Well, I am back from my whirlwind one day trip to Origins. I did not take any notes, but here are my thoughts on the new stuff of the day.

Wiz Kids

Crimson Skies - Wiz Kids have just launched their newest clicks as a pilot game akin to hero clicks and an air to air airplane combat game combined. The are separate games in the same box. Understand the rules are separate for $7.95 and the planes and pilots come in sets in the $15 range. And, you need them both.

This is one I really wanted to try being a sucker for air combat style games. It tried the plane game. It has a nice movement system where you roll for initiative and select a card that has a hex based maneuver on it for each of your two planes. When your turn comes, you lay out the hexes in the pattern on your maneuver card and move the plane of over them, then take them off the board. There is no altitude adjustment in this game...all planes fly at the same altitude. They have added a speed dial to the regular special power base of the figures so there is now another sheet of special powers to check based on your selected speed. I.e., if you are going to fast, you cannot aim too well, etc.

How was it? I am just glad there was a guy that knew the game and planes well that was teaching us. Otherwise it would have suffered massively from a look up on the table for each power to compute the die needed for a hit...much like the basic hero click system. If you like air combat and hero clicks, this will be a wonderful game for you. I found it just to fiddly for my current tastes and although I was ready to buy it on sight, my opinion changed to a pass. I would happily play it though with someone who could let me fly around and roll dice. The base game was fun.

Fantasy Flight

They had three new ones I tried. They also have a Lord of the Rings Trivia game out now that I did not try.

Anlantheon

This is a two player abstract. You have an 8 x 8 grid that has three castles randomly place on it. You get a set of tiles...I think 0 to 9 and a King. As you orthogonally surround a piece, you count the points of the pieces surrounding and the piece that is surrounded. Whoever has the most points gets control of that space with a control marker. It happens sometimes that several squares get evaluated with one tile placement. You win by getting out 11 control markers. Or, you can win by taking control of the opposing players King...and there is a third way..but I forgot. It plays very fast, there are some tactics...but I would put it in the light 10 minute two player category. After one play maybe a 5 -6.

Quicksand

This seemed to be a hit for many. It is a very light family card racing game. There are six characters of which you get one secretly. The goal, get you guy off the board first. You do this by playing cards. You play a green card, you move the green one place, you play two greens you move the green guy twice, etc. If you manage to land a colored person onto their matching colored space on the board, you get to discard an extra card which give you more cards to look at next turn. There are also quicksand spaces and quicksand cards. If a piece is hit by these, they are flipped over in the quicksand. Now they need a card just to flip back over so it would take now two cards to move them one space. First one out wins. It reminds me a lot of Troedlin without the dice. We played with 5, took maybe 30 minutes. Not a whole lot of control but, as people commented, kids would enjoy it.

Magdar

You are dwarves out mining for gems in a mine (where else do you mine except maybe data). Unfortunately, you have disturbed Magdar the game timer and eater of dwarves...actually a lava monster I think. Anyway, you have 4 columns of tiles...the number of rows varies by the number of players. The tiles are each mining squares and each one has various dice symbols on them. The dangerous ones have all dice numbers 2-6 and the safer ones only have a 6. On your turn, you have two dwarves that can take an action each. One action is to move into or out of the mine. Another action is to mine for jewels and another action is to mine for mythril and another action is to stake someone else's claim. I lieu of one of this actions, you may place one of three tokens. A lure for Magdar, a safety token, or a berserk token. More on these later.

After you finish your actions, you roll a die and you must remove a tile with that number on it that is adjacent to Magdar...thus killing whoever is on it and shortening the game. When Magdar can see the mine entrance on a clear line, the game ends. He with the most money wins.

First turn, move in both dwarves, roll a die, remove a tile..next player, etc. Second turn, mine for jewels or Mythril. Mining for mythril is easy and can be done anywhere. It takes two turns however, to get a complete removable piece of Mythril. Mining for jewels is different. This is the part of the game relating to Chicken. If the tile you are mining is adjacent to Magdar, you get 8 points of jewels..If you are one away you get 4 and if you are 2 away you get only 2 jewels. For every turn you stay on a tile and mine you will double the value of the jewels you have already mined. So, you are trying to start close to Magdar and keep mining and get out before he catches you. This is the purpose of the Lure and safety tiles. By playing a Lure tile in an adjacent space, if that number comes up on the die, the player rolling the die must send Magdar to remove the lure tile..the rolling player no longer has a choice of which tile to remove.

By playing a safety token on your space, Magdar will remove the safety token instead of the tile. Please understand, with the wrong numbers rolled, and with four players...one player rolls and removes the safety token and the next player removes the tile anyway. It is very chaotic.

The action I haven't discussed is jumping another persons claims. If your dwarf is adjacent to another player, you may roll a 6 and take his place to steal his hard earned treasure. Optionally, if you place a berserk token on a turn, the next turn you can jump a claim on a roll of a 4.

