New Game Round-up: Become the Chosen of Asgard, Pick Up Rocket Fragments in Days of Honor & Revisit Omen and Hemloch

It is the end of the Bronze Age! A new era begins. Only recently have you discovered how to extract iron from the ore in the peat bogs, and it's best to use your new discovery before others use it against you. As a Teutonic lord, your duty is to ensure your family line is preserved and that your land prospers and grows. Of course, every other lord seems to be thinking the same thing. The gods grant favors both to control creatures and to aid your goals. Make the proper sacrifices to the Æsir to appease their whims, and you will win the game.

In Asgard's Chosen, you build armies to achieve the desires of the gods. Each god has a request and will help you to gain ground. You use the favor of the gods to aid your cause, and in return you appease their desires. In order to win you will need to appease the various gods in your deck. Appeasing gods requires dramatic losses to your position or the composition of your deck. When you appease the appropriate number of gods, the game ends, and whoever has appeased the most gods wins.

The game board is composed of different landscape tiles: Mountains, Forest, Hills, Scrub, Bog, and Lakes. Each tile contains two different terrain types and an enchanted land. Players will create the board in the beginning of the game by joining the tiles together. City tiles are used to fill in some of the open square spaces on the map not used by enchanted lands. There are a number of different kinds of cards in the game: God Cards, Creature Cards, Town Item Cards, Enchanted Item Cards, and Event Cards. Players build a deck with cards to take over land and to battle each other.

Asgard's Chosen plays with 2-4 players, and includes both a solitaire version and a two-player co-op version.

Days of Honor: Operation Wildhorn III is a fast-paced, tactical card wargame for two players. The first player takes the role of the Polish commander. His goal is to collect fragments from rockets test-fired from the German missile base. The second player takes the role of the German commander and is trying to protect the secrets of the rocket testing area.

The game lasts four turns. Each turn begins with a missile test, which scatters new fragments of the rocket in the peripheral area surrounding the testing ground. Players alternately take turns during which they place their units on the table and perform actions. Players use scouts to collect missile fragments, but they need to be protected by soldiers and partisans because enemy contact can lead to combat. These actions are supported by elite units: Polish Unseen and Silent commandos and German SS Stormtroopers, who are able to penetrate enemy lines. In addition, players build a network of command and support units, which allows them to effectively carry out their actions.

Players also affect the course of the game during their opponent's moves, playing cards for immediate effects. And each side has a set of unique events, e.g., Germans can use their logistical advantages while Poles can hide, and even evacuate rocket fragments to England! To determine combat and exploration results, players each use a six-sided die, but they have many opportunities to modify the results, so a good plan should work even with bad luck.

At the end of the game, the player with more rocket parts wins. This means the player successfully stole (Polish) or concealed (German) the secrets of the V-2 weapon.

The Olympus Edition of Omen: A Reign of War contains one of every Unit ever published for Omen. Some units have been altered to make them work within the constructs of the new format. However, this is considered to be a "catch all" release for people who have wanted Omen but have missed out. Relics are not present in this edition, as they were exclusively a Kickstarter expansion. If you already own Omen, there is no reason to purchase this version of Omen.

Hemloch: Vault of Darkness, a new version of Hemloch, is a standalone game. It borrows very heavily from Hemloch. I urge people who already own Hemloch to read the rules of this new game before placing a preorder. You may or may not find enough of a difference to warrant owning a copy of each. However, people who do not already own a copy of the original Hemloch, I think you will find the new game to be a good respresentation of the old game, albeit with some mechanical shifts and additional gameplay options.