Wait, didn’t we already do this? Yes, well, some of us are not quite as organised as others. So to help you get in the Christmas mood, here’s a few more choice cuts for the last-minute dash to fill the festive stack! And of course, there’s a wee bonus giveaway PLUS check out the results of our previous Great Geeky Gift-Guide Giveaway over on Instagram @big_geekingout!
BEST GIFT WHEN YOU HAVE NO IDEA WHAT TO GET THEM
Star Wars Unlimited – Twilight of the Republic
You know how it is. We geeks are difficult. We have a lot of stuff. So how do you know what to buy? Well, cards games are always a winner, but again, what to get? The answer to the question is Star Wars, naturally (that’s the answer to most questions, tbh).
Star Wars Unlimited is Fantasy Flight’s latest foray into the Trading Card Game (TCG) market, which is enjoying a bit of a resurgence at present. Twilight of the Republic is set (mostly) during the events leading up to and around Episode III, and introduces new mechanics whilst still being accessible. A good, safe bet is the Starter Set, featuring a villainous General Grievous deck that depends on generating lots of Battle Droids (roger roger!) and using the new Exploit mechanic (sacrifice your units to make bigger units cheaper to play) versus a wily, heroic Ahsoka Tano deck that deploys the Clone armies of the Republic to make best use of the new Co-Ordinate mechanic (abilities that trigger off having 3 or more units in play).
Both decks feel like you are playing out the mass battles of the Clone Wars, and even if your giftee (is that a word?) already has a copy, the additional copies of cards will be gratefully received for expanding playsets. If you’re confident, however, that they have enough of the basics, then boosters packs are the answer. Let’s face it, we always want more packs of cards to crack open and collect.
Particular highlights of this set go full force (ahem) into the new mechanics. General Grievous, as a main deck card, can collect and play lightsabers from any colour, whilst A Fine Addition as an action allows you to steal from your opponent’s discard. I love it when we get something that’s not only mechanically interesting but thematically on point. Speaking of Lightsabers, we get Mace Windu’s in Aggression and a new generic saber in Green, whilst the dark side of the force gets some terrifying new warriors in the form of an Asajj Ventress that can drop turn 1 with Exploit and just carve her way through, and monstrous Savage Opress that can outmatch even Darth Maul. Plus, there’s still love for the previous expansions, for example with Cad Bane and Osi Sobeck making an appearance to capture opposing characters and flesh out that mechanic from set 2.
Even the common bases in this set are useful in their multitude, even more so that in previous sets. The reverse of these is printed as an upgrade token in sets 1 and 2 (which, to be clear, is very handy), but in this set they are either Clones or Battle Droids – and when you have a turn with 14 Battle Droids on the table (genuinely happened the other night… I still lost though), you really want your army to look imperious and imposing – not just a lot of handy scraps of paper.
If, however, the question is one of storage, then the answer is Soft Crates and Card Sleeves. No, this is not a mysterious social media trend. Soft crates are deluxe, full art storage boxes which can hold a sleeved deck and have a token box also; card sleeves are the necessity of all even remotely serious gamer, and we ALWAYS need more – so why not indulge in some lovely full art ones?
BEST (cheap) LAST MINUTE GIFT FOR THE GEEK WHO HAS EVERYTHING
Ticket to Ride Deluxe Trains
On the subject of the awkwardness of us geeks and the owning of MANY games, expanding a classic that’s in every Kallax is always a good call – and so upgrading the seminal Ticket To Ride, that graces so many shelves, is an easy win. These wee trains are frankly adorable. The detailing is great, the painting is neat and they look lush on the board. The player tracker is neat, and as an upgrade they don’t look out of place – just BETTER. My copy of TTR Europe has never looked so bling! Of course, now I want the other colours 😬 a perfect stocking filler or Geeky secret santa! And hey, in the unlikely event that they don’t have TTR, there’s always the gorgeous 20th Anniversary edition!
BEST POCKET GIFT FOR ALL AGAES
Panda Party
Panda Party is the game my 8-year old daughter most regularly breaks out with her friends – but it’s also a portable delight that we can take with us anywhere (and indeed, everywhere).
It introduces a lot of core gaming mechanics in a straightforward way – it’s a bidding set collector with party twist, and it is pure Panda-monium – yes, this a game that is full of un-bearable Panda puns. As well as collecting regular pandas, Silver and Gold Pandas exist which trigger extra bonuses, steal other pandas, go off and sulk in corners – but they cost more of your precious food. Players bid with their tasty snacks (Bamboo is worth the least, Pizza more, Donuts the most) to attract the Pandas to their party, and the first person to get 5 wins! The real delight is the terrible, terrible names:
There’s even a Halloween themed Booster pack, complete with point-heavy Pumpkins!
This year’s new expansion is the Bam-Booster (I approve this terrible pun) full of extra beach fun for the party pandas.
And we like it – and you – so much that we’re going to give 2 lucky winners codes to get the game with expansions (which, given that it’s coming all the way from Australia, is a big help!)
BEST GATEWAY GAME
Looot
Looot is quirky Viking themed meeple majority game of resource gathering, with a dash of tile-based tableau-building for good measure. Despite this mix of mechanics, it feels like a unified whole, and is surprisingly quick and accessible to play. It’s a great Gateway game – that is, a bridge to weightier games for the inexperienced.
Players have individual tableaux to build – your Fjord Board – using tiles from the common Landscape board, which represents where your longships are raiding (the Landscape itself varies in size with player count).
You start with each type of construction to place and build on your fjord; you simply gather the appropriate resources and flip (build) by surrounding the construction with them. However, with limited space on your fjord, it becomes about careful placement and triggering adjacent constructions simultaneously. Not only that, but you both lose points for incomplete constructions and gain extra from bonus Longship tiles.
Each turn you place one of your 13 adorable Viking meeple, adjacent to another meeple or longship, gathering the resource of the tile you’re on; in this way you all gradually crawl across the landscape. Existing buildings have different capture rules, such as watchtowers requiring a chain of vikings or castles surrounded. Then, you can take an optional action: Select a Longship (giving board bonuses), Use a Shield (a one-time limited bonus, such as double resources, max 3 per game), or Claim a Trophy (when have the required number of axes, gain an extra bonus).
Finally, when all meeples have been placed, the game ends, and you tot up your scores.
Looot is a really great wee game. I was initially worried about action paralysis, given that you’re effectively running two boards at once, but it’s really not an issue. There isn’t a huge amount of setup variety, but this isn’t a bad thing necessarily – once you’ve got the hang of it, it’s a fast, fun time for all! Maybe I should’ve called this month’s article Last-Minute Loot…
BEST CAMPAIGN GAME TO OCCUPY THE WHOLE HOLIDAY PERIOD
Marvel Champions – Age of Apocalypse
Alright, I admit it, this is a little bit of a cheat, as you need the Marvel Champions core set for this one (although, only sort of) – if you don’t own it yet, why not?! We’ve given away a few copies of this ourselves, it’s a superb Living Card Game as you Assemble (um…) your team of heroes to defeat the scum of the Marvel universe.
In Age of Apocalypse, two new heroes come to the table: Bishop and Magik. Bishop is a solid Leadership deck that works well not only with the eXisting X-Men and X-Force heroes but actually synergizes well with pretty much any other hero. He runs off resource manipulation with a splash of healing, so brings a lot of the joy of Protection without you necessarily switching him out. Magik is prebuilt as Aggression but, to be honest it’s the least interesting part of her build, with some fun allies and lots of damage output – so relatively straightforward, certainly, but more potential and synergy in Protection or (my preference) Justice, particularly as she manipulates the top card of her own deck for cost reduction. Still, she’s accessible, effective and independent, and a bit more interesting than your regular Aggression killing machine.
As you would expect, the big bad is of course Apocalypse – and we do mean BIG! Like Ant-Man, his card folds out to giant size, our first truly big boss. The scenarios are great, fighting through Prelates, the Horsemen and Dark X-Men (the latter are particularly well-designed, if brutal), and the curve on the campaign is tough but not as horrendous as the culmination of Spider-Verse or Galaxy’s Most Wanted. There’s some similarities with the excellent Kang Scenario pack too, battling through side-quests across time.
And the other big addition is Standard III: a new core encounter set that can replace the one in the base game (I’m definitely not suggesting, therefore, that you could treat AoA as a standalone game). For those of us that have switched to the more challenging Standard II (found in The Hood Scenario pack), this is not necessarily more difficult than that, but adds in one absolutely massive change: Pursued by the Past, which translates as you’re ALWAYS going to be facing your Nemesis. This is a massive switch-up and deals with my younger son’s biggest complaint with Champions (to be clear, he loves the game) – if he’s playing Spider-Man, he WANTS to run into Venom at some point, whether he’s halfway across the Galaxy or helping rescue a kid from a burning brownstone. It makes the game differently difficult, keeping the challenge fresh and mixing it up further – and proving that Marvel Champions remains the best (Living) card game out there.
BEST STRATEGY GAME TO MELT EVERYONE’S BRAIN
Huang
This deviously twisty game from the mind of Reiner Knizia is a revised version of Yellow & Yangtze (sequel to Tigris and Euphrates). For 2-4 players (14+), your aim is to unite the realm under your banner, taking the role of 1 of 7 Warring States (in the period 475-221BC).
There are excellent player screens and setup is a breeze: place 7 yellow tiles on the marked regional capitals, and then you simply draw further tiles from the bag.
Predominately a tile placement game, with a wee splash of area majority, each turn you take 2 of 5 possible actions (same or different):
❖ Position a leader: Governor, Soldier, Farmer, Trader, and Artisan (each a different colour)
❖ Place a tile
❖ Discard 2 blue Farmer tiles to cause a peasants’ riot
❖ Discard 2 green Trader tiles to establish a pagoda (where you have placed the third of 3 tiles in a triangle of the same colour)
❖ Replace up to 6 tiles from behind your screen
If the matching colour Leader is in the state at the end of turn, you gain a point in that colour; naturally, the most points overall wins at the end of the game (when tiles run out).
A key, if slightly confusing, concept in the game is the difference between War, Revolt and Riot
REVOLT: If you place your Leader into a State with an opponent’s Leader of that same colour, there is revolt. Each player simultaneously reveals a number of yellow tiles; highest bidding player wins (and scores a point in the colour) and losing Leader withdraws.
WAR: If you place a tile connecting 2 states where the leaders match colour, a War begins. You can discard red tiles and add these to your Leaders. The losing Leader(s) withdraw and the winner gains a point in the Leader’s colour.
RIOT: 2 Blues can be discarded to trigger a RIOT (yes, another type of uprising!), discarding any tile – even a regional governor tile, those initial 7 yellows – from the board.
Blue tiles can also be placed continuously connected until they would trigger war or create a pagoda. Green allows you to immediately take a face up tile from the market next to the board. White does… nothing – except score your lowest colour as points at the end, so you can’t ignore it, either.
With deceptively simple core mechanics this game is an absolute winner. It’s a constant push-pull, balancing and sacrificing your resources, taking shots at opponents and keeping your different colours ticking over. It feels like it SHOULD be straightforward, but is monstrously intricate, subtle and restrained whilst utterly cutthroat. It absolutely sings at 3 players, but at all counts it’s satisfying: you’re always scoring, always moving forwards and even when battling against the odds feels like you can win.
The game comes with 2 expansions as standard. The Bandit tiles add Rogue soldiery wandering across the map, causing havoc – as you have to fight them off together, this adds to the across-table negotiations. The reverse of the board, meanwhile, is set in the aftermath of unification, where you must control grain supplies across the whole realm in order to maintain peace and order. It’s a very different map, denying specific strategies that can dominate the basic game – chaining farmland, specifically, which makes sense given that it’s about controlling grain. So you get even more value out of your basic game box.
Components are good quality – silk effect tile bag, satin player screens – with distinct, varied tokens and standees. But there’s empty space on the print sheet, so a 5th player set would have been a zero-cost addition to print, as would the Governor’s capital tile (a T-shaped quad hex) is also only available as an exclusive despite there being 2 additional blank triple hexes on the component sheet (and its rules come in the basic game)
Nevertheless, a truly superb game!
GIVEAWAY TIME!
It’s what you’re here for, we know, we know. So, we’re giving you a chance win a copy Star Wars Unlimited: Twilight of the Republic, along with a copy of Looot AND a full brace of Panda-powered madness from Panda Party!
So head over to @big_geekingout to enter, but as ever you blag some extra entries RIGHT HERE – just tell us in the comments below what’s under your tree and you’ll get fiiiiiive extra entries (to the tune of 5 gold rings)!
The Writer of this piece was: Sam Graven
Article Archive: Geeking Out
You can follow Sam on Instagram at @big_geekingout
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