Imhotep the Duel
2 players
20-30 mins
This is a great little ‘mean as you want it to be’ game. The main board is a 3*3 grid surrounded by 6 boats, 3 each are docked to 2 of its sides. The idea is load the boats with the tiles you want to try and build the best Egyption monuments which will attract the most Instagram followers in 5000 years time to pose in front of them in a way that looks kind of normal online but decidedly odd when done in real-life (to simplify that, they use a system called points, but I know what the intent was). The board looks like this:
On your turn you either add a guy to the board or ship a boat. You add the guy with the intent of getting the matching tile on the boat to the right, but your opponent then ships the boat on the bottom, forcing your worker to deliver you the thing you didn’t really want (I’m guessing they’re a slave, which are dope for keeping costs down, but the downside being they don’t really give a $h1t if you get the thing you didn’t want). If YOU ship, you get what you want, but aren’t adding a guy which means in the long term you aren’t getting as much stuff.
There are 5 ways to score points shown on your own long stringy board, which can be flipped over for an entirely different way to score. It can be mean if you are that way inclined, but you don’t have to be that way, if you just focus on taking and doing what’s best for you, then any meanness is usually just a by-product of your opponent not paying attention.
If you like Kahuna, Lost Cities style games. This one should be tried, its very reasonably priced too.
Hadara
2-5 players
45-60 mins
Culture, Military, Food and Wads of cash. These are the things great civilizations are built on. In Hadara you will similtaneously select 2 cards in the first part of 3 ages. Discard one to the board and then either buy the other or discard it for wads of cash. The cards will usually look a bit like THIS:
That guy on the camel is killing something, so you get to move up four points on the military track, but he is doing it tastefully, so you also get one point of culture.
Everyone knows smoking is cool, so three points of culture, plus it tastes great so one point of food!
After taking 5 cards to play or get cash, you can conquer places if you have enough miliary points, build a nice statue if you has loads of culture and get then get paid for moving up the cash track.
Then you do the same thing again, but this time you can buy (or discard for cash) the cards that you discardrd earlier in the era. Then again, you get to build a statue if possible etc…but at the end of this part you must have enough food equal or greater than the number of cards you have. If you have less you must discard cards until your food = your cards.
Repeat, in Era II and then again in Era III. There are also some purple cards that can give you some special powers and some end game medals you can buy. People will certainly compare it to 7 Wonders, but its pretty different. It’s weirdly satisfying. You are just moving up tracks, but after finishing you want to play again immediately. It is very solitary, so its scales well from 2-5 and doesn’t take much longer with more players. If you like 7 Wonders you will certainly like this one too. It has that satisfaction of constantly getting MORE, but your always just poor enough that occasionaly you can’t have everything, but not so poor its annoying.
Jaws
2-4 players
60 mins
Well, this game is a prime example of how to adapt a movie into a board game. One player will be ya boy J-dog, the poor miss-understood shark who just wants attention and goes about trying to get it in the wrong way by eating people. Everyone else gets to play macho 70’s guys who drink too much and try to save the world through the medium of attaching barrels to things.
Its a 2 part game. In the first half, you play a Scotland Yard style game, where the drunken men drive around Amity in a boat trying to attach barrels to a shark they can’t see, following the clues left by the shark in the form of half eaten corpses (there are no half eaten corpse pieces in the game). They are also trying to get the swimmers out of the water so they don’t turn into shark lunches. The shark is hungry and is trying to eat as many swimmers as possible, but if he gets two barrels attached to him, then its on to the second half of the game. Flip the board!
The more swimmers the shark ate, the more advantages it has in this part. If Brody and his crew managed to accessorize the shark with the latest haute-cotoure barrels without him ruining his look by eating too much, they get the advantage.
I’M ON A BOAT, and its getting attacked by a shark. Armed with a bunch of weapons, you’ll now try and kill the shark before it kills you or sinks the boat. Each round you’ll be shown three places the shark could attack, it’ll pick one and you pick where you want to attack, all together, split up? You decide. It’ll then pop up. You will do damage if you picked the right spot, then the shark will hit you and the boat, slowly sinking it round by round until it’s dead or you are.
Lots of tension in this one. The classic trying hidden movement game. The shark needs to feed but tells you where it is when it does. The players need to get those people out of the water, but they also need to tag the shark. Then the rock, paper scissors mechanic of the boat attack. Everyone also has lots of items and special actions they can do, so its not entirely random. The tension rises as the boats shrinks and you are forced ito a smaller and smaller area.
With less players, one players will take multiple roles for the good guys. Excellent family fun 🙂
