Board Game: Obelisk

Note: No obelisks are involved in this game.

The Game: Obelisk
The Publisher: Tessallation Games LLC, but I have no idea if the game is still available
Time: We played two games in about 30 minutes
Players: Me, Cael, Del, Ada

Game Play: The game "board" consists of 25 puzzle-piece looking things like in the picture up there. They represent several different kinds of terrain, and one of them has a portal symbol. All of them have little blue arrows on them (except mountains). 

The idea here is that monsters are streaming out of the portal and follow the path the arrows point. If they leave the grid, cross their own trail, or get to the mountains, you lose (the game is cooperative, forgot to mention). Players can avoid this by rotating tiles to guide their path, putting "towers" (dice) in the spaces between tiles, and then raising the value of the towers (by incrementing the dice up) to capture a monster every turn.

Before the horde arrives

Incrementing the towers up requires spending monsters, captured by the tower. You can also "hunt," but that only grabs purple monsters (the weakest), and increasing a tower requires four of those. Color of monster determines how far they move and how strong a tower has to be to capture them. So, purples can be captured by any tower (assuming the terrain is friendly, but we'll get to that), but they move faster, while yellows are in the middle and reds move slow, but they require at least a 4 on the die to capture.

Terrain matters because the non-yellow (plains) tiles have modifiers on them. The green ones (forest, I think) subtract one from the effective tower strength targeting any monsters on that space. So if you want to capture a purple monster on a green space, you need a tower of 2 or better. 

The map with some towers n' shit

Opinions: The game moves pretty fast, it's very easy to lose. You have to plan moves a couple of turns ahead, and there's very little randomness other than the tile placement (at least with the setup we had; you can slide the difficulty by adding more monsters). It's a fun strategy game, if a bit unforgiving, and the manual needs an editor, but not so much that it's unreadable. 

This is a game that Cael picked up at a con and learned it from the creators (who are local), and apparently there are some advanced options, so maybe that changes the game in a fun way. I dunno, I'd check it out.

Keep? Sure