Dixit Odyssey is the European answer to Apples to Apples. Dixit Odyssey is a party game, light enough to play socially even with a drink or two. The game is composed of 84 large, Tarot-sized cards, a scoreboard, player boards, and rabbit score tokens. Each card depicts a childlike, innocent, surreal painting. The beautiful art of the cards make this game magnificent.

The gameplay is simple. At the beginning of a turn, the active player picks a card and describes it with a word or a short phrase. Other players then submit a card from their hand of cards that best matches the active player's description. The active player then shuffles all the submitted cards including her card.

Everyone that guesses the active player's card scores, and players who have their cards (wrongly) picked also score. However if no player guesses correctly, all but the active player score. Thus the goal is to pursue the golden mean of giving clues that are not too easy but not that hard.

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Wonderputt is a conventional minigolf game with 18 holes, in which you use the usual direction-and-power mechanic to direct the ball: mouseover the ball, and an arrow appears, pointing along the line between your ball and mousepointer; you draw the pointer back to increase power, and click to release.

So far, so normal; what's interesting about the game are its visuals and flash animations. The course is an oddly-designed 3D structure, and between each hole an interesting animation plays; for example, at one point, cows emerge from the barns at lower right, eat their way across the field thereby establishing the shape of the course, and are then beamed up by a flying saucer, which drops your ball at the course start.

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In GIRP, you are trying to climb a sea cliff as the tide rises below you. Lose your grip or let the sea catch up, and you die.

Scattered above you are rings you can hold onto, each bearing a single character; you reach for a ring by pressing the corresponding key, but you much hold it down or you release it. You yourself are subject to ragdoll physics, so when you release one, you swing about, which may help you grab for another ring, or may result in dangling helplessly. In addition, you have to press and hold Control, Shift or LMB to pull yourself up.

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Submissions Open for IndieCade 2012 Festival of Independent Games

LOS ANGELES - Feb. 1, 2012 – Submissions for IndieCade’s 2012 International Festival of Independent Games are now open at the IndieCade website: www.indiecade.com

IndieCade invites independent game artists and designers from around the world to submit interactive games of all types. Works-in-progress are encouraged.

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Donal X. Vaccarino took the randomization mechanics of his game Dominion and applied them to a territory-control boardgame, Kingdom Builder. Kingdom Builder is a territory-control game in same vein as Knizia's Through the Desert or Kramer's Hacienda. The innovative mechanics are the goals (scoring) and the power-ups, which are randomly generated, making each game drastically different. A strong strategy in one game may be impotent in another, depending on the variable power-ups and goals.

The game begins by randomly selecting and joining four quadrants to form the board. Then the Builder (scoring) cards and the Special Action (power-up) tiles are randomly selected. Builder cards declare what and how scoring works. For instance, The Miner card declares that settlements (your tokens) adjacent to mountains generate one victory point; while the Oasis Special Action tile declares that if you have a Oasis tile, you can place one additional token on desert terrain.

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English Country Tune is a little puzzle game in which you control a blue square, flipping it in different directions with the arrow keys (or, on an iOS device, with a swipe). In each level, there are some number of yellow balls that you must get into yellow boxes; sometimes, there is also a blue square where you must end yourself.

The level itself is 3D, so you're flipping in three dimensions; some squares are blocking. In addition, wherever you are at present, gravity is "local down" to you, and if you flip a yellow ball into space, it will fall down, relative to you; quite often, this means losing the ball as it falls out of the screen. But if you were to approach it from the other side, it would fall in the other direction, which is often the desired behavior.

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Shmups tend to start off easy then steadily build difficulty. Many times I have given up on a game because the difficulty ramps up so high. It is utterly frustrating to play 80% of the game and then quit because the game gets impossibly hard. Charlie fixes this problem in Scoregasm by offering a non-linear, grid-level advancement. If you score high, you will be offered a choice between Normal or Advanced, or if you really score high then you can go to the Insane levels. If you choose Insane and you score poorly, the game will drop you to Normal levels. Thus you are always facing the right difficulty level.

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Caylus is a much-hyped game. The first printing sold out so quickly, people were calling it the second coming of Puerto Rico. Due to this popularity, Big Daddy Creations is releasing a universal iOS port this week. Caylus is a pure Eurogame, putting elegance over a rich theme. Although, you play a master builder constructing a castle in Caylus, France, you spend most of your time changing one color cube for another cube, which in turn will be converted into another color cube.

Caylus popularized the worker-placement mechanic whereby a player places a token (a worker) from a menu of choices, denying others that specific choice. Furthermore, the Provost and Bailiff mechanic is fascinating because they are neutral pieces (white discs) that any player can spend resources to move. You can use it to speed the game up as well shut down other player's buildings, and increase tension around their movement.

Caylus is also available as a Windows fanware by Jason Long.

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...is that it tries to solve a problem that doesn't exist. We already have a universal points system, across all aspects of life, that represents status and is redeemable for real world prizes. It's called "money."

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