New Game Round-up: Deceiving in One Night Ultimate Alien, Drafting in Ethnos, and Drinking in Raise Your Goblets

In Ultimate Werewolf Legacy, players and the village itself have attributes that are retained between games, with events taking place in the first games having effects that ripple through remaining games. Make a bad decision early on, and it can haunt the village for years to come! Players can earn titles, which provides them with special abilities in future games, regardless of their role.

The full campaign is divided into chapters of about three games each, with each chapter designed to be played in a single night with the same group of players. Each chapter is standalone so that different players can play different chapters, but since early chapters affect successive ones, it's an even richer experience to play through more than one chapter. Even better, the chapters are designed so that you can switch moderators between games.

Ultimate Werewolf Legacy uses the basic gameplay found in Ultimate Werewolf and adds a number of twists and Legacy-style mechanisms to give the game a richer, more immersive experience than werewolf players will find any other way.

In Ethnos, players call upon the support of giants, merfolk, halfings, minotaurs, and other fantasy tribes to help them gain control of the land. After three ages of play, whoever has collected the most glory wins!

In more detail, the land of Ethnos contains twelve tribes of fantasy creatures, and in each game you choose six of them (five in a 2/3-player game), then create a deck with only the creatures in those tribes. The cards come in six colors, which match the six regions of Ethnos. Place three glory tokens in each region, arranging them from low to high.

Each player starts the game with one card in hand, then 4-12 cards are placed face up on the table. On a turn, a player either recruits an ally or plays a band of allies. In the former case, you take a face-up card (without replacing it from the deck) or the top card of the deck and add it to your hand. In the latter case, you choose a set of cards in your hand that match either in tribe or in color, play them in front of you on the table, then discard all other cards in hand. You then place one or more tokens in the region that matches the color of the top card just played, and you use the power of the tribe member on the top card just played.

At the end of the first age, whoever has the most tokens in a region scores the glory shown on the first token. After the second age, the players with the most and secondmost tokens score glory equal to the values shown on the first and second tokens. Players score again after the third age, then whoever has the most glory wins. (Games with two and three players last only two ages.)

Have you felt the thrill of the struggle between life and death, sitting at the same table with your worst enemy and an unreasonable amount of poison? Don’t forget to bring some antidote when playing Raise Your Goblets!

In Raise Your Goblets, players take the roles of nobles at a banquet, each one with their own agenda of personal vendetta. Each player has wine, poison and antidote tokens they can pour into the goblets, trying to poison their enemies while staying alive themselves! Each noble also has a special ability that allows them to bend or even break a rule.

Use all of your actions to become the most influent noble at the table!