When Magdar gets a line of sight to the entrance the game is over. Scoring is very simple....You may score any jewel tokens you have brought out if you can match it with a mythril token. In our game, I got out two 8 jewels and one mythril for 8 points. James got out a 4 and 16 jewel and one mythril for 16 points, and the fantasy flight guy got out two 4 jewels and one mythril for 4 points.

This was another very fast game. Considering that typically three tiles are removed each round, it is pretty easy to get picked off if you stay too close too long unless the luck of the die is with you. Michael Green did not like this one at all...but, I think this was my favorite of the Fantasy Flight games I played this trip. This is not for everyone. It has a lot of luck and not a whole lot of control. But, I thought the ride was fun....

Loco

This is a card game. I did not play it but got a rule review. I said it is a redo of Flinke Pinke or Quandary. The guy said he never heard of either one...but the mechanic was identical as he explained it to me.

Lechner???

Dwarfen Dig. As soon as I arrived I ran into Frank Branham and we both go talking about this one as a must see. This became a top priority for playing and luckily, we got in a demo in the afternoon.

It is a hex based tile board layout. Hexes are thinner than say, Twilight Imperium but seem sturdy enough. You get a team of 4 dwarves each with their own specialty. Your job, dig into the mine, get the treasure (one less than the number of players) and get out first.

From memory there are 4 phases. First you dig. In this phase you may play cards, dig, move, play cards. The cards all seem to help you or hinder your opponent. To dig, you look at the type of rock on your tile side and the type of rock on the tile side you want to enter...black to black or black to white, etc., look at a chart for a success score and see if you can modify it by having the right digging dwarves to help with that type of terrain. Typically, it would take a 3-6 to dig a hole. And, if you fail, you get grit which is an interesting and novel idea which I liked a lot.

As a matter of fact, anytime you fail a roll you get grit which you can later use to buy cards, get an extra turn, and play special cards.

Then, you move one square per turn, assuming you have a clear path to move to. Many of the tiles you move to have hazards on them. There you must face the hazard again with a die roll modified by who is in your party (you can add grit to improve your chances). Failure requires a luck roll. Success with a luck roll lets you stay around with no consequence, failure of a luck roll and someone in the party dies or suffers the consequence. (most of the time it is death) The fellow that taught us the game lost all of his dwarves half way through the game.

Next is combat. Here you may attack other players to kill them or steal the treasure. If you have the guy with the ax, you can do this hex to hex attack anywhere on the board.

The next phase lets you spend grit for an extra turn and the final phase is where you collect grit from all of your failed rolls in the round...get a grit for being alive and then you can buy cards with grit.

That is the game.

So, my thoughts are this. My initial excitement to try the game was quickly diminished by a 16 page rule book. This is not a difficult game and with several plays you would know all the modifiers. This is another game that is a throw back to 20 years ago. This is the old AH type games that were a lot of fun. This one does have the idea of grit which to me is very unique. This game is just too "old style for me". A lot of rolling dice and a lot of luck on a quest for treasure. Again, I am sure the teenage kids may just love it but, at $54 mine will not get the chance to try.

Plenary Games

Angela was there with Fresh Fish. Apparently her next game Jet Set by Stephen Glenn did not make it for the show but, will be out shortly.

R&R games

They had several new games...some just making it in time and Frank is very excited about the new Knizia Circus game he has. You are collecting nice little cats and dogs.

Smarty Party

Frank told me I would love Pitt Crandlemire and Aaron Weisenblum's new game Smarty Party. I cannot tell you about it as I bought it for that=reason and still haven't tried it. He also has another party game out by Aaron which he spoke very highly of.

Out of the Box

I guess some of these are not new but they are importing three games from PIN..notably City Scape, Octi, and another. They are nice wooden games and play pretty well. Only City and Octi did I see.

Dungeon Games

Well like collectible card games I saw two new dungeon crawl games that are collectible. As I didn't take notes, I cannot remember the name of the one card game (it was not Dungeoneer BTW). This new company has two pre-built decks to do an adventure in the dungeon. You lay tiles and encounter monsters...enough said.

The second I saw was a collectible Hex tile game called Crypt I believe. Again, you bring your tiles that work best with your character, I bring mine, we mix and build a crypt and start exploring...encounter monsters, etc. I did not play either of these and although I love dungeon games, I had to pass on trying one for now.

GMT

Stopped by to see Andy at the GMT booth. He was having a great sale with Zero at $15 and Flagship card games at $5 per box.

Eight Foot Llama

They had their new Monkey's on the Moon game there which I did not get a chance to try.

Collectible card games and Miniatures

They are still coming out. There were several new ones...I am not into this so I had to pass most of these booths.

That was pretty much the dealer room for me. It was great running into old friends and seeing some of the new things.

I hope this was of some use.