There and Back Again (July 2020 newsletter) (Patreon)

Hey folks, in case you haven't seen it, the War of the Ring video went up a couple days ago, and it featured my good friends The Brothers Murph! I called them up with a silly idea for an intro and I'm so glad they were on board. I always love working with them and I'm eagerly awaiting the time when we can actually play games in the same room again. 

In the meantime, I have two games I'm working on for RTFM. Nemesis, as you know, but I've also been commissioned to make a tutorial for a strategy game called The Shores of Tripoli. It's a very asymmetric historical strategy game and I should have that out in September. As for Nemesis, unfortunately I wasn't able to get my hands on the new kickstarter expansion (looks like it won't be out for almost a year), but I have the base game and the original expansions, so I'll be getting to work on that very soon. On top of those, I've played quite a few other games this month, and there's a couple I definitely want to talk about.

I know I'm late to the party but I finally got my hands on Unmatched. I've played it before, but I didn't own it, and man I'm glad I do now. That game is kind of perfect. Besides being beautiful, it's such a great little skirmisher that hits hard and doesn't overstay its welcome. Much as I like a long strategic battle (like WotR, hey), sometimes it's nice to have a quick knife fight.

A guy I work with is developing a game called Plunderous and I've tried it out a few times on Tabletopia. It's a big steampunk-y pirate-y 4X game, and while the theme isn't a huge draw for me, there's a lot of gameplay here to like. It's still being worked on, but it should be coming to kickstarter in the next couple months and, when it does, y'all should check it out. It's not going to be for everyone (the game is little over-complicated, tbh), but I'm sure some of you folks will really dig it. Rahdo also talked about it in his latest round-up video and he had quite a bit to say if you're interested.

Speaking of Rahdo, I filmed a couple videos for him recently and I've got quite a few coming up, so here are the ones I think are worth your attention (and I'll mention that they pay me to make these videos, but not to say anything here. This my uncut opinion). Turris (above) is a very interesting twist on a worker placement game. It's got locations to put workers on, sure, but it also has lumbering beasts that roam the world, devouring or otherwise inconveniencing you and your workers. Because of this, I think it actually makes for a great two-player game, which is pretty hard to do for worker placement. The biggest issue is the iconography, which is occasionally impenetrable. I'm hopeful they'll work on that for the final release, but...we'll see. It's on kickstarter for a little bit longer, so go take a look.

Nanga Parbat is a very cute little game about Sherpas leading you up and down a mountain, building camps, and trading animals. It's a simple enough game, but it provides a very interesting puzzle. The core mechanic of it is that you place a hiker on a space in the sector with the big yellow guide meeple. You'll gain whatever animal was on that space, which you can use for some simple but very useful abilities, but your placement moves the guide to the matching sector. So you end up balancing the positioning you want now versus where you want your opponent to go next. I was very pleasantly surprised by it and I'm looking forward to previewing it for you in the next few weeks.

And that's about all for this month. I've got the strategy videos for War of the Ring coming out soon for you Rules Lawyers, as well as another video, which I'm having trouble deciding on. I'm torn between talking about my experience with the balance of the two factions in WotR, and how much harder I've found it to play as the Free Peoples, or I could do a comparison of WotR and Star Wars Rebellion, which both fill a pretty similar role. What do you think?