The World on My Table – June ’15

New game genres and subgenres are popping up all the time. Do you remember your first Room Escape game? What about your first 2056 derivative, or your first physics-based catapult destruction game? It’s as true for board games as it is for electronic games. Before 2008, “deck-building” was what you did with your $1000 worth of Magic cards, but after Donald X. Vaccarino designed Dominion, deck-building became one of the most popular card game genres in existence. Hanabi, a 2013 Spiel des Jahres winner, has inspired a spate of new limited-communication cooperative games like Bomb Squad, Mysterium, and the Blake and Mortimer comic-inspired Witness.

One of the newer trends is the Tower Defense board game. While this subgenre has been well established in video games for years, including titles as diverse as Plants vs. Zombies, GemCraft and Dungeon Defenders, it’s difficult to pin down what the term means when it’s applied to cardboard. Most cooperative games, and some competitive ones, have the players defending something, but is that enough to call it a Tower Defense game? I would argue that it isn’t. Even though I am defending a medieval castle (with towers!) from advancing monster hordes in Castle Panic, or defending the Earth from invaders in XCOM: The Board Game, neither of those give me the feeling of playing a true Tower Defense game on the computer, although it’s hard to imagine what would.

Actually, let me try to imagine it. Essential to the Tower Defense genre is the concept of protecting a central base from several waves of enemies. But there is another feature that is just as important: TD games emphasize planting stationary defenses before the threats arrive, instead of reacting to those threats after they appear. A perfect example of this distinction would be Gamelyn Games’ Tiny Epic Defenders, in which fantasy heroes move between various locations surrounding the capital city, restoring damage before they fall and leave the capital open to attack. This much of the game is reactive, more Base Defense than Tower Defense. The TD part comes from the way that heroes intercept damage whenever an enemy attacks their current location, turning the heroes themselves into stationary defense towers between activations.

It just so happens I played several new Tower Defense board games this month. So without further ado, I present:

 

The Tower Defense Games on My Table

Sylvion

Sylvion is the latest game in the Oniverse series from designer Shadi Torbey and publisher Z-Man Games, the previous offerings being Onirim and Urbion. Although they explore different mechanics, the Oniverse games all have a few things in common: they’re all designed for 1 player only, with variant rules for 2-player cooperative play; they all include one or more “expansions” in the box, providing many different game elements to mix and match as you wish; and they all feature whimsical watercolor illustrations from artist Élise Plessis.

Quick, inexpensive, and easy to learn, Onirim is one of the more popular solitaire card games out there, but I ended up trading my copy away–I simply found other games I enjoyed more that fit into the same 5-minute, strategy-light niche. For the same reason, I skipped Urbion, but Sylvion‘s description–a deck-building tower defense game–caught my eye.

All I can say is that the game is fantastic. At 30 minutes per game, it’s in a totally different category than the 5-minute Onirim, and it carries the depth and variety of decision-making to complement that increased length. The art is a new high point for the series, wonderfully evoking the battle between a great forest (and its denizens) and a blazing wildfire. There are only two “variants” in the box this time, but it doesn’t need any more; the way you build your Defense deck afresh each time (more drafting than deck-building, really) keeps the game fresh and interesting, even without additional variation. If a $20 cross between Plants vs. Zombies and Race for the Galaxy appeals to you, make sure to give this one a look.

 

XenoShyft: Onslaught

In contrast, here is an actual Tower Defense deck-building game. XenoShyft appeared on Kickstarter late last year and raked in a ton of dough–the publishers, Cool Mini or Not, are crowdfunding veterans, and the high-quality sci-fi horror art didn’t exactly turn people away. Think of this one as Starship Troopers meets Dice Masters. No, there are no dice, and the game is cooperative, not competitive, but it’s the closest analogue to how XenoShyft approaches deck-building. (A much closer but lesser-known comparison would be AEG’s Nightfall series.)

Like most deck-builders since Dominion, you will be playing resource cards from your hand to “buy” other cards from a large grid of options. Here, the resources are Xenosathem, a rare isotope of Unobtainium, which the NorTec corporation is mining from the core of a remote planet. Not an unoccupied planet, as it turns out. As divisions of NorTec’s security, the players must wisely spend the Xenosathem they receive each round to hire troops and kit them out with guns, armor and other gear.

