We venture beyond hex-and-counter wargaming for much of this week’s GARPA ~

GrogHeads Staff, 22 April 2016

The Dark Sands (GMT Games)
p500 $38, MSRP $55 – made the cut

Ted Racier strikes again!  He’s taking his East front campaign system from The Dark Valley and dropping it into North Africa.  You get to refight the dramatic 2 years of back-and-forth warfare between Cairo and Tunis at the operational level, with a focus on combat and planning.  Notably, the GMT copy on their promotional material pokes fun at a certain well-known North Africa game with a heavy logistical focus.  Meanwhile, you’ve got a highly solo-friendly game that spans a grand campaign from a designer we all love and a company that churns ass-kicking products.  Got get your order in before you can’t get the p500 price anymore.

Last Front (Plow Games)
$13k of $4k, ends 1 May 2016

It’s a military-themed trick-taking/bidding game that involves combining your combat assets to put the strongest hand on the table.  It’s not a wargame.  Hell, it’s barely a strategy game.  But if you’ve got family game night coming up and can’t bear the thought of another round of Sorry Sliders or 21st Century Ad-Splattered Monopoly, maybe you can get them to sling a few cards with in a game that doesn’t require buckets of dice, a CRT, or an order of battle.  You’re taking down territories and responding to events as you’re juggling your hand to be ready to take down your opponents’ stabs at the battlefield.  Flip over to the Kickstarter page and drop your pledge.

Sector Prime (Two Guys and a Giant)
$6300 of $26k, Ends 1 May 2016

It’s got a big uphill battle to make it to the finish line, and it might be suffering from space-4X-fatigue in the marketplace, but Sector Prime’s 1-hour play time is attracting a lot of attention from fans who have regular game gatherings where a bunch of options hit the table.  The cute build-your-own-space-station bits look neat on the board, and the variable planet tiles add replay value.  There’s a bunch o’ dice and an underlying mine-the-world storyline that gets the economic explorer juices pumping.  Drill your way to their campaign page and cash in your pledge.

Star Trek Ascendancy
Coming Summer 2016

We don’t normally show off games whose eventual presence in the marketplace isn’t under your control, but hey, it’s Star Trek so we’re making an exception.  Gale Force 9 has a Star Trek-themed space 4X game of their own, as you explore some of the TV show’s most well-known systems, build space stations, construct space lanes, and maroon treacherous crews on desert planets for future sequels.  Tons of plastic pieces, lavishly-illustrated planet tiles, and a build-as-you-go web of trades lanes look an awful lot like a big-box FFG production, but let’s just be thankful we get a chance to play out a big Star Trek game that doesn’t involve collectible cards.

That’s all for this edition – see you next time!

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