Game Night featuring Elysium and Lords of Scotland!

Come on out to The Wandering Dragon on Tuesday, May 19th to check out these hot new titles during our Tuesday Night Game Night!

Seating is limited. RSVP at: http://www.meetup.com/The-Wandering-Dragon-Game-Shoppe/events/222626572/

Elysium

Mythic Greece. As an upstart demigod, you want to earn the favor of the Olympians and become a figure of legend yourself. Gather heroes and powerful artifacts, please the gods and bear their power to write your own epic tale.

Let your allies achieve their destiny and enter the Elysium, home of the glorious and the brave. Once the stories are written, only one demigod will be chosen to stand at the side of Zeus.

Elysium is a game of set collecting and combinations in which players recruit cards representing heroes, items, powers and gods. These cards have many different powers and you can create powerful combination to earn gold (the help of the gods) and victory points (the favor of the gods). Each card belongs to one of the eight Olympians gods (a family), and shows a level (1 to 3).

During the five turns of the game, players will try to transfer their cards to the Elysium and write their own Legends, which are series of cards from the same family or from different families of the same level. The more epic the Legends, the more favor from the gods they’ll earn. But as they go to Elysium, most cards lose their power and players will therefore have to renounce some of their combinations !

A game of balance and opportunity with simple action, but constant dilemmas and complex strategies.

Lords of Scotland

Introduction

The throne lies empty and the clans are restless. As a lord of Scotland with land, men and money at your disposal, now is the time to lay your claim. But you are not alone. Your rivals have been waiting for just such an opportunity themselves and they are poised to act. With the clans of Scotland ready to follow the strongest leader, it is up to you to win the loyalty of the clans first. If you can demonstrate your prowess in battle to enough clans, then the rest will fall in line behind you. Do you have the audacity and cunning it takes to be crowned king?

How to Play

You acquire the support you need to win the game by winning skirmishes against your rivals. A skirmish is five consecutive rounds of play. During each round of a skirmish, you have the opportunity to either build up your army by playing cards from your hand or recruit clans to fight for you by drawing cards from the recruit pile. At the end of the five rounds, each lord gets to claim a supporter in order of highest strength army to lowest. Then you discard all the clans you mustered and begin a new skirmish. The game ends when one lord reaches forty or more points worth of supporters and claims the throne. If you hope to be the one to do so, you will need to know when to commit your forces to battle and when to regroup to fight another day.

Design Notes

Lords of Scotland borrows design elements of Three-Dragon Ante, Condottiere and Havoc: The Hundred Years War and sets the action in the interregnum period of Scottish history surrounding the wars for Scottish Independence. The gameplay is broken up into five round skirmish which are conducted in a turn based clockwise fashion. During each skirmish, the ability to activate more special card powers by going first is balanced by the knowledge of what strength card you need to play to win by going last. While throughout the game, there is a general pressure to use resources to make immediate attacks of opportunity balanced with the need to collect resources for long-term strategic advantage. Lords of Scotland scales well to the number of players with most victories being determined in the final skirmish.