Preparing ourselves for Xmas time 🙂

Star Wars: The Card Game – Balance of the Force

Game description from the publisher:

“General Solo, is your strike team assembled?”
–General Madine, Star Wars: Return of the Jedi

It’s time to assemble your strike team. With new rules and 154 new cards, Balance of the Force, the second deluxe expansion for Star Wars: The Card Game, introduces two new multiplayer formats and powerful new objective sets for each of the game’s six affiliations.

The game’s new two-versus-two format allows you to team up with a friend against a pair of opponents. The challenge deck format allows as many as three players to join forces in order to confront the imminent threat posed by a single, powerful rival. Or you can explore the powerful new units and tactics enabled by the expansion’s six new objective sets. By adding Balance of the Force to your Star Wars: The Card Game collection, you don’t just populate your Star Wars galaxy – you expand it!

Dead of Winter: A Crossroads Game

Game description from the publisher:

“Crossroads” is a new series from Plaid Hat Games that tests a group of survivors’ ability to work together and stay alive while facing crises and challenges from both outside and inside.

Dead of Winter: A Crossroads Game, the first game in this series, puts 2-5 players in a small, weakened colony of survivors in a world where most of humanity is either dead or diseased, flesh-craving monsters. Each player leads a faction of survivors with dozens of different characters in the game.

Dead of Winter is a meta-cooperative psychological survival game. This means players are working together toward one common victory condition — but for each individual player to achieve victory, he must also complete his personal secret objective. This secret objective could relate to a psychological tick that’s fairly harmless to most others in the colony, a dangerous obsession that could put the main objective at risk, a desire for sabotage of the main mission, or (worst of all) vengeance against the colony! Certain games could end with all players winning, some winning and some losing, or all players losing. Work toward the group’s goal, but don’t get walked all over by a loudmouth who’s looking out only for his own interests!

Dead of Winter is an experience that can be accomplished only through the medium of tabletop games. It’s a story-centric game about surviving through a harsh winter in an apocalyptic world. The survivors are all dealing with their own psychological imperatives, but must still find a way to work together to fight off outside threats, resolve crises, find food and supplies, and keep the colony’s morale up.

Dead of Winter has players making frequent, difficult, heavily- thematic, wildly-varying decisions that often have them deciding between what is best for the colony and what is best for themselves.

Blueprints

In Blueprints, players are architects who must use different colored dice to build three different structures from blueprints, with the dice providing different advantages to you. In the game, each round progresses like this:

• Discover your blueprint.
• Each turn, choose a die and place it in your building.
• Reveal your building, tally your points, then discover who wins the awards and prizes.

After three rounds, players tally their awards and prizes to see who wins. Who will be the best architect?

The Lord of the Rings: The Card Game – The Morgul Vale

The epic adventure that begins in the shadowed streets and alleyways of Gondor’s greatest city reaches its conclusion with a desperate battle at the very gates of Mordor…

The Morgul Vale is the climactic final Adventure Pack in the “Against the Shadow” cycle for The Lord of the Rings: The Card Game! After exploring underworld locations, encountering hidden ambushes, and rallying the troops during battles and sieges, the new scenario from The Morgul Vale presents Middle-earth’s greatest heroes with an opportunity to ride against the strength of Mordor itself. Should they succeed, though, the heroes will find no peace. Instead, they must fend for their lives in battle against one of Mordor’s undying captains: the Nazgûl of Minas Morgul!

Meanwhile, while the “Against the Shadow” cycle has developed the Gondor trait and strengthened mono-sphere decks, The Morgul Vale draws the cycle’s focus on these themes to a close. Players gain an inspiring new hero and three copies of each new player card.

Legendary: The Fantastic Four Expansion

Legendary: A Marvel Deck Building Game has just become Fantastic! The Legendary: Fantastic Four expansion introduces Marvel’s first family to the world of Legendary. Now you can play as fan-favorite Heroes: Thing, Mr. Fantastic, Invisible Woman, Human Torch, and Silver Surfer. Fend off the new evil Schemes of Masterminds like the world-devouring Galactus and the ever-elusive Mole Man!

Freedom: The Underground Railroad

Early in the history of the United States, slavery was an institution that seemed unmovable but with efforts of men and women across the country, it was toppled. In Freedom: The Underground Railroad, players are working to build up the strength of the Abolitionist movement through the use of notable figures and pivotal events. By raising support for the cause and moving slaves to freedom in Canada, the minds of Americans can be changed and the institution of slavery can be brought down.

Freedom is a card-driven, cooperative game for one to four players in which the group is working for the abolitionist movement to help bring an end to slavery in the United States. The players use a combination of cards, which feature figures and events spanning from Early Independence until the Civil War, along with action tokens and the benefits of their role to impact the game.

Players need to strike the right balance between freeing slaves from plantations in the south and raising funds which are desperately needed to allow the group to continue their abolitionist activities as well as strengthen the cause.

The goal is not easy and in addition to people and events that can have a negative impact on the group’s progress, there are also slave catchers roaming the board, reacting to the movements of the slaves on the board and hoping to catch the runaway slaves and send them back to the plantations.

Through careful planning and working together, the group might see an end to slavery in their time.

http://www.hullbreachgame.com/

Hull Breach is a sci-fi cards-and-dice game featuring epic space combat between ships, firefights between Marine boarding parties, and plenty of clever tactics and galaxy-shaking events. You assume command of a space station belonging to one of our several in-game factions and fight it out with one or more other Commanders to achieve galactic domination! The object of the game is to protect your Station – your home in space – from other Commanders while trying to capture or destroy theirs.  Be warned – they’re trying to do the same thing to you. It’s a tough galaxy and at the end of the day only one Commander gets to remain standing.