Unlike most deck-builders, the cards you buy go right into your hand, so buying cards is less about building a future deck and more focused on setting up a solid defense right now. You can place up to four troops, each with up to 1 weapon and 1 armor, in your combat lane; another four-card lane then gets filled with aliens, and both sides butt heads until all the aliens are dealt with. If your troops survive the attack, they stick around (with their equipment and damage) for the next round, but any aliens that survive deal damage directly to the base, which can only survive so much abuse.

XenoShyft plays fast, looks great doing it, and is one of the most cooperative games on the market: you can play almost any card in your hand to help out a buddy, and vice versa. I’ve played the game almost ten times this month and still want to break it out each time I see the box on my shelf.

 

Frontier Stations

Frontier Stations from Victory Point Games is the newest-to-me and oldest-to-everyone-else game on this list, which is weird to say considering it’s only been out for about a month. (I just picked up my copy in the publisher’s June sale.) It’s also less visually stunning, coming from a much smaller publisher who produces all of their game components in-house. That said, based on a handful of plays, it seems to hold its own alongside the other two.

Think of Frontier Stations as a cooperative Machi Koro…in SPAAAAAACE! The players control space stations on the frontiers of explored space. (There’s a minimum of 3 stations, but it would be no problem for 1 or 2 players to play multiple stations each; I’ve been managing 3 stations solitaire so far.) Each player starts with one System in place, the Nexus. Each round, the active player rolls a 6-sided die, adding a second die midway through the game. The die result will be used to purchase new Systems for the active player’s station, gradually expanding that small Nexus into a massive array of supercomputers, shield generators, and warp cores.

First, though, you have to check to see if the value of the roll matches the number(s) printed on any of the Threats or Systems currently in play, causing those cards to activate. Systems activated this way produce color-coded resources: energy, security, medical, shields, or engineering. Each System has a limited number of storage slots, though, with the System’s initial cost reflecting some mix of resources produced, storage available, and frequency of activation.

Threats always activate first, and be they space pirates, plague, or cosmic superweapons, all Threats work the same: they consume these resources as you try to defend against them. For instance, you may need a shields resource to defend against a laser, while plague would require medical. Each set of threats is shared by adjacent players, with the consumed resources allowed to come from either station, so players have to plan as a team to make sure the right people get the right modules and resources. If you don’t have the resources to defend against a threat, even a tiny raider, all players lose the game.

I can’t recommend this one as enthusiastically as Sylvion or XenoShyft, mostly because I haven’t played it enough yet, but I always try to support Victory Point Games when I can–they’re The Little Game Company That Could, and the lo-fi components always come along with well-developed, original gameplay. If you like more resource management and logistics in your Tower Defense games, this one might be for you.

 

The World Beyond

Speaking of supporting the Little Game Company, you should definitely take a look at their current Kickstarter campaign for Dawn of the Zeds: Third Edition. This is the first game they will produce in large quantities overseas, hence the crowdfunding campaign, so you can expect great gameplay and great components. One of VPG’s bestselling titles, Dawn of the Zeds is a cooperative game of defending the small town of Farmingdale from a siege of undead monsters.

While it’s not technically a tabletop game, The Frankenstein Wars from Cubus Games has the potential to appeal to a wide stripe of the NerdSpan community. It’s a digital gamebook, a cross between a choose-your-own-adventure and an RPG, set in an alternate history inspired by Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. I’ve never been disappointed with a Cubus Games app, and this one brings in veteran RPG/gamebook writer Dave Morris. It may not reach its low goal, so please do check it out before July 1!

A final project of interest is Slaughterville, which slots directly into the “explore-a-location horror adventure game” niche created by games like Arkham Horror, Eldritch Horror and A Touch of Evil. If that’s your thing, this one looks to be of great quality, with a cast of photorealistic characters plucked straight from horror movie conventions. They’ve already funded and are plowing through stretch goals, some of them exclusive, and indie comic fans might be excited to hear that characters from the feminist Brandi Bare comics will be exclusively available to backers.

I’m sure that July will bring plenty more news thanks to Gen Con 2015, so stay tuned!

Related posts: