A Deckbuilding Look at Penny Arcade

Penny Arcade has been released as two standalone deckbuilding games: Gamers vs Evil (2011) and Rumble in R’lyeh (2012). They’re both pretty basic deckbuilders, but they still offer some interesting ideas for the deckbuilding genre.

The Game

Though Penny Arcade is a much later release than most one-and-a-halfth generation deckbuilding games like Thunderstone (2009) and Tanto Cuore (2009), it nonetheless shares a lot of elements in common with Dominion. However, it also builds strongly on another deckbuilder, Ascension (2010), thus offering the first look at a third generation of deckbuilder games — which are influenced not just by Dominion, but also by other deckbuilder releases.
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New to Me: Winter & Spring, 2012

Back in my earliest days of writing board game blogs, I opined upon the 70 new games I’d played in 2005 in an article full of mini-reviews.

I’ve decided to revisit this topic here in Mechanics & Meeples. Thus, this is the first of a series of mini-review articles where I’m going to give quick synopses and impressions of games that I played for the first time in the preceding months. This article covers the first half of this year, from January to June.

I was somewhat surprised when writing this to discover that only two of the new-to-me games dated from earlier than 2011 and only one from earlier than 2010. I generally feel like I’ve escaped the cult of the new, but clearly it’s still a major focus in my gameplaying.

I’ve generally listed games in descending order of my interest. That doesn’t mean a game is necessarily good or bad, just that it does or doesn’t fit my gaming tastes.

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