Movies / TV / Radio theme

Firefly: Out to the Black is a quick card game that plays from three to five players. It’s unusual in that the players do not compete against each other, but compete against the game. This is a fairly new style of game called a co-op game or cooperative game. Players take on roles of the crew of Serenity and play through a series of Events. Using their Fightin’, Flyin’, and Thinkin’ skills they attempt to successfully complete these Events to earn Credits and Honor. If the players run out of Credits or Honor before the end of the game, they all lose and the game wins! If the players manage to complete the predetermined amount of Events without running out of Credits or Honor, they win the game, and live to fly another day!

Components:

Double sized Character Cards – Contains the Character’s Skill numbers and special abilities

Event Cards – These are the Events the players must overcome to win the game.

Serenity Cards – These are dual use cards. The main use is to help the players overcome Events. It’s secondary use is to determine random numbers.

Alliance Cards – These are penalty cards that are drawn if the players do not do well at certain Events. Draw too many of these and the players lose the game even if they still have Credits and Honor.

Gorramit Cards – These cards modify the Events, generally making them harder.
A Set of Rules – The rules to the game.
Honor Tokens – These are used to track the player’s Honor.
Credit Tokens – These are used to track the player’s Credits.

The Character Cards each represent one of the main Characters in Firefly. In addition to having their skills values listed, Each Character has special abilities, which cost a variable amount of Credits or Honor. On a players turn he can choose to spend Credits or Honor on one of these abilities, but it brings them closer to losing, so they need to think about whether they really need to or not.

A typical turn of the game consists of the active player turning over the top Event card. Each Event card has three challenges, one Fightin’, one Flyin’, and one Thinkin’. Each of these has a number, which the players must equal or exceed to be successful in the challenge. Characters gain skill two different ways, they may play Serenity cards to gain skill, and, after playing their Serenity cards, they add a random number to determine their final skill. This is added to the Character’s base skill number listed on their Character cards. Depending on how many challenges they successfully complete they either gain or lose Credits and/or Honor. The more successful the more they gain.

Once the event is resolved, the next player starts a new turn, and turns over the next Event card. The game is over once all the Event cards have been drawn and resolved.

The Firefly TV show is about surviving with honor. Mal and his crew are continually trying to scrounge up enough credits to keep flying, while maintaining their own personal sense of honor. The game reflects this grand theme with the victory conditions, survive the Event deck without running out of Honor or Credits. Each Event in the deck is tied to an episode in the show, and is easily recognizable by fans of the show. The Skills needed for each Event are tied to action of the episode featured on the card. A sub theme of the show is escaping notice of the Alliance, and again, with the inclusion of the Alliance deck, Firefly: Out to the Black delivers. The Alliance deck is an ever-present threat looming over the players as they desperately seek to finish the Events in the game.

Game description from the publisher:

During its original mission, the Enterprise, Captain Kirk, and his intrepid crew visited many strange new worlds and discovered many new life-forms and civilizations. Now you and your friends can boldly go and explore this galaxy, too, with the Star Trek: Catan - Federation Space Map Set, which includes two maps depicting the Known Galaxy.

Based on the "Explored Galaxy" map seen in Kirk's quarters itself, these maps allow you to settle the famous worlds of Federation Space using pieces from your Star Trek: Catan base game.

Lupin The Third brings the characters of the decades-old manga series Lupin III, created by Kazuhiko Kato, to the game board, with players taking the role of one of five characters from the series, each represented by a colorful miniature:

The unpredictable gentleman thief Lupin
His inseparable friend with the unerring aim, Jigen
The taciturn master swordsman Goemon Ishikawa XIII
The charming and mischievous Fujiko Mine, Lupin's love interest
The stubborn and indefatigable Inspector Zenigata

Lupin The Third has elements of a reverse Scotland Yard in that one of the players will control Inspector Zenigata and be visible on the game board along with his team of police agents, while the other players will work together to try together to steal the treasure and escape; these players are visible only when within view of Zenigata and the police, but both sides can use tricks to misdirect the other. What's more, as in the comic, Fujiko Mine can betray the group to try to escape with the treasure on her own!

This description's a bit tricky, so let's take it in stages...

Countermay: The Tapestry of Worlds, the crossroads of civilizations beyond imagining. After a thousand years of war, Countermay is dying. Battles, curses, extraterrestrial parasites, demonic influence, and other hazards have ruined much of the planet. The food is running out, and the threat of starvation looms. The only way to save Countermay is to seize undisputed control. Until then, armies march, fed with the ever-dwindling food as they churn farmland into mud with their boots. Can you save Countermay from its invitable doom?

Romance of the Nine Empires is a fictitious interactive collectible card game (CCG) set in the fantasy world of Countermay. In the game, players assume command of one of nine vastly different warring factions — including steampunk aliens, a dark god-king's crusade of conversion, displaced WWII-era American GIs, and a risen empire of the undead — to expand, glorify, or defend their empires. Through its fictitious fifteen-year history, players have shaped the world of Countermay through their individual and collective achievements, and the results are reflected in the story and the current state of the empires.

Romance of the Nine Empires is based on the Legend of the Five Rings CCG and was created for use in the movie The Gamers: Hands of Fate, mimicking the way that L5R tournament results affect the actual story in future expansions of that CCG but allowing the movie creators more freedom to design the game to match the characters in the movie. L5R publisher AEG agreed to be the in-movie publisher of the fictional Romance of the Nine Empires, but as a result of Kickstarter funding for The Gamers: Hands of Fate, it decided to create a real-life version of R9E.

This game represents the 15th Anniversary World Championship Edition of Romance of the Nine Empires, and (to slip into the movie storyline for a second) it holds the decks used by the top-placing players for each faction that made it to the quarterfinals at the 2012 World Championships at Gen Con Indy.

In World War Z: The Game, a strategy game based on the movie and book of the same name, players work together to stop the spread of the zombie pandemic across the globe. Two to four players begin the game by choosing an ability-granting Role Card and starting in the United States. Players roll a die to initiate the zombie threat, represented by horde tokens of strengths 1 through 4 placed in zones around the board. Special "grey zones" represent lack of intel by featuring face-down tokens with zombie hordes of unknown strengths. Throughout the game, players travel to different zones and battle the zombie hordes in those locations by rolling dice and adding effects of Combat Cards.

The game features a die-based combat system. Humans always roll a six-sided die, while the hordes are represented by either a six-, eight-, ten-, or twelve-sided die depending on their strength. Humans may modify their role or add additional effects by playing Combat Cards, which consist of reusable Weapons (including Lobos, slang for "Lobotomizers") and one-shot Tactics (like Booby Traps or Redeployment). Every time a human wins a battle, the zombie horde strength decreases by one level, while victories for zombies cause players to discard Combat Cards. At the end of each turn, humans draw a Threat Escalation card to reveal how the zombie threat has grown.

Though players start the game working together against the zombies, when a player loses all his Combat cards, he becomes one of the undead. Player-zombies can manipulate the hordes on the board to attack other humans and to escalate the zombie threat.

The game ends after a predetermined number of rounds based on the number of players (six rounds for four players, seven for three, and eight for two). At the end of the game, if more than ten total zombie hordes of strength 3 or 4 still remain on the map, the humans lose (and any zombie players win). If ten or fewer such hordes remain, the humans collectively win.