HEX SHARDS OF FATE KICKSTARTER FULL
HEX SHARDS OF FATE KICKSTARTER LICENSE

Here are a handful of the Cryptozoic games I was aware of before walking into their booth:

HEX SHARDS OF FATE KICKSTARTER LICENSE

Next, I moved on for a meeting with the folks at Cryptozoic Entertainment, a company best known (to me) for their card games and for strongly leveraging their ability to license popular intellectual properties. When I swung by the booth at the end of the day on Saturday, they were virtually out of their entire stock, so it seems to have been quite a success, but it is available for pre-order right now.

HEX SHARDS OF FATE KICKSTARTER FULL

I didn’t do a full demo of this game, but I’m hoping to get my hands on a copy, as it looked like a fun family-oriented game with a lot of fun quirks built into it. It’s a crafting game where you roll materials, hire various types of Dwarven craftsmen to work your mines, and try to move through the mines more quickly than your opponents. I then zipped through a rather quick demo of an intriguing new game called Dwarven Miner, from the folks at Rather Dashing Games (one of my favorite gaming company names, by the way). However, the mechanics are rock solid and I’ll be doing a more in-depth review of the game and expansion in the future, since I now own a copy! It has that “Good, but …” artistic feel that I’ve found on several of the Kickstarter board games that I’ve seen. My one immediate issue is that the artwork isn’t the most polished. This Influence mechanic also allows you to basically seize control of a technology established by someone else and get points for controlling that technology. In order to keep technologies working, you not only have to establish the technologies, but keep them active by using your Influence on them, so that the technology (or its prerequisites) don’t fade out of existence. When you establish working technologies, you gain Influence tokens. You can establish a Combustion Engine without Fire or The Wheel in play, but the Combustion Engine won’t actually be successful until those earlier technologies are established. Some technologies are “Fundamental,” but others require certain technologies to be established earlier in the timeline for them to work. Basically, you move back in time along a track and establish technologies.

Legacy: Gears of Time is a time-travel themed technology-building card game. Unfortunately, this was right after a little heart-to-heart with my wife about my Kickstarter “issue” … so I had pledged to pretty much stop backing any Kickstarter projects. I first heard of it a few months back, when they Kickstarted the Legacy: Forbidden Machines expansion. This game’s from a relatively new company, Floodgate Games, and was funded through a Kickstarter. One of the first games I came across upon entering the Exhibitor’s Hall was Legacy: Gears of Time ( Amazon). I’m going through these games mostly sequentially of how I experienced them, rather than in any specific order of preference. The number of cool new (or just new to me) games was astounding, so I’ll do a quick run-down of them here and then go into a bit more depth in individual and group reviews over the next couple of weeks. As always, the best four days of gaming did not fail to impress.

Hex shards of fate kickstarter