It's New Game Friday David Wiley (Cardboard Clash) is here to tell us about the new games.
Here’s what is new this week:
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Pinball Builder: Tower of the Wizard
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Pinball Builder: Desperate Sun Expansion
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Ice & Land
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Power Creep: Chef, City Center 2092
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Dangerous Space: Oliver, Diffuse Mission
https://www.pnparcade.com/collections/new-games
Pinball Builder: Tower of the Wizard
Pinball Builder allows you to construct your own Pinball table! As new sets are released you’ll be able to swap cards (theme and/or standard part cards) to create unique gameplay challenges for you and your friends.
If you’re like me, you spent part of your childhood haunting arcades big and small, whether the machine or two in a family restaurant or in a movie theater, or even at a full-blown arcade place. Chances are if they had any arcade games, they also had pinball machines. If you wanted to try your hand at not just playing pinball, but building your own machine using various parts and effects, this is the game for you. With fairly simple rules, and room to get creative in mixing and matching sets in the future, this is going to be one you won’t want to miss.
Pinball Builder: Desperate Sun Expansion
A simple, yet important expansion here for your Pinball Builder game, as this adds in 6 more cards and a new machine to build and tackle the challenge. You’ll be excited by the power of The Rocket, which lets you choose a direction to redirect to a new card. Can you take down the Head Bandit, surviving cards like the Graveyard, The Range, and Saloon? Get your PNP skills ready and let’s see what sort of crazy pinball combos we can dream up!
Ice & Land
In an age of steel men and wooden ships, the whaler LeHonor leaves the bustling commercial port off the coast of Nantucket to embark on an expedition with a one-way ticket, but possibly without a return ticket, to the ends of the earth in search of previous amber gray.
Brave across 9 or 12 days worth of exploring, fending off threats, and even warding off your fellow adventurers in the harsh landscape. Inspired by a Dan Simmons novel, but certainly not required reading to enjoy this, you’ll be trying to maximize your score as best you can while scraping by, feeling like you can never quite do everything, but hopefully managing to get enough done to survive another day. If you like games that are interactive among players and provide some interesting decisions, you might want to check this one out.
Power Creep: Chef, City Center 2092
A small reprieve - the raiders having moved on - allowing the settlers to scavenge for the scraps left behind.
Ooh this one is sinister! As the time track creeps toward your demise, you begin to have to ration supplies, losing a health when using food or water after that point. Ouch. The monkeys are bad enough, making you lose value on your dice when they trigger, but you’re going to want to do everything you can to move quickly through the City Center. Thankfully he comes with some nice blueprints that let you reroll dice and change items you’ve collected into something you need for the moment. If you haven’t felt challenged with Power Creep yet, this week’s map might change that!
Dangerous Space: Oliver, Diffuse Mission
Oliver likes to take a more considered approach to his dives. Slow and sure finds the prize…alive.
A fun mission comes your way for Oliver, having you avoid using a 1 or a 2 in the same row or column as an active bomb within its room. Not only that, but it gets diffused by marking all adjacent and diagonal spaces with even numbers, making it a really tricky task to undertake. You’ll probably wish there was only one, maybe two bombs, but feel deflated by having three in here. Thankfully, Oliver can upgrade to moving diagonally fairly quickly, making it an easy choice as an early Gear slot to snag to help clear those bombs.
https://www.pnparcade.com/collections/new-games
Game of the Week: Dungeon Ball on sale for just $4!
While the monsters wait for more heroes to wander into the dungeon to meet their untimely end, they bide their time by playing games they learned through torturing adventurers. For the most part, they understand how to play, but they’re a little hazy on things like the rules against cheating and whatnot.
If you are seeking a 1-2 player game that plays out almost identical to an NFL football game, Dungeon Ball is something you’ll want to look into. While there are restrictions on play calling (choosing an orthagonally-adjacent play from your previous one) and a luck factor via dice rolling, this game pays homage to the sport that inspired the game. It even comes with a way to have dexterity-based extra point attempts using the box lid and a die. A clever use of momentum tokens allows both sides of the ball to use a handful of ability cards to manipulate things in their favor. Lacking a friend to play against? There is an AI deck to allow you to play this one solitaire against the game itself, practicing your moves to perfection like I used to with Tecmo Super Bowl on my old NES.
Check out Game of the Week here: https://www.pnparcade.com/collections/game-of-the-week
Glass Garden
Terrariums are works of living art, lush worlds cradled within glass walls. Use care to cultivate and protector your fragile environment.
An interesting little solo game where you’re moving around plants within a Terrarium, seeking to get them to grow into Succulents, trigger light within your jars, and minimize the damage being done by the critter contained within. It might be tempting to move plants to the bottom to let them grow, as the critters ignore them there, but you’re going to need to move them back up if possible in order to maximize your points scored at the end of the game. Plan out your moves wisely, as you only get nine turns to puzzle out how to become a Master Gardener.
Glass Garden: Centerpieces Expansion
Make your terrarium really sparkly by introducing a centerpiece plant. Be warned: these unusual plants bring equally unusual critters.
A nice little expansion that brings two new things: centerpiece plants, and new critters. The centerpiece plants are the key here, as they remain in the middle of your Terrarium and MUST grow into their succulent side in order for you to win the game. That makes it a little more challenging to approach the game, as you have a bar to cross over in order to get the chance to score points. The critters are unique here, as they each have a continuous effect that will interfere in your best efforts to make progress each round. A perfect small expansion to the game!
Check out the new Button Shy releases here: https://www.pnparcade.com/collections/new-games
See you next week with more information on our newest print and play games!