Guards of Atlantis II
I have played board and card games my whole life. Growing up we played a lot of Monopoly, Cribbage, Pitch, and Golf. Occasionally, I would get in a game a Risk and Chess. As I grew older video games became my predominant medium, but board games were always there getting played occasionally. As I was in high school and college I started to play more Table Top Role Playing Games (TTRPGs) and in college really started to get into "designer" board games. I remember playing Catan with friends, our friends Hannah and Chase hosting board game nights at their apartment, the Tabletop web series, and really starting to fall in love with all these new games.
I soon became the main buyer and researcher of new board games, a role I still play to this day. My collection started exploding as it so often does in one's journey through board games. I started playing more and heavier games. And I eventually found I am what is called an omnigamer. I play almost all genres of games without much preference one way or another. I can be in a big dice chucking Ameritrash game as much as I can be in a heavy puzzly euro style game, though these terms hardly have any real meaning anymore in my opinion. That's a topic for another post!
I started to try and keep track of my favorite games (top 10 usually) early on in the resurgence of my board gaming, but sadly have lost many of the archives of this list. The earliest list I was able to find was from May of 2017.
But this was all really just a long winded introduction to talk about Guards of Atlantis II (GoA2). GoA2 is a MOBA style board game that has no luck and an elegant rule set that sees players only having 5 cards in their hand but a plethora of options every turn. Why have the long introduction above? That's because GoA2 has been rapidly climbing my list of favorite games. I am not sure where it sits currently, but it is definitely within the top 10.
I bring it up because the game is having a crowdfunding campaign to get the reprint and some additional heroes (bringing the total to 32!). This campaign can be found here: https://gamefound.com/projects/wolffdesigna/guardsofatlantis2new?ref=homepage-featured_1
So with a long intro, I will try to give you a short succinct summary of what I love about GoA2.
First, it captures all that I love in a MOBA video game, while not getting bogged down in the minutia of details. It has pushes and minions, but the rules overhead to handle these is simple and doesn't detract from the gameplay while still keeping them integral to the game state as it does in a MOBA video game. It has a large cast of heroes, each of whom feels unique and just as powerful as all the others.
Second, it has such an elegant action selection system. As mentioned above you always have 5 cards in hand at the start of the round. These 5 cards represent the actions you can take, each being played one at a time and going on "cooldown" until the next round when you have the card back in hand ready to play again. This are chosen simultaneously and with each card played, your pool of available options dwindles for the remainder of the round. This leads to the game staying snappy as you have fewer cards the longer the round goes on. These same cards also represent your hero's health/stamina during the game. This makes attack and defending resolutions trivial to calculate and doesn't bog the game down when someone is attacked.
Lastly, it is an excellent team game. Some very smart restrictions on when you can cannot communicate with your teammates really makes you second guess how much you should say aloud at the table and how much you should trust your teammate to see the plan you are laying before them.
It has been something I haven't stopped playing, wanting to play, or thinking about playing since the first game I have gotten in. I have been a non-stop evangelist for the game (probably to the chagrin of some of the local players). I am attending a local convention this week and I am hoping I can get another 4 or 5 games played, including one at the max player count of 10!
If you ever find this and are at all interested in learning it, please let me know as I would be happy to teach you over Tabletopia (or in person!).
