Crowdfunding Round-up: Amerigo, Ars Victor, The Mystique Deck, HEX: Shards of Fate & Archon: Glory and Machination

In Amerigo, the players help Amerigo Vespucci on his journey to discover new land. The players explore the islands of South America, secure trading routes, and build settlements.

The actions available to players are determined through the use of a specialized dice tower, which has appeared in the Queen titles Im Zeichen des Kreuzes and Wallenstein. At the start of the game, this tower is seeded with action cubes, which come in seven colors, with each color matching a particular type of action. During the game players will drop additional action cubes into the tower – but some of these cubes might get stuck in the floors of the tower while other cubes already in the tower are knocked free. Thus, players need to play both tactically – taking advantage of the actions currently available in the best way possible – and strategically – using their knowledge of which actions do what to play well over the course of the game.

The game board is composed of nine, twelve or sixteen tiles, depending on the number of players. Players sail their ships through the landscape created for this game, landing on islands to plan and build settlements, which then supply resources and allow the player to earn victory points. Players might want to invest in cannons to protect themselves from pirates roaming the waters or acquire progress tokens to gain special advantages.

Ars Victor is a card-driven two-player game of tactical combat in a science-fiction setting.

You create an army from an selection of regular and irregular troops from the Empire of Man. You then build a map from a set of interlocking map tiles. You and your foe alternate turns playing a command card to move and attack with their units.

You win by reducing your enemy's Glory to zero by holding ground and killing enemy units. Your initial Glory is equal to the points you *didnt* spend on your units. This adds another "bidding" consideration to buying your starting units: do you need that last unit, or would you rather have more staying power?

The players build up their armies of by selecting from various unit options. Each unit has an attack for close combat (when adjacent), medium weapons (at a distance of 2), or long range (longer than that). The attack is listed as a number of dice of different colors so that it is easy to see which units are deadly close up, and which prefer to sit back and shell the enemy. Additionally, every unit is given a suit (hearts, clubs, spades, diamonds). Players draw cards that allow them to issue orders for units of the same suit – or units of the same color with a penalty. There are also tons of terrain modifiers and unit special abilities. Despite seeming completely overwhelming at first, it actually moves very fluidly and after just a turn or two, most players were able to grasp the basics.

An interesting twist is that players start with 80 glory. Composing an army costs some amount of initial glory. Then, the game is won when the other player is reduced to 0 glory. This can be done by killing units, or by keeping and controlling capture points. The race to knock your opponent out was very reminiscent of a CCG like Magic and contributed to the desire to destroy your opponent rather than merely achieve pre-printed objectives.

Mystique is a climbing game for 2 to 6 individual players that can be also played in pairs (4 or 6 players).

In Mystique, the players are spellcasters in combat who start each skirmish with a hand of spell cards; each card includes a number (1-5), a color (red, blue or yellow), and a suit (Suns, Moons, Arms, or Crowns). The first spellcaster opens a round by "casting a spell" – that is, she chooses up to five cards from her hand that have something in common (either the same number, the same suit, or the same color), then announces the number of cards she's chosen and what they have in common as she places them face up on the table; e.g., "three crowns" or "four yellow". The following player must either:

Cast an equal or stronger spell of the same type as the previous player (i.e., the same number of cards — or more — with the same common feature), thereby passing the turn to the next player, or
Take all cards that have been played during this round and place them face down in a pile next to herself. These are her "burns". This ends the round. She becomes the new "spellcaster and opens a new round.
When a player must open a new round but has no cards in hand, the skirmish ends and the player with the fewest burns wins. Ties are possible. The game can be played to the best of three or five skirmishes. Mystique includes two advanced rules, covering "aces scoring" and "spell deflection".

The land of Cardis has been ruled for many years by King Rhodrig. Cardis is a rich and powerful kingdom controlling all neighboring provinces, which provide valuable resources. All this wealth attracts warlords and raiding parties who more than often launch attacks against the kingdom. So far Cardis has stood against such attacks but with heavy casualties. Thanks to the support of wealthy Archons, the kingdom gets rebuilt so that Science and Arts can flourish once again. At the same time new soldiers are recruited and the army prepares for the inevitable moment when the kingdom will need to be defended once again.

In Archon: Glory & Machination, players are powerful Archons who support Cardis in order to win King's favor. The Archons use their influence on figures of authority, taking as many as they can on their side in a constant struggle amongst themselves to see who can best manipulate their subordinates to do their bidding.

Each game consists of three rounds (years). For each of these rounds, the King issues different demands that players must fulfill. Each round includes 3 turns during which players use a card-driven worker placement mechanism to perform various actions that will allow them to gather resources and income, recruit soldiers for the royal guard, rebuild the city, and use the palace buildings to acquire scoring cards (Science, Arts, Royal Guard). After three rounds, the game ends and the player with the most victory points wins.