Toy Fair 2018: The Games

I’ve dedicated this post to just the games I saw there, as they are worthy of their own post, and even this is just a sampling.  This content had been previously combined with the prior post, but it is now separate and expanded.  I did replicate my conversations with Stronghold Games in both posts.

With that out of the way, let’s cut right to the chase:  I need this.  Now.

Prelude is supposed to help get a Terraforming Mars game going a little faster, and therefore conclude a little sooner.  I personally think there’s nothing wrong with the current length of the game, about 2-3 hours, but apparently some do, and I have no problems speeding things up.

I did talk to the folks at Stronghold Games about an official, sanctioned Terraforming Mars tournament at GenCon. “I so hope they do a tournament,” said my friend, Televator, one of the best and most competitive gamers among us, a little while back. The folks from Stronghold are open to the proposal of running an official event at GenCon. I’ve run Epic Duels events at GenCon, participated in tournaments for dozens of other games, and I think I’ve got a format.  You can leave me a comment here or on boardgamegeek if you’d be interested.

Gameception is the other game I need to get. It’s the game within a game, the game you can play while playing other games. You can play cards to gain points, like the one for any time someone has 2 empty bottles in front of him, which for us, would get played by 1130am or so. Mark from Vile Genius Games seemed like a good guy, who had a successful weekend.

I don’t know what this is, but it comes in a huge box, and I want to play it.

Ravingspire is definitely the coolest-looking of the games I saw.

A combination of deck building and tactics (those are figures close to the center if you look closely) on a rotating dungeon map, way cool! Designer Cory Scanlan from Vorpal Chainsword Games and I had a great conversation about getting started in the game world, and he was very gracious with his advice.

Tower of Madness also has a very impressive table presence, one needed if you’re going to hold back the forces of Cthulu.  This one follows the line of Mansions of Madness 2nd Edition.

These Cthulu tentacles actually hold up marbles, and you want strategically let those marbles fall to gain some magic, without letting so many come through as to free up Cthulu.  Has some Jenga-like dexterity and physical strategy mixed.

Z-Man makes a lot of great games, and their latest, History of the World, looks like it could join that list:

Games Workshop stated that they are opening a café this fall for fans of GW, especially for fans of Warhammer 40K. They have had great success with the 8th edition.  However, the minis can get costly and require a fair amount of space, so you sort of need a place to gather where you have access to both. If the café is successful, they will open more. They told me which state it will be in but asked me not to share since they haven’t announced it yet. As someone who lives in Chicago, it will be in a state too far for me to drive to, I’ll tell you that.

For fans of Happy Salmon from North Star Games, here comes Funky Chicken. You can actually play them together.

I also love North Star Games for Evolution. They are now doing Evolution: The Beginning, an even more streamlined version of the game, though I swear it didn’t need it.

I love space games, and Pulsar 2849 is getting great reviews.

As is Unstable Unicorns by Ramie Badie.  This one was all the rage on Kickstarter, basically earning $2MM overnight:

I thought there was a strong science theme throughout the show, in both toys and games. The ladies from Killer Snails worked with the Museum of Natural History to put it together.  They also couldn’t be nicer (though I suspect that underneath that, they’re cold-blooded killers).  They were there with Biome Builder, their latest.

Chara games does games with more Christian themes like Soul of the Empire. Not my thing, but the games look well-designed.

Joe from Gray Matters Games is an acquaintance who does party games, and You Bet-Cha! is his latest.

Love the title of this one:

And the concept of this one, with jokes written by L.A. comics:

Plus, I always wanted to play one of those electric football games, and got to demo this one a bit.

Finally, this new game from a new inventor looked as good as any of the ones I just showed you and can likely be played faster than all of them:

😉

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