Increasingly, the newest deckbuilding games use deckbuilding as a single mechanic in a more complex gaming system that  draws from our categories of gaming. Thus, Martin Wallace’s A Few Acres of Snow was a wargame deckbuilder and Friedemann Friese’s Copycat was a worker-placement deckbuilder. Asgard’s Chosen by Morgan Dontanville follows that trend.

The Game

Asgard's ChosenAsgard’s Chosen is — like A Few Acres of Snow (2011) — a deckbuilding wargame. However, where A Few Acres felt like it was a pretty serious wargame that happened to use deckbuilding as a resource mechanic, Asgard’s Chosen feels like a serious deckbuilding game that happens to also incorporate wargaming.

Which is to say the emphasis is different.

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Co-Op Interviews: Bruno Cathala & Serge Laget

Bruno Cathala and Serge Laget are the designers of Shadows over Camelot and the recent Shadows over Camelot card game. They were kind enough to talk to about their design in email discussions between August and October this year.


Picture by Toshiyuki Hashitani (moonblogger at BGG); used under CC license.

Picture by Toshiyuki Hashitani (moonblogger), used under Creative Commons

Shannon Appelcline: How did the Shadows over Camelot board game come about?

Serge Laget: I’m a teacher, and I use cooperative gaming in my work. In the years before Shadows over Camelot was published, there were no cooperative games for adults except The Lord of the Rings by Reizer Knizia.

At first, I began to work alone on a cooperative game. I met Bruno Cathala during this time, and I proposed that he work with me on the project. The game was born by the cooperation of our two minds!

Bruno Cathala: The story begins on Christma 2002. My sister’s gift to me was The Lord of the Rings, the cooperative game designed by Reiner Knizia. In my head, i said: “Wow … exactly what I didn’t want to have.”

At the time, I didn’t like cooperative games (because I’m a competitor), I thought that cooperative games were just for children, and I was not familiar with Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings story. I had tried to read the book many times, but each time, I gave up after less than 100 pages, because the style was boring to me — as boring as the French author Honoré de Balzac! Continue reading