Some sci-fi related games this month, but not only…

Xia: Legends of a Drift System is a 3-5 player sandbox style competitive space adventure. Each player starts as a lowly but hopeful captain of a small starship.

Players fly their ships about the system, completing a variety of missions, exploring new sectors and battling other ships. Navigating hazardous environments, players choose to mine, salvage, or trade valuable cargo. Captains vie with each other for Titles, riches, and most importantly Fame.

The most adaptive, risk taking, and creative players will excel. One captain will rise above the others, surpassing mortality by becoming Legend!

Customize: Each player begins the game by choosing and customizing a Tier 1 starship. Invest all your money in engines and be a rapid, yet fragile, explorer. Put all your credits into an uber missile and watch other players flee in terror. Get a small engine and save space and credits to invest in buying and selling cargo. Or create a well rounded ship, ready for anything. In Xia, the choice is always yours.

Adapt: The goal of Xia is to become the most famous captain. Completing missions, besting ships in combat, purchasing higher tier ships, selling Cargo Cubes and claiming Titles are all ways that players can earn Fame Points. The best pilots will adapt to their surroundings, making snap judgments and changing plans on-the-fly. If you can think on your feet, you’ll do well in Xia!

Sandbox: The real fun of Xia is that each game will be different. There is no set direction of play, players may choose to be peaceful traders, fierce pirates, workers, miners, opportunists, etc. The game board is randomly laid out and explored each time you play. Players might choose not to explore at all, creating a tiny arena for swift and deadly combat, or explore all 19 sectors and have a large play-scape to exploit. It’s up to you!

This May Twilight Creations will release Jupiter Rescue, a cooperative strategy game by Mark and Christina Major. You play a crack team of rescue robots, launched into space to help the humans at the Jupiter Deep colony escape imminent death at the hands of a shapeshifting menace from beyond the stars.

Between 2 and 7 players work together to evacuate colonists before they’re converted into alien creeps. Players take 5 actions to move, drive back the creeps, and use powerful programming cards. The board and dice rolls determine creep advancement, and double-sided tiles allow for hundreds of station variations.

Jupiter Rescue takes 30 to 60 minutes to play, and contains 20 double-sided module tiles, 1 evacuation pod tile, 4 reference cards, 36 rescue cards, 1 six-sided die, and 127 plastic figures (7 player robots, 50 colonists, 60 creeps, and 10 super creeps).

The Battle at Kemble’s Cascade is a board game adaptation of a classic shoot ’em up video game. In the game, which is played out on a scrolling space backdrop, the players take on the roles of brave space pilots sweeping around in nimble yet powerful fighters, searching the asteroid clusters for universal glory and ancient technology. Players compete to obtain the most glory, with glory resulting from carrying out missions, finding lost treasure in asteroid clusters, and destroying alien entities, not to mention other players.

In the game, players fly through an ever-scrolling space setting, which is represented by rows of cards. Each turn, the bottom row is removed and a new row is added to the top. Players move their spaceships and resolve effects continuously, performing actions such as collecting power-ups and money, fighting alien cruisers and titans, blocking and shooting other players, and dodging asteroids and black holes. The players need to balance the use of their ships’ energy as it’s used for both absorbing enemy fire and boosting their movement speed and fire rate.

The game includes missions and achievements as well as a mechanism called “threat level” to keep everyone in suspense throughout the whole game. Threat allows players to enjoy the satisfaction of both shooting wildly at each other and dodging the hundreds of bullets raining down from enemy fighters and other players.

All player ships are fully upgradeable with four different weapon classes, engines, shields and more. Each player must buy the upgrades and navigate the path that best fits his chosen strategy in order to successfully complete his missions and attain the most glory.

In Machina Arcana, players take on the role of explorers who are investigating an ancient subterranean complex of unknown origin. They face monsters inspired by H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos in a steampunk setting. The adventurers collect equipment, interact and utilize their environment, fight monsters, and immerse themselves in the rich narrative elements.

The complete story is broken down into different scenarios that represent a self-contained game. All of these scenarios contain chapters, each with its own narration and specifics. The objective of the game is to progress through the tale and face the endgame at the finale of each scenario.

The main goal behind Machina Arcana is to provide players with a chilling game that can never be played the same way, mechanisms that enable varying strategies and approaches, and an extensive framework that combines everything smoothly. The game scales by default; there is no need for special conditions based on the player count. As the story progresses, so does your gear. But beware! If you are too slow, horror might very well prevail and devour you whole…

 Unita

Helvetia: a country in evolution, divided between the surrounding Empires who claimed taxes and allegiance. Primitiva was the first to wake up and decide to fight to obtain independence. The other regions followed their example: Luserna, Zugriga, Berena, Friburga, etc. However, between year 1 of unification and the day of the nation, several centuries went by with alternating periods of war and diplomatic peace, troubled and bloody times which you will discover in Unita!

Unita features 64 dice but not an iota of luck! You can be the men of Primitiva, the Nuns of Friburga, the Engineers of GermanLand or the Frogs of the Hexagone, but no matter your role, forge ahead on the warpath, lead your army in the mad rush to get to the Magic Gate, and put an end to all these afflictions. Move forward on the path of the war with your army compound of six-sided dice. Every time you contact an opposing army, a fight takes place, with the least hardy losing a point of strength. When your army reaches the magic gate, the army disappears, and the total of its points of strength (its dice) becomes your points of victory.