Penny Arcade Gamers vs Evil
VG30 got the opportunity to sit down with Cryptozoek for a private demo of Penny Arcade's new card building game. In it, players take on the role of one of the characters from the PA universe, I was Tycho, my wife played as Gabe, and our demoed played as Mr. Period. They say there's many more characters that people can play as, each with their own abilities like adding additonal tubes (power) or tokens.
It's a deck building, so players start with a standard deck. What constitutes a standard deck is actually different between each character, however. Tycho starts with more tubes than tokens, and Gabe the reverse (yes, I was a bit surprised that Gabe wasn't the one who started with more tubes, but the design has Tycho being more aggressive which makes sense). As cards get played, you'll either defeat enemies with power, adding them to your deck for points and abilities, or acquire them with tokens that will allow you to build up combos to get more powerful cards or defeat more powerful creatures.
As you can see from the pictures, the game board is two rows, the tubes row and the tokens row. Each row culminates in a boss card which comes in three levels. As you defeat them, you are rewarded with powerful boss cards that are added to your deck. I had one that allowed me to draw three additional cards, for example. The game ends when either of the level 3 boss cards are defeated, or when six card stacks have been emptied.
As fans of Penny Arcade, we really enjoyed the art style and the humor. The game plays pretty well with definite inspirations drawn from Dominion and Ascension. They tell me it plays best with 3-5 players, but there'll be more characters available than that. They also are hoping to have it ready for release at the Penny Arcade Expo this fall.
Super Dungeon Explore
I brought the wife to check out a very chibi style game called Super Dungeon Explore. Essentially it's a dungeon crawler game in which one player controls the monsters and The others control heroes. The heroes explore a Pre made dungeon made of fairly large tiles (roughly 12" x 12") to destroy spawn points and from what we could tell, force a level boss to spawn.
The art is extraordinarily cute and might even be tough to swallow for some gamers, but it was fun to play and seems to be doing well as they're already completely out of the promotional figures they were giving out for Pre-orders, even with the steep price of $90. Check it out if you're here at the con.
Sentinels of the Multiverse
Sentinels of the Multiverse is a cooperative superhero card game. Each player selects their superhero from an available pool, takes their corresponding deck, and then gets ready to thwart a villain's plans for world domination. The villain begins with a countdown timer of sorts that forces the players to act quickly to stop them. Once their countdown is stopped and the villain defeated, he enters a last form and has final combat with the heroes. The game is challenging and a lot of fun, we're looking forward to offering a full review of it after we've gotten to spend ore time with it.
Fandooble
If you've ever played Zombie Dice and wished there was a way to recover from being blasted by shotguns, Fandooble is your game. Each turn you will roll three dice consisting of treasure chests, green dragons, and a red dragon as well as a fourth die of heroes. The heroes can bring otherwise dead dice back into the game, and steal treasure from your opponents. In the center of the table is a pile of treasure and once it's all claimed the game ends. Beware of rolling too much, though. Three dragons of any kind will end your turn making anything you gained that turn return back to the pile, and if they happen to be three red dragons, it will empty your treasure pool.
That's going to wrap up day two of Gencon for us. We saw lot more than this, and hope to get to visit andnpost about everybody, but time flies fast here at the con, we're already half done!
