Tabletop

Strike of the Eagle (Sote) is a modern war boardgame, incorporating many contemporary game mechanics such as hidden orders, fog-of-war, diceless combat, and a card-driven system. As with many card-driven games, a card play starts a turn and a card can be played in three different ways: for bonus unit movement, for a combat bonus, or as a historical event. Giving three different ways to play a card ensures that a player never gets a bad hand because it is up to the player to make creative combinations.

The hidden order mechanics are implemented via order discs. Each order is disc is chosen secretly and placed on top of units, then flipped and resolved simultaneously; this way a player can bluff and be unpredictable. As with other block games, your opponent sees the blank back side of your units, creating fog-of-war; as well, the blocks can rotate 90 degrees to track hit points, a mechanic pioneered in Quebec 1759. Finally the combat is diceless: the combined combat strengths of attacking and defending units are compared on a chart. You can add two free randomly drawn cards to modify the combat result or pay with specific cards from your hand. Thus you can pay resources to hedge your bets or press your luck.

Modart is a fanware implementation of Modern Art, one of the best Reiner Knizia's auction games. Each player is an art broker and speculator, buying paintings low to sell high. It has been published in multiple languages, in different editions. Unfortunately the US, Mayfair edition is the ugliest of them of all. The Brazilian, Nordic, and German editions are all unique and beautiful. However, the most intriguing is the Japanese edition, with stamps rather than paintings.

Zendo is an inductive reasoning game by Kory Heath. Heath reworked Eluesis, a game designed to play with a standard 52-card deck by Robert Abott. Eluesis was first published in Scientific American, June 1959, but has been published several times since in card game rulebooks. Heath created a complete boxed set with colorful transparent pyramids, guessing tokens, sample puzzles, rules and a new Buddhist theme rather than the original Judeo-Christian theme. Zendo is more colorful and tactile because it uses 3D pyramids rather than standard cards.

Armada d6 is a space war boardgame by Eric Zimmerman and John Sharp. Emulation is not only for software. Since Dungeons & Dragons 3.5 was released under the Open Game License as the d20 system, numerous clones are being published. New designers are taking the d20 system and making retro clones of Dungeons & Dragons 1st edition as well as ultralight systems. For instance you can play the official Dungeons & Dragons 3.5 modules (adventures) with the Microlite d20 system which has two-page core rules that emulate a full Dungeons & Dragons 3.5 system.

Zimmerman and Sharp is doing something similar. Several years ago Zimmerman and Sharp serendipitously ran across photocopies of partial rules and notes of an unpublished board game, Armada d6 at a book store. Twenty years later, they are emulating rules from partial information to reconstruct Armada d6.

The goal of Armada d6 is to build five monuments on the board. The board is made up of modular square tiles that you can arrange to create a large variation of maps. Each tile is divided in eight movement squares surrounding an impassable circular build site for a monument. Within the circles are costs and slots for monument construction.

Goko is an ambitious online boardgame portal. As of now they have three games: Dominion, Forbidden City, and All the King's Men. All the King's Men is a hybrid tile-pushing RTS by Goko -- an original game. The other two are boardgames. Each game has an AI and a tutorial; Thus Goko offers play with with people or the AI. Forbidden City is an light edge-matching tile game that is published exclusively as a digital edition -- there is no retail cardboard edition. More importantly, Goko's implementation of Donald X. Vaccarino's Dominion, is the best digital implementation to date.

All the games are free and playable without registration. Since the games are implemented in HTML5, they run on numerous platforms. I wish Goko the best, because their "coming soon" is highly impressive, if they can keep up the same level of polish for their future boardgames.

Slapshot is a highly abstracted hockey simulation card game with a great amount of luck. The original edition was created in 1982 but reprinted multiple times, including a recent reprint and an iOS app. The publisher, Columbia Games is famous for making one thing -- block war boardgames. Slapshot is an odd game in long lineup of hard-core wargames from Columbia Games.

Slapshot's core gameplay is similar to Reiner Knizia's Battleline, because both games use lane-based "combat". Each player gets six cards that represent six players (suits): three forwards, two defensemen, and one goalie. On your turn you can draft, trade, or play (challenge) a team. Drafting improves your hand by exchanging one of your low cards with a draw from a common pool of face-down cards. Trading is similar to drafting but you randomly draw a card from another player's hand and you must exchange a card of the matching suit. Thus if you draw a forward card from an another player, you must give one of your forwards in exchange.

Ars Victor is an innovative, light war boardgame that has surprising strategic depth for a simple game. Ars Victor uses Richard Borg's popular Command and Color system and, adds Richard Sivél's Friedrich movement system and Mark Herman's command points, which are common in card-driven wargames. The Command and Color system is in use by several games and expansions, including the Memoir '44.

The core gameplay of Ars Victor is similar to that of Memoir '44. You manage a hand of cards that dictate what units you can move on a hex map and you roll custom dice to resolve combat. The differences are few but definitely game-changing. The map is made up of nine modular, double sided pieces that form a 9x9 grid. Because of variable locations on the 9x9 grid, terrain orientation, and the front/back side that one can use, there is huge variability in map setup.

Keltis Or is a dice version of the popular Lost Cities card game. When Knizia submitted the Lost Cities Board Game, a follow-up to the original Lost Cities, Kosmos, the German publisher, decided to retheme it from an archeological expedition to leprechauns and clover harvesting. The American publisher kept Knizia's original design and name, Lost Cities: The Board Game, while in Europe the game is distributed as Keltis. Keltis is popular, and spawned six sequels and variations.

Keltis Or plays much like Lost Cities--collect and play sets of sequentially numbered tokens. However Keltis Or uses three six-sided dice, with pips 1-5 and a Wishing Stone icon. You get two rolls and you choose which gets locked or rerolled. You can pick up one of the five suited chips, numbered from 0-10, that match a single pip value, or sum of pips that you rolled each turn. You can acquire a zero chip by rolling a Wishing Stone. On the numbered chips are randomly distributed long- and short-term score modifier tokens. Since there is a sunk cost when starting a new suit, one must balance long- and short-term goals as well being careful not to take on too many suits.

The aMAZEing Labyrinth, or simply Labyrinth, in the original German game, is a children's sliding-puzzle boardgame. Players, in turn, race to get their avatar pawns to randomized assigned objects in a labyrinth. When a player picks up all the items, she heads for her starting spot to claim victory. The twist is that the labyrinth keeps changing as each player also shifts the labyrinth by playing labyrinth tiles. Tiles are are arranged in a 7 by 7 grid. The players can slide a new labyrinth tile in one of twelve edged spots, pushing an entire row or column of the maze.

Ascension: Storm of The Souls (ASOTS) is a deck-building game, akin to Thunderstone and Dominion. Players build a custom deck with in-game currencies like the aforementioned games, but ASOTS is simpler, and looks and feels more like the original source of inspiration, Magic: The Gathering. Another major difference is that ASOTS has more randomness in deck-building.

In both Dominion and Thunderstone, the card market is randomized in fixed sets, allowing players to see all the cards available for deck-building. In ASOTS, only six cards are available for purchase and the rest are revealed as cards are bought. Thus, one cannot fully plan card mix strategies, rather one must acquire cards tactically, carefully watching the card purchases of other players.