![New Game Round-up: Zombicide Creators Welcome Massive Darkness, Alderac Revisits Valley of the Kings, and Dice Hate Me Gets Meta](https://cf.geekdo-images.com/sZLSd_g7S6z7aMdRuW46Bw__thumb/img/WWJXRXBd5lbaj1477FEhVUPcwV0=/fit-in/200x150/filters:strip_icc()/pic2957911.jpg)
Using the popular Zombicide system as a starting point, Massive Darkness adds all the richness of a dungeon crawl RPG. Pick your hero, choose a class, decide on which skills to spend your XP, and get loot by searching the dungeon or killing special enemies that can use the equipment against you! Face a multitude of different enemy types, coming in all shapes and sizes, whose behavior is resolved automatically...or you can try to sneak around enemies by taking advantage of dark areas of the map.
Players begin their adventure in Massive Darkness by picking a Hero – each with two special starting skills – and pair them with a Class of their choosing. Depending on the combination, another skill can be unlocked, giving players a wide range of choices and play styles. In Massive Darkness, the created Heroes go on Quests, killing monsters, collecting loot, and gaining XP. Players spend their XP to unlock new Skills, growing more powerful as the Quest progresses.
Throughout the game, players encounter different monsters, including Minions, Agents, Roaming Monsters, and Bosses. A unique mechanism of the game is the Guardian. Any of the monster types have a chance of spawning as a Guardian, meaning it will use a random piece of equipment in the fight against Heroes. However, if players are able to overcome this difficult encounter, they will acquire that piece of loot!
• We recorded a bunch of game overviews with Alderac Entertainment Group at the 2016 GAMA Trade Show (Mystic Vale, Love Letter Premium, the return of Guildhall, etc.), but the publisher has still more coming in 2016, including Ryan Miller's dice-rolling, hero-recruiting Fantahzee in August 2016 and Valley of the Kings: Last Rites, the third iteration of Tom Cleaver's deck-building card game Valley of the Kings, which introduces the various citizens and roles of people in the ancient Egyptian kingdom.
• In early March 2016, Greater Than Games announced the winners of its "_________: The _________ Game" contest, with the two winners being published under the Dice Hate Me Games brand, along with a third in-house design. The winners are:
—Time Management: The Time Management Game from Nathaniel Levan: In this quick-playing, tile-laying game that serves as its own expansion, players are workers at the Office of Time Management, managing the space-time continuum. Their goal is to add temporal workers to the work force and arrange them in such a way to ensure the safety of the continuum and to save time — and save time!
—Trick-Taking: The Trick-Taking Game from Tovarich Pizann and Bob West: The world's greatest magicians have been assembled to establish who is the best illusionist of all time — but as with all great magic, there is much sleight-of-hand afoot, and the magicians will use cunning and great mentalist powers to steal each others' tricks!
—Traitor Mechanic: The Traitor Mechanic Game from Christopher Badell and Peter C. Hayward: Players are automobile mechanics, all working together to fix cars. However, one of them has been hired by a rival auto-shop to undermine their efforts and make this auto-shop go bankrupt. You must work together, fix the cars, and attempt to reveal just which one of you is the...traitor mechanic.