When you think of board games, what does PnP mean? For me it's always been Pen and Paper, referring to RPG's such as Dungeons and Dragons and the like. Apparently there is a whole other meaning to PnP. A world of board games exists, specifically for you to print and play. These games range from professionally developed to homebrewed and they seemingly have the same broad range of quality, design, and fun factor.
Age Of Sovereigns
First on my list of testing was Age of Sovereigns. On the surface it looks like a well developed game with interesting art and mechanics, similar to what I would imagine to be a Sid Meyer's: Civilization board game. After we scratched the surface and popped open the rulebook, however, we realized that we were WAY in over our heads.
The game can last much longer than it's estimated 60 minute playtime simply because of it's complexity. Since we were just picking it up it comprehending the rules and many different win conditions took much longer. There were arguments over confusing rules and all in all it was just not the right game for what we were aiming for. The time investment confusion of rules, and the plethora of mechanics caused us to stop playing prematurely and move
on.
Unbound: Endless War
Unbound: Endless War is the most fun game we played. It had major replayability, the rules were easy to comprehend, and we could easily modify it to play for more people than the suggested two
The objective of the game is to traverse space with your units and take over the enemy base. Each turn you were able to summon units from your finite pool of them and place a space hex facedown that could be traveled into. This brought strategy, bluffing, and an amount of gambling to the table.
There were specialty hexes in the deck such as a supernova, which destroys all adjacent hexes and units, and a black hole, which sucks in your units and traps them there for however many turns per unit that entered. These added the entirely gratifying "gotcha" moments where you would wreck peoples plans, because the unexplored space tiles essentially became a minefield.Shattered Olympus
Shattered Olympus is a card game eerily similar to Magic: the Gathering. The main difference is, you draw from a shared card pool, instead of your own deck, and battle the creatures of other players whilst protecting your life pool. In theory this could be an very fun game, but their translation of land to be actual locations characters had to move through, in order to attack, seemed a little janky.
All in all it was kind of fun (mostly because I like Magic) and a new experience, but it did not have the sticking factor that would make me want to replay it. The rules were simple and easy to comprehend, which I now think is very important for something such as a print and play. The mechanics were also pretty simple, for someone who plays magic, which just added to my ease of just picking it up and playing, but I could see where others would have issues.More Photos:
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