Hey everyone! Today I am back with another installment of my Rulebook Preview series. In this series, I take a look at tabletop games that have not yet been released. I have not played these games, but simply reviewed the rulebooks (hence Rulebook Preview). Anyway, without further ado, here are 4 new games that you should keep a lookout for!

Coreball

In Coreball, you control a team of robots in a highly popular futuristic sport. In many ways, it reminded me instantly of Quidditch, a popular sport from Harry Potter. In the game, your goal is to score points by having control of one or more of the “balls.” You are penalized for having your flyers fly out of the arena, or if they get wounded/killed. Players take turns moving their flyers around and having them take actions, which are all unique and do different interesting things. Similar to many sports, you have standby units that you can substitute in. I find the concept of Coreball fascinating, and it is clear that the production quality of the game is fantastic. This is definitely one to look out for.

Rulebook: You can find the rules here. While it is a google doc, it is the way that the rules will be printed for the actual game. I will say that the digital rules are quite nice, as you have an outline on the left sidebar that lets you jump through the rules to the sections that you need.

Tasty Humans

In Tasty Humans, you play as a hungry monster who is terrorizing a village by eating the adventurers and their leaders. I love how you play as a monster in this game, and it kind of reminds me of a card game I really enjoy called Boss Monster. Anyway, in this game players take turns eating adventurers. Players eat 2 normal adventurers, and then they eat 1 “leader.” What makes this game fascinating is the Tetris-style strategy. Here is a great example of what I mean by “Tetris-style” gameplay.

Unlike Tetris, your goal is to fill up your board. The arrangement of tiles on your board is crucial to scoring, as you want to place the leader tokens in strategic positions to take advantage of the body parts that you have eaten. I really like the way this design incorporates spacial reasoning into the theme of eating adventurers. I find it pretty funny, but maybe I have a morbid sense of humor.

Rulebook: The rulebook was excellently written, and I appreciated the graphical design. What made it stand out was the use of graphics to make the rules easy to grasp. Personally, after looking at the image above, I was able to have a solid grasp the game without even reading the accompanying text. That’s a great place to be. You can download rules PDF here:

Forks

In Forks, your goal is to embezzle the most money from companies as possible. These companies are represented by company cards (there are 5 companies in the game, and they are kind of like suits in a 52 card deck). On your turn, you draw 3 company cards and keep one of them. You pass the other 2 to your left, and that player keeps one of them, and plays the other face-up in the middle (Your giving them a “fork” decision, which is where the name of the game comes from). At the end of the game, players get points for keeping cards from the top 3 companies and lose points for keeping cards from the worst 2 companies. The top companies are the ones with the most points in the middle.

And that’s about it! The game is incredibly simple at its core, but I can see it getting more and more complex as different rules are applied to the game. The game comes with 8 ability cards that can change the game up, but they aren’t described in detail in the rules so I am not exactly sure how they might change the gameplay. It’s hard to get a feel for the strategy, but I have a feeling that this could be a fast game with some interesting tactics.

Rulebook: The rules were only 2 pages, which was really cool to see. I like how the author didn’t over-describe the game. You can find the rules here.

Wizards of Roygbiv

In Wizards of Roygbiv, you are trying to kill an opponent. In the beginning of the game, each player builds a deck out of 3 spells of their color and 2 “white” spells. Each player starts with 3 spells in hand and draws 2 spells on each of their turns. This means that your starting deck is extremely small! Don’t worry though, on each of your turns you can take a spell from the central pile (kind of like buying cards in Dominion) and add it to your hand. You can have as many cards in your hand as you like, but at the start of your turn you’ll take 1 damage for each card in hand past 3. When you play cards from your hand, you pay the mana cost. If you don’t have enough mana? You can pay health instead, and you start with 20 health. However, by doing this you get closer to dying.

When playing a card, you can “overload” it by removing it from the game. This makes the card much stronger, but means that you’ll have one less card to work with. This can be challenging, especially with the tiny deck sizes in the game. And that about wraps up the rules! The rules are very unique in terms of deck builders and collectible card games go. I love the decisions between wanting to have cards in hand, but not wanting to take damage for keeping them in hand. I also really like how you can overload spells by removing them from the game, and how you can pay for spells by paying health points. What makes this game interesting is the fact that there is less “build up” and more immediate destruction, as you can play those extremely powerful spells on turn one. It’s hard to say what it will feel like to play this game, but I’m really looking forward to seeing it on Kickstarter.

Rulebook: You can find the rulebook on Google Drive here. The rules are very funny, and I really like how the rules are very approachable. There isn’t as much graphical design understandably as it is still a google doc, but there is a ton of thought behind the rules. The chart above really shows how the author spent the time to make the gameplay easy to understand. On Kickstarter now! Find it here.

Which of these four excellent games are you looking forward to the most? Let me know in the comments below! Thanks for reading!