Spielwarenmesse 2014 — Game Previews VIII: Akrotiri, Tichu, Arboretum, Pocket Battles & The Battle of Kemble's Cascade

The Battle at Kemble's Cascade is a board game adaptation of a classic shoot 'em up video game. In the game, which is played out on a scrolling space backdrop, the players take on the roles of brave space pilots sweeping around in nimble yet powerful fighters, searching the asteroid clusters for universal glory and ancient technology. Players compete to obtain the most glory, with glory resulting from carrying out missions, finding lost treasure in asteroid clusters, and destroying alien entities, not to mention other players.

In the game, players fly through an ever-scrolling space setting, which is represented by rows of cards. Each turn, the bottom row is removed and a new row is added to the top. Players move their spaceships and resolve effects continuously, performing actions such as collecting power-ups and money, fighting alien cruisers and titans, blocking and shooting other players, and dodging asteroids and black holes. The players need to balance the use of their ships' energy as it's used for both absorbing enemy fire and boosting their movement speed and fire rate.

The game includes missions and achievements as well as a mechanism called "threat level" to keep everyone in suspense throughout the whole game. Threat allows players to enjoy the satisfaction of both shooting wildly at each other and dodging the hundreds of bullets raining down from enemy fighters and other players.

All player ships are fully upgradeable with four different weapon classes, engines, shields and more. Each player must buy the upgrades and navigate the path that best fits his chosen strategy in order to successfully complete his missions and attain the most glory.

In Pocket Battles: Confederacy vs Union, tiles represent troops and troops make up units in your army; just determine the size of the battle, then create your own army from a pool of existing troops. Each tile hits on certain rolls, and some can only melee while others can shoot. Some tiles also have special traits that can affect their whole unit or army.

The basic rules of the game are fairly simple: Two armies face each other in battle. The armies are split into three columns and two rows. Players must decide at the start of the game how many points they will give to their armies, which then determines how many points you must defeat to win.

On your turn, you choose which faction of your army to send off to battle! Attacks are made by using Order Tokens. If no Order Tokens are present on a unit, it costs just one token to issue orders to that unit. Issuing orders to the same unit in the same Battle Round costs you the number of tokens present on the unit, plus one. (If one token is on a unit, it costs two additional tokens to activate it again; with three tokens on the unit, it costs four additional tokens, etc.)

After a round of battle, you may choose to redeploy you units. (Units may move from the back of the row to the front of the same row, from the back of a row to the back of another row, or from the front of a row to the front of another row). Redeployment costs no Order tokens. The battle ends when one army has eliminated at least half of the points in the opposing army.

Arboretum is a strategy card game for 2-4 players, aged 10 and up, that combines set collection, tile-laying and hand management while playing in about 25 minutes. Players try to have the most points at the end of the game by creating beautiful garden paths for their visitors.

The deck has 80 cards in ten different colors, with each color featuring a different species of tree; each color has cards numbered 1 through 8, and the number of colors used depends on the number of players. Players start with a hand of seven cards. On each turn, a player draws two cards (from the deck or one or more of the discard piles), lays a card on the table as part of her arboretum, then discards a card to her personal discard pile.

When the deck is exhausted, players compare the cards that remain in their hands to determine who can score each color. For each color, the player with the highest value of cards in hand of that color scores for a path of trees in her arboretum that begins and ends with that color; a path is a orthogonally adjacent chain of cards with increasing values. For each card in a path that scores, the player earns one point; if the path consists solely of trees of the color being scored, the player scores two points per card. If a player doesn't have the most value for a color, she score zero points for a path that begins and ends with that color. Whoever has the most points wins.