New to Me: Fall 2013

Though my new gaming was light in fall (primarily because my gaming was light in fall, due to the holidays), I’ve opted to publish my short list of new-to-me games while they’re all still fresh. (And it looks like I still managed almost a dozen new games.) As always this is an assessment of how much I like the games, rather than whether they’re great or not. I tend to prefer light-to-medium euros that don’t make me work too hard.


The Great

Caverna: The Cave FarmersCaverna: The Cave Farmers (2013). I thought Agricola (2007) was great the first time I played it, because it combined worker placement with scarcity and it also supported deep and thoughtful gameplay. It’s too long for me to play very often, but it’s still a great game that I love when I play. Caverna is essentially more of the same, but with fantasy theming, with some simplified game elements, with reduced randomness, and with an interesting new expeditions systems. Overall, it’s a great variant, that’s just (barely) far enough from the original that you might want to own both.

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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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