New Game Round-up: Setting Up Defense Grid, Reviving Arcane Academy, and Expanding Public Service

In the cooperative deck-building game Defense Grid: The Board Game, players must face off against waves and waves of aliens as they try to #ProtectTheCores. How you construct your deck for each mission is just as important as where you place your towers and which ones you choose to power each round.

Defense Grid: The Board Game includes at least ten missions and six AI characters from which to choose. Over the course of the game, players unlock new AI improvements, AI abilities, towers, and cards that they can use to go for the Gold Medal on each mission as they fight to #ProtectTheCores.

Challenge rival students to become the best in class in Arcane Academy, an innovative board game of tile-linking, wizardry for 2-4 players that pits young spellcasters against one another in a duel for honor and prestige. Forge potent magic items and wield wickedly powerful elemental energies to outthink and outmaneuver your opponents in this elegantly simple and quick-to-learn board game that will appeal to families and experienced players alike!

Arcane Academy is based on the critically acclaimed, all-ages comic series Finding Gossamyr, which is set in a fantasy world in which math is the language of magic.

The challenge for us was to keep the bomb disarming theme (which is perfect for this game, I think), but without the unfortunate link to tragic recent (or future) events.

For this reason we needed a strong theme, something that people can identify immediately as being totally fictional, and Sherlock achieves that perfectly: everyone knows Moriarty is evil, and trying to bomb Big Ben is something quite likely from him. But no one can accuse him of being anything [other] than the great British crime lord we all know...

There was no easy theme for this game, but Sherlock became the obvious one.