We could be heroes

There are a vast number of games based on pre-existing film, television and literary properties. The most successful tend to have distinctive settings with large casts of characters, such as Star Wars or Lord of the Rings, but what about the more character-driven franchises, where the action tends to be led by a single hero through multiple adventures? There is always going to be a problem answering the question "who gets to play the hero?"

Age of Conan solves this problem by having players bid for the right to have Conan lead their armies, while the short lived Conan Collectible Card Game just lets every player have their own version of the Cimmerian hero when it's their turn, and Monolith's Conan adventure game balances Conan against a wide variety of arguably more interesting playable characters. Planet of the Apes divides lead character Taylor into four separate psychological aspects (with only limited success).

The designers of Samurai Jack: Back to the Past, based on the Cartoon Network animated television series, faced a similar design problem, and they found an ingenious solution. Players take on the roles of various colorful characters Jack meets along his journey, while Jack himself is a non-player character who adds an interesting layer of complexity to what would otherwise be a simple "race to the finish" game.

The game board consists of a trail of tiles representing different types of locations such as jungle, fields, or desert. Players play Movement cards to move along the trail, collecting Support cards along the way which will be spent at the end of the trail to fight one of several villains. The better your specific combination of Support cards, the more points you'll earn from the villain, so a lot of the game is looking at which cards are available at which locations, and planning your moves in order to beat your opponents to the cards you need for the most points when facing the villain.

This alone might be an okay game (if a little simple), but in addition to the player pieces, there are two non-player characters moving along the path, Samurai Jack and his nemesis Aku. Jack moves along the path first, his movement determined by drawing a random card. Then the players all move, and finally Aku moves using another random card. A separate board keeps track of Jack's sanity, and if he is on a tile by himself or with Aku, he moves a step closer to madness. If his madness tracker gets all the way to the end, all the players lose the game, so in addition to gathering the cards they need to win, players have to keep an eye on Jack, and occasionally come to his rescue.

The game manages to combine several different mechanical elements without any of them seeming out of place, and the graphic design and game components are miles ahead of what I would expect for a relatively inexpensive game like this: full color plastic miniatures, what looks like original illustrations rather than just screen captures from the show, and a sharp design sense overall. It all comes together to make a game that, while fairly simple, is entertaining to play and very true to its source material.

Rating: 4 (out of 5) a little on the simple side, but nevertheless an excellent, well-crafted game.

• Samurai Jack: Back to the Past official website
• Samurai Jack: Back to the Past on Board Game Geek

Running and screaming

"Oh, yeah. Oooh, ahhh, that's how it always starts. Then later there's running and screaming."

-- Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum), The Lost World: Jurassic Park

In the past few years there have been several great games such as Dinosaur Island and DinoGenics that were clearly inspired by the Jurassic Park franchise. Interestingly, those games are about building a successful, functioning dinosaur zoo, the one thing that doesn't happen in any of the films; they're always about the dinosaurs escaping and causing chaos. I guess it takes a legitimately licensed game like Jurassic Park Danger! to really understand what the franchise is all about.

It's a one vs. many game based on the first film in the series, where one player takes control of the escaped carnivorous dinosaurs while the others play as a selection of the humans trying to make their way through the malfunctioning park to the helicopter pad and escape.

Each human character has a unique deck of cards giving that player general options such as moving and hiding as well as a few that are specific to each character, such as Ray Arnold's "hold on to your butts" that allows him to turn the electric fences back on, or little Timmy's encyclopedic knowledge of dinosaur behavior. Human players have to carefully manage their cards, choosing the best moments to play certain cards; if a human player ever runs out of cards, their character is eliminated and removed from the game (but not to fear, that player gets a new character to play).

In addition to avoiding the wily dinosaurs, the human characters each have a goal they must accomplish before they can head for the helicopter pad. Most of them just have to go to a specific location to collect their goal token, but some have to perform a specific task: Muldoon the game warden has to distract the Velociraptor, for example. Sneaky Dennis Nedry starts play with his goal token already collected, so all he has to do is make a beeline for the chopper, but he's more likely to be attacked by a dinosaur than the other characters.

The dinosaur player's goal is simple: eat a certain number of humans before they can escape. The dinosaurs move via a deck of cards similar to what the humans have, and each dinosaur has a special ability that they can't use every turn, so their player has to employ some strategy to get the most out of each dinosaur.

With cardboard components and wooden meeples instead of sculpted miniatures, Jurassic Park Danger! has clearly been designed for mass market sale. In an industry that seems increasingly interested in marketing expensive, overproduced, made-to-order games for a small market of mail order consumers (a trend I'm as guilty of supporting as anyone), it's nice to see a cheap, accessible game that's a lot more interesting than we usually see in licensed mass market products.

It's not going to change your life or anything, but it's fun and simple and evokes the source material very well. This might be a good entry level game for younger gamers, people new to the hobby, or even for your regular gaming group if they need a break from Gloomhaven...

Rating: 3 (out of 5) not quite in the same league as most hobby board games, but close, and definitely worth the low price.

• Jurassic Park Danger! official website
• Jurassic Park Danger! on Board Game Geek

Teeming with life

Exoplanets is a fairly simple tile placement game in which players score points by placing and advancing life on the planets with the most advantageous location within the solar system. Play consists of drawing tiles that represent new planets and placing them in one of four rows that extend outward from the central "sun." Where a tile is placed helps determine what resources a player gains from placing the tile; each tile gives its own resource, and also gains one from the tile it is placed next to.

Resources are then used to add life to planets. The cost is determined by the type of planet, and these costs can be modified by "space tiles" that players pick up when placing new planets. Additionally, a space tile played in this manner will often affect other nearby planets, either in the same row or the same "orbit," the corresponding position in the other three rows. This is where the game steers away from the standard engine-building and lack of player interaction that is characteristic of most eurogames, as a well-placed space tile can often force a player to change where they're placing their life tokens.

Life tokens are gradually piled up onto a planet until one player has four, at which point they are exchanged for a species token. At this point all the other players' life tokens are removed from that planet, which adds to the games strategy -- will you try to race with the other players to see who can add life more quickly to the easier planets (the ones that require fewer resources to play on), or will you take your time to build on a more difficult planet in order to avoid the competition?

The game ends when the last energy resource is taken from the center of the board, which is normally also when the last empty spot is filled with a planet tile. At that point players score based on how much life they've put into play, with modifiers for placing life on planets with more difficult requirements.

I like this game because it's managed to put together some fairly familiar game mechanics (tile placement, resource collection, area control) in a unique way. I can't point to any other games that it has much in common with. On top of that the rules come with several variants to keep game play from getting stale, and there's an expansion that adds new space tiles, different types of central stars, and a gravity well that allows players to change around the types of energy they have to spend.

Rating: 4 (out of 5) A neat game with some unique game mechanics and simple, clear graphic design.

• Exoplanets official website
• Exoplanets on Board Game Geek