Pulp Fiction Comics & Games

Before we begin today, a bit of mood setting.  In that effort, please click below and keep it playing during your reading of the first item.  Thank you all.

Okay, now insert Ultimate Combat when applicable.  That’s right, Pathfinder:  Ultimate Combat has cartwheel kicked its way onto the shelves this week.  Many have perished in its making, but the bloodshed was well worth it as this thick edition expands the Pathfinder universe with more fighty madness than you can shake a katana at.  That includes three completely new classes that every single gamer out there will froth at the mouth to play:  gunslinger, ninja, and samurai.  Enough new equipment and combat information to take down a small army is included side-by-side with a detailing of vehicular combat and over 250 new feats!  If you’re looking to supplement, and by supplement I mean violently beat to a pulp, your Pathfinder Core Rulebook, Ultimate Combat will do so with murderous glee.

Staying with Pathfinder for a second (music is still optional), three other companions and campaign settings arrived this week, as well.  Learn all things goblin (seriously, I think this thing’ll tell you which side of the bed they sleep on) with the Player Companion, Goblins of Golarion.  Follow that up with a chaser of Pathfinder Society Field Guide, which is like an enrollment manual to the Society, laying out for players and GMs alike, all the details about factions, archetypes, Absalom, and everything else needed to flesh out Society characters and campaigns.  Finally, for dessert, Inner Sea Magic, which delves into the nitty-gritty of everything magic related in the Pathfinder world, including spellcaster history, magical schools, variant magic, along with two oracle mysteries.

Since you’ve already got your otherworldly passport handy after the last items, how about a jaunt into the realms of Dungeons & Dragons.  Today we venture to the realm of Neverwinter (sounds like summer in Lee’s Summit) with the new Neverwinter Campaign Setting hardcover.  This supplemental book is like a travel guide to the region, complete with a massive fold-out map.  But it’s not all just pretty pictures here, the hardcover also gets intricate with pages and pages of minute detail about character themes, cleric domains and powers, race variants, and all sorts of adventure-building materials for Dungeon Masters.  Somehow, with all that, the book still manages to introduce a new wizard type known as a bladesinger.  Oh and, uh, if you haven’t noticed, bit of cross promotion, there’s also a new Neverwinter Fortune Card booster expansion.  Hmm, who’da thought?

You remember playing Mouse Trap as a kid?  The Impossible Machine captures that same sense of inventive insanity as players lay down cards in an attempt to build the most inefficient contraption to perform the most menial of tasks.  For instance, maybe you want to pour a glass of water, well in The Impossible Machine players connect cards that represent components like fans, cogs, catapults, and so on toward the eventual goal of completing the overall task.  Each card has an input and an output arrow to indicate what cards can be connected to it.  The game ends when a player has more points than any other player after three machines have been completed.  Would it be too much of a pun to say this is quite the inventive game?

Brush up on your Smurf dialect before reading this next one, folks.  ’Cause it’s gonna get Smurfy up in this Smurf!

Timed perfectly to the release of the new Smurf movie, No Smurf Left Behind is a collectible board smurf that smurfs as a perfect family gaming experience.  Smurfing like a simplified kid-friendly version of Last Night on Earth, players can choose to play one of the five included Smurfs on their way to the portal home or the Smurily Smurf Gargamel as he attempts to Smurf the Smurfs’ efforts.

And if you Smurf to expand your game (this is where the collectible part comes in), Wizkids has also released a bunch of individual boosters that contain a single painted Smurf figure.  There are eight total, so Smurf that allowance money to collect them all.

So who votes for all future posts to be written in that language?  No takers?  Whew, hallelujah!