Boardgames and COVID-19

I think this could be considered a controversial topic. On one side, I really like to play boardgames with my friends. On the other side I feel it’s my duty to not move around to much, meet up with a lot of people and/or hang around in small rooms.

That’s why I spent the first 3 months of our Dutch intelligent lockdown mainly at home. Working from home, entertaining myself from home. Luckily I can do ~99% of my work from home and luckily both me and my wife don’t mind that much on staying home some more.

However, the itch came more and more and when the Dutch government started loosening the lockdown, I carefully started seeing some friends for 1 on 1 games, sometimes with 3.

Some baselines we laid according to our Dutch guidelines:

• No handshakes and such; we just wave.
• About 1,5m distancesometimes; hard with a boardgames so we try to not give eachother pieces of the board and sit across the table on a safe distance
• and, obviously, nobody has a cold / is sick
• We, decided ourselves not to wear masks during these games. If we couldn’t keep a proper distance, I would probably have brought one along.

With this method, we were able to do some safe boardgames:

Project: ELITE (2020)

In Project: ELITE, players are members of the ELITE squad on a mission to stop the invading forces of an alien empire. Stopping the invasion requires players to speedily roll dice as they take part in real-time, two-minute combat rounds against waves of terrifying enemies. Once the ELITE members take their turn, the aliens react. The game continues in this fast-yet-tactical series of rounds until the scenario is won or the aliens take the Earth.

This new edition of Project: ELITE will have new art, new miniatures, new card designs, new weapons, new ELITE members, new enemies, and more.

• 1 - 6
• 60 - 60 Min
• 14+

The Big Book of Madness (2015)

So far your first year at the Elementary College has been slightly disappointing. They taught you to light a flickering flame at the tip of your finger, but other than that you've spent much more time reading books than learning powerful spells as future great wizards like you should.

So when you heard about the Big Book of Madness hidden in the great school library, you couldn't help but to sneak in and peek in this intriguing tome in spite of your professors' warnings. When you slowly lift the cover of the terrible book, dozens of dreadful creatures rush out, threatening to destroy the world itself! This was your mistake, and only you can fix it now! Learn from the library to fight back against the monsters, and try not to sink into insanity...

The Big Book of Madness is a challenging co-operative game in which the players are magic students who must act as a team to turn all the pages of the book, then shut it by defeating the terrible monsters they've just freed.

Each player has their own element deck that they build during the game and use for several purposes, such as learning or casting a spell, adding a new element to their deck, destroy or healing a curse. Spells allow you to support your playmates, improve your deck, draw cards, etc. — but the monsters from the book fight back. Each comes with terrible curses that are triggered every turn unless you dispel them in time. They will make you discard elements, add madness cards to your deck, or lose spells...

If you manage to turn six pages and defeat all of the monsters, you win the game!

• 2 - 5
• 60 - 90 Min
• 12+

Nemesis: Aftermath & Void Seeders (2019)

Nemesis: Aftermath & Void Seeders is an expansion for Nemesis. It contains all of the stretch goals from the Kickstarter campaign except for Medic: the Aftermath expansion and the Void Seeders expansion.
—user summary

"Every spaceship has a voice; a melody of machinery and subsystems its crew learns intimately during long travels. The problem is, ever since the last mission our ship sounds WRONG. There’s something foul in the way it’s speaking to us. Barely audible murmurs. Strange whispers no machine could make. The dark corridors and vast halls almost seem to SING.

Some of us have tried to locate sources of this interferences, but they always seemed two steps ahead. Stalked by their never-ending presence, we soon started cracking. Our engineer has cut some words on his flesh. When we asked why, he replied:‘Incandescent secrets need to be written in blood’. Then, our navigator took a spacewalk without her suit. When we pulled her in, her entire face frozen and cracked, she grinned in a way I will never forget.

Now, it got even worse. Noises turned into voices, sharing tales of slaughter and terror. They do not run from us anymore. They encircle us and herd us through the ship to some dark purpose. I need to UNDERSTAND them before it’s too late. I put my hand on the pistol grip, looking at the backs of my last two crewmembers. I see dark mysteries swirling under their skulls. It would only take two bullet holes to release them..."

Rules:

Overlook:

Voidseeders are a race that can interact with the minds of crew members. They will have few nests instead of one, but only one strong fighting presence at given moment. Once killed, new one will be awakened from the most developed nest.

This race will focus on whispering and controlling minds - people who will be near them will start to hear voices commanding them to do different destructive things.

Nests:

On the board, there is normally 1 Nest as a room token, but there are additionally 2-3 smaller nests. Those are places where new Voidseeders will born. At the moment of discovering main Nest, you should put a Stalker miniature in it (this is the model that is on the ship from the beginning. He is very dangerous, especially when faced by people with a high Insanity level).

Other Nests will start showing up on the board together with discovering certain Exploration tokens. Those nests will be especially dangerous. They will not move, but if a crew member will happen to end the turn at the tile with a nest, he will get a serious wound.

Voidlurkers

They will spawn in nests, and their objective will be to spread insanity and try to move players to Nests.

Whispersers

They will work very similar to Voidlurkers, but with the difference that they will have the main goal of defending the main nest.

Stalker

He is a main guardian. He takes advantage from fear / insanity of the crew members and will focus on them.

Despoiler

Equivalent of the Queen. Actually, it is hard to say if she is real or if it is a mass hallucination. One way or the other, she will only emerge when all Insanity tokens are on players (number of tokens will be specific for different numbers of players). She is extremely strong.

Contamination card

Here it will change a little bit - players will normally get a contamination card every time they will get an insanity token. They will be easier to discard (you don't need to check if it was infected or not). Effect of the card will only take place at the very end of the game, and it will be the same as in the normal version - if it will turn out it was indeed "infected," it will mean that your character, even if escaped, went mad and lost the game either way.

Whispers mechanic

This mechanism will change the noise mechanic. Whenever you move (or an event card will tell you to), you will need to roll for whispers. If you would get a corridor with an whisper token already in it (you hear something more) - you need to draw a Card from the Insanity deck. Those cards will apply to you or not based on the numbers of insanity tokens your character has. Effects might be very different - from one-time action to permanent disabilities.

Combat

In combat, Voidlurkers will only try to add insanity tokens to you and then run away to the closes nest. Whisperers will be harder to kill, as well as present some portion of actual physical danger, but their main weapon will still be giving you insanity tokens.

Things will change with Stalker and Despoiler - those two will be huge opponents who will give you real wounds, so you will not want to be near them.

Event phase

In the event phase, one additional step that will be added is checking your insanity tokens and numbers of Voidlurkers and Whisperers in all rooms next to yours. If the number of them is higher than the number of insanity tokens, you add one insanity token and draw one contamination card.

But whenever you will be in a room with other people, this effect will be less harmful. (they can help you calm down)

Overall feel

Overall feel we will be going for will be way different from what you will have in the base Core Box. We have a lot of cool ideas how to get Insanity cards in a way, that it will be an additional layer of you not trusting your friends - not only because of their objective but perhaps because of the Insanity cards.

Additionally, interaction with Voidseeders will be way different, you will need to think very carefully where to move or place your hero to not go insane.

—description from the publisher

• 1 - 5
• 90 - 180 Min
• 12+

Unfortunately, the ship blew up, so we weren’t able to do aftermath 🙁

It was so nice to do some more boardgames after such a time. Hopefully we can do some more soon. I just want to emphasize: don’t be an idiot. There is no reason to potentially kill another person just because you can handle the cold. Another might not be so fortunate. If your government says it’s not safe to meet up, then they will probably have a reason to conclude that.

Stay safe!