PAX Day 1 is over and the SIFTER team had a blast checking the expo hall out. While most of the crew was covering digital games I decided to go check out the AUS Indie Showcase Tabletop Winners. Six great indie games designed right here in Australia put on a strong showing with art, design, mechanics and manufacturing easily on par with the heavy-weights in the tabletop space.
If you love tabletop, these are the six best new games you should check out. There's something for everyone from the casual cozy gamers to the crunchy war gamers.
Potion Society has you go head to head with 2-4 players to brew the best potion. You’ll be fighting over cauldrons and when things don’t go your way it’s time to cast some spells to sabotage your fellow brewers.
The art is cozy and the card stock is super premium with lots of attention paid to the physical aesthetics where ingredients get placed on cauldron boards and spoon cards move around as you mix things up.
There's a strong association between the narrative elements and game mechanics which makes it pretty easy to work out what to do. This came as no surprise when I heard that Az (one of the designers) teaches game design at JMC Academy.
You’ll have to get your head in the game if you want to score points in this strategic brew off. In our short game I managed to burn my first batch and ended with a very unrespectable negative 2 points!
Potion Society was created by Az & s_parklestea, the duo behind Murmuring Mystic and is available to buy right now at PAX AUS. The card stock and printed offering is some of the most premium manufacturing I've ever seen in a board game so definitely recommend grabbing a physical copy.
Panda Party is a cute party game for casual gamers who have maybe exploded one too many kittens.
Three to six players work to be the first to assemble a party of 5 pandas. Each turn you’ll try to lure pandas to your side with offerings of bamboo and pizza. Watch out for other players who will try and outbid you, those pandas have no loyalty and will ditch you for the highest bidder.
Panda Party was created by a family trio of Goran, Ana and Darko and is available to buy now at PAX AUS, they even have some booster packs available to mix it up and fantasy themed ones in the works.
Fans of the Japanese animation Planetes will love Spacewreck Salvage, a strategically interesting game about being the first to cruise in and nab cargo from wrecked spaceships.
The game has a fun and interesting inventory/scoring mechanic where you try to fit Tetris blocks of salvage into your cargo hold. There's also crew to rescue and modules to upgrade your ship.
The round sequence uses a simultaneous “plan and reveal” mechanic which nicely avoids the annoying "waiting for your turn" experience some games have. Game-pace is quick and full of strategic decision points, I identified several missed optimisations after the fact during my learn-to-play session. I could easily see myself getting very competitive and mathy in repeated play throughs.
Spacewreck Salvage was created by Chris & Sarah from Sydney and will be releasing soon, until then why not pop by their booth at PAX AUS and get an early preview.
Ever wanted to create your own homebrew fantasy setting? Cartograph can help with that. It's a solo RPG where you take on the role of a cartographer and in the process, build a fleshed out world (map and journal included!) ready to take to your next fantasy RPG campaign.
The game has you roll dice, interpret them with the help of detailed tables in the rule book and then draw the resulting map. Brandon Lee came up with the idea of Cartograph after spending COVID stuck in lockdown, unable to play their regular game of D&D.
Cartograph is available to buy now at PAX AUS, so check it out in the Indie Showcase area.
Do you enjoy Risk, Diplomacy, Twilight Imperium or Eclipse? Are you less than enthused by the prospect of multi day long campaigns? Conquest for the Capital aims for the deep strategy of those games but in a more manageable two hour session.
Four players battle it out for control of the capital with distinctly different factions, Dwarves, Elves, Orcs and Undead, while humans act as the neutral occupying force. The simultaneous movement mechanics allow for sneaky plays and bluffs as you gang up on each other or lure your opponents into carefully laid traps.
Conquest for the Capital is available to back right now on GameFound.
Coffee Up! is a fun cooperative card game from Jason Tam where you work together as baristas to not just get customer orders right but also remember their damn names.
The game starts with a few customer cards that you lay down and tell stories about so that you can recall them later. Just make stuff up here, like Zelda orders a mocha with vanilla and she's always mean about it because what she really needs is a double shot esspreso. You then hold up cards to each other and have to guess the name and order.
If you get a customer’s name and order right you get an exceptional star card but you lose one when both are wrong. It’s one of those games that gets more enjoyable the more you lean into the Barista role-play and start building up comedy narratives about the annoying customers you have to remember.
Coffee Up! is out now and available to buy at many places including PAX AUS.
