#204: Viticulture, Vindication, Shadows of Brimstone and Living without a Game Group
Timecodes
Viticulture Overview 00:57:41
Viticulture Review 01:00:43
Vindication Look Back 01:29:25
Shadows of Brimstone Look Back 01:33:25
Wendake Look Back 01:39:11
News with Tony T 01:44:29
Living without a Game Group 02:29:09
Opening Banter and Reviews
Feature Review: Viticulture Essentials Edition
In Viticulture, the players find themselves in the roles of people in rustic, pre-modern Tuscany who have inherited meager vineyards. They have a few plots of land, an old crushpad, a tiny cellar, and three workers. They each have a dream of being the first to call their winery a true success. The players are in the position of determining how they want to allocate their workers throughout the year. Every season is different on a vineyard, so the workers have different tasks they can take care of in the summer and winter. There's competition over those tasks, and often the first worker to get to the job has an advantage over subsequent workers. Fortunately for the players, people love to visit wineries, and it just so happens that many of those visitors are willing to help out around the vineyard when they visit as long as you assign a worker to take care of them. Their visits (in the form of cards) are brief but can be very helpful. Using those workers and visitors, players can expand their vineyards by building structures, planting vines (vine cards), and filling wine orders (wine order cards). Players work towards the goal of running the most successful winery in Tuscany. Viticulture - Essential Edition comes with components for Viticulture, but adds some of the expansions from Tuscany, including 36 Mama & Papa cards, Field cards (previously known as "Properties"), expanded/revised Visitors, and 24 Automa cards (solo variant), along with a couple of minor rule changes.
Designed by Jamey Stegmaier, Alan Stone & Morten Monrad Pedersen
Published by Stonemaier Games
Lookback Review: Vindication
Vindication (formerly Epoch: The Awakening) is a highly strategic, fantasy-based tabletop journey for 2-5 players. Play time is 15-30 minutes per player. Thrown overboard for a life of wretchedness, you wash ashore a hostile island ruins — completely alone with nothing except the breath in your lungs and an undaunted spirit. Through your advanced resource management, area control tactics, and freeform action selection, you’ll add companions to your party, acquire bizarre relics, attain potent character traits, and defeat a host of unusual monsters in the ultimate goal of mastering heroic attributes — and regaining honor.
Designed by Marc Neidlinger
Published by Orange Nebula, LLC
Lookback Review: Shadows of Brimstone
Shadows of Brimstone: City of the Ancients is a fast-paced, fully cooperative, dungeon-crawl board game set in the Old West, with a heavy dose of unspeakable horror! Players create characters, taking on the role of a classic Western Hero Archetype, such as the Law Man, Gunslinger, or Saloon Girl. Forming an adventuring posse, the Heroes venture down into the dark mines, overrun with all manner of ancient demons and foul creatures from another world. With tactical gameplay, lots of dice, and a robust card-driven exploration system, no two games are ever the same as the heroes explore the mines finding new enemies to fight, new loot to collect, and new dangers to overcome. Players can even find portals to other worlds, stepping through to continue their adventures on the other side!
Designed by Jason C. Hill
Published by Flying Frog Productions
Lookback Review: Wendake
In Wendake, you step into the shoes of the chief of a Native American tribe. You will have to manage the most important aspects of your tribe’s daily existence, thereby earning points on the Economic, Military, Ritual, and Mask tracks. The core of the game is the action selection mechanism: you will have the opportunity to choose better and better actions over 7 years (i.e., rounds), and the winner will be the chief who finds the best combinations of actions and uses them to lead their tribe to prosperity!
Designed by Danilo Sabia
Published by Renegade Game Studios
Gaming News by Tony T
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