We just rotated a couple of new titles out onto the displays in-store, so now’s as good a time as any to talk a little about these!
CASTLES BY THE SEA
You and your fellow clan of tiny beach people have worked so hard all week, gathering and compacting sand, finding the right shells to decorate with, fighting off marauders determined to swipe your precious sand dollars and sea glass… Oh no. By the Beach itself… What is THAT?
IT’S THE TERROR! Run! Hide! This beast knows only destruction, and is sure to doom us all!
In Castles by the Sea you’ll be playing as a group of tiny builders attempting to construct and inhabit carefully crafted sandcastles, all while trying to avoid having those sandcastles destroyed by the much larger inhabitants of the beach. The art of the game has a gorgeous look, almost Studio Ghibli-esque, and it’s clear that Marby Kwong, the game’s sole artist, put a lot of thought into the day-to-day lives of these tiny beach societies.
The gameplay itself revolves around placing sand in carefully crafted patterns so that you can build structures, and then finally place units upon them. If you plan ahead (and plan around the giant baby that might stomp all over your castle) then you can score whopping amounts of points. With many different options for units, structures, and hazards, the game has a lot of replayability packed into one box. And if you pick it up from us, fancy painted wooden tokens and the Riptide expansion are included with the base game!
Come in and ask for a demo any time- just watch out for the gigantic crab that might try to crush you!
WING IT
“You’re in the lead during a bathtub sledding race, speeding down a steep, snowy hill. When your rivals’ fans start hurling rotten vegetables at you, you accidentally slide over a rocky patch and crack the tub. Now it could break into pieces at any moment.”
Man. That’s tough. But what do you do? Wing It is a game that bridges the gap between party games and roleplaying games. Using nothing but your wits and the cards in your hand, you’ll need to tell the story of how you scrape by unheard of, sometimes dangerous, but always zany situations. One of the highlights of this game that it can hold over many other party games is that the game doesn’t always come down to how funny or unfunny the cards in your hand are, it matters how sharp you are.
How is a trivia book on the dictators of the 20th century going to get you evacuated from an actively erupting volcano? Well it beats me, but if you’ve got a gaggle of wise-cracking, quick-witted players at home, I’d bet one of them can get you an answer.
TWO ROOMS AND A BOOM
Hidden roles games are a tried and true genre, and Two Rooms and a Boom takes the concept and turns it into a highly malleable clay. At its core, the game takes your typical hidden roles and splits them into two rooms. In a round, each room decides upon a leader, and then the leader, along with the rest of the players in the room, debate over and decide on a “hostage,” someone to be exchanged with the other room. This happens three times over the course of the game, and at the end, if the Bomber is in the same room as the President, then the Bomber’s red team wins. If the President is in the opposite room, then the President’s blue team wins.
That’s a fun enough concept, and by all means the game design could have stopped there. But Alan Gerding and Sean McCoy wanted to give us a game, not just some cards. So this game is inundated with over 70 roles that each interact with the basic framework of hidden roles and President vs. Bomber.
You’ve got the opportunity to play as spies, or as characters that play for neither team, or perhaps play as a member of a secret third green team!?! I hear they eat brains for breakfast…
You can play with any number of players from 6 to 30, making this game great for everything from typical game nights to huge get-togethers! It’s an easy pitch even to the non-board gamers in your life, just use the words of the game itself: “Lying encouraged.”
Stop in any time for a demo of these games! We’re happy to give you a peek inside the box– unless you’re the Bomber, in which case we vote for you to go to the other room.
