The first game I played with a group was Light Speed, a print and play game designed by James Earnest and Tom Jolly. The cards themselves were illustrated by Eduardo Muller.
The game was pretty cool in concept. It sells itself as a "Real-Time Card Game" on its site, and it does a pretty good job of delivering on some spicy real time action. The game is designed to be played with between 2 to 4 people (though it could technically be played with even more if one desired). Essentially, three asteroids are placed down onto the map, and people must place down their ship cards as fast as possible. Each ship has a different number, dictating the order in which they fire in after being placed, and a different direction and power of lasers that they shoot out in specific directions. There are two choices for players to obtain points: They may target the astroids in order to maximize resource mining, or they may place their ships so that it destroys others who are in their line of fire, depleting the player of any resources that their ship currently carries while gaining points of their own.
It was an incredibly fast paced game, for this one killer mechanic: Whoever places their cards first must say "Stop!", and anyone who is not done placing their ships down must stop. This forces everyone to think quickly and make rash decisions in terms of their ship placement, which could end up hurting them in the end. We had multiple rounds where somebody's ship would fall victim to their own friendly fire, causing them to lose out on some valuable resource points. Overall, "Light Speed" was quite a blast, and it's interesting and unique take on the concept of a card game left me excited to play even more Print and Play games.
The next game I played was called Sword and Sail, another print and play game designed by Jason R. Williams.
Essentially, Sword and Sail plays out like a simplified risk. The goal of the game is to take control of one country, or territory, of the map. Territories include small but hard to reach areas like Britannia, to vast, expansive areas, like Italia, or Africa. The whole theme of the game is set so that it occurs during the era of classical warfare, which was quite interesting. Each turn, a player would get four actions. Actions included drawing a card, moving an army, playing a card, and discarding a card. There were two types of cards that could be drawn. The most common card were territory cards, which would have the name of one specific territory on them. When activated by a player, he would place one army onto that territory. Another type of card was the navigator card, which would allow a player to upgrade one of his or her armies to a naval army, which would allow them to traverse water. However, their strength would be unchanged. An army could only be destroyed if two opposing armies were placed in conjoining tiles. Then, one of each player's armies would be discarded, with the last remaining army taking place of the attacked one.
This game was exciting and tactical. There were many occasions where the game came pretty close to ending, where it would require one player to gain control of only one or two more tiles in a region such as Africa or Britannia to win the game. However, either of us were would always end up draw a card for these regions, allowing us to enter in behind enemy territory preventing the player from gaining control of it without losing one of their armies. This tactic earned the name "Orbital Strike", as the ridiculousness of having an army come flying in to the top of Britannia when most of that player's armies were located in Africa was pretty funny. In the end, I ended up winning by taking control of Italia. It was a long and protracted war, but "New Rome" was ready to restore the world of its former glory and peace.
Overall, the whole experience of playing Print and Play games found online was really fascinating, awesome, and fun. The whole time, I kept thinking that "These are pretty much indie board games", and they definitely played like them as well. Some, like Light Speed, took really unique approaches to an old concept which resulted in a fast paced shoot first, ask questions later game that I wouldn't normally associate with tabletop games. Others, like Sword and Sail took a popular concept and made it smaller and more simplified, making sure that each component in its small set of rules was refined and easy to follow as possible. Last but not least, this whole process has gotten me super excited to make my own Print and Play game. Bring it on!
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