First up is Dicetiny, which I picked up this morning. In a word, it may as well be called Hearthstone:The Board Game. Starting with a deck of cards (which you build yourself), you move your avatar around a board, fighting nasties and your ultimate target, the Foozle. Every lap earns an action point, which is the currency used to play cards that help or hinder your cause, as well as using special abilities.
I've played one game and found it kind of "meh", but it was only $4.50 (release price will be $20). It didn't seem particularly deep and wasn't much of a challenge, but it was only the first battle. I'll probably go back and play another one to see if it becomes any more interesting.
The other is by Alexey Bokulev, the man behind the great Eador:Genesis, and is called Gremlins, Inc.. It's a lot more ambitious, and so far I like it a lot more than Dicetiny, but not to the point where I wholeheartedly recommend it. It's got a cool Steampunk aesthetic and a lot of good ideas.
Up to four of the titular Gremlins race around a convoluted game board trying to capture Victory Points. The game is also card-driven, but in a much more novel way. Each card has a numerical value, and most have an effect tied to either a minor space on the board or a major Location (there can be several of the same kind of minor spaces, but the Locations are all unique). Landing on a Location allows you to play the associated card if you have it in your hand. But you also move around the board by burning cards for their numerical value, so the decision every turn is whether or not to burn a card for it's movement value, or hold onto it hoping you can take advantage of it by landing in the right spot. Aside from VP's, the other currencies in the game are Gold (many cards have a cost to use), Votes (every 20 turns there's a vote for Governor, and the title comes with several advantages), and Treachery (a lot of the effects deal with screwing over the other players, and you gain Treachery by doing so. Treachery not only makes it harder to be elected Governor, but also increased how much you have to pay in bribes).
After several attempts at playing, I was going to write it off as confusing, cluttered, and too difficult to follow what other players are doing,when I had an Aha! moment last night when everything clicked and I was able to play a game to conclusion. The learning curve is huge, not helped by a confusing playing field:
There's got to be a better way to present the game and information than this.
The game is still very much in EA. There's no single player campaign to speak of (you can play solo, but only by setting up a multiplayer game against nothing but bots), you can't save mid-game (planned for the future, according to devs), the "tutorial" is just a series of help screens (although a real one is planned ads well), and the AI is (in the developer's own words) stupid.
Still, once I figured out how to play, I enjoyed the game, but for me it's going to stand or fall on the back of the single-player experience, since no async mode is planned. The developers say the $10 price point is going to hold at release, so there's really no reason not to wait unless you just want to show support.
