While most of my time out at Gen Con is playing and hosting games, I also enjoy meeting up with publishers and designers to discuss their upcoming projects. I’ve been working with Aron West out at Elzra Games, developer of the Catacombs series of dexterity games. A new, non-dexterity game that Elzra has in development is Catacombs Cubes.
Earlier this year, I was available to proof the rules for this new title and when I had the chance to meet up with Aron at the Con, he surprised me with the first production copy to look over. This is the first title with a new artist and I think it is fitting since the game also leaves behind the disc-flicking Dexterity System. While I always love Kwanchai Moriya’s work, I think Denis Martynets’ new art here works well while tying themes back to the Catacombs world.
While I haven’t had a chance to play the game yet, at its core, it is a VP scoring game where you are pulling resources to build the most lucrative structures. There is some nice spatial reasoning going on as you can build the structures in many different ways.
Since the main aspect of the game is building structures with the building resources you acquire, there is compulsion to constantly mess with the blocks as you see what combinations you can create. I don’t know how much downtime there is between your turn and the next but if there is any, I know I’ll be messing around with the blocks to see what I can do.
The game caters to a few different player preferences as both resource chits can pull from a blind bag or be rolled on dice. Gameplay can also vary by being cutthroat and allow you to steal resources from another player. If that kind of “take that” isn’t your thing, you can also play a variant where you to take a lesser resource from the draw pile instead.
All-in-all, the production sample looks great and I’m looking forward to seeing more of the game when it hits Kickstarter as early as later this month.