Welcome to the very first edition of Tabletop Tuesday!  This humble corner of Gonna Geek will cover news highlights from the wide world of analog gaming every week.  In addition to covering all the latest news and gossip for board, card, miniatures and roleplaying games I’ll also be discussing some of the terminology commonly used in friendly local games stores around the world.  So without further ado, let’s see what’s been cooking this week!

First off, we have some exciting news for gamers on both the desktop and the tabletop.  Fantasy Flight Games announced a shiny new expansion for Sid Meier’s Civilization: The Board Game.  Dubbed “Wisdom and Warfare“, the expansion promises to add 6 new civilizations.  Montezuma of the Aztecs, Genghis Khan of the Mongols and Napoleon of the French are all confirmed in the announcement, but I wonder who that dashing samurai on the cover could be…  In any case, the new civs aren’t the only reason to be excited.  Wisdom and Warfare will also be adding alternate unit cards that add a bit more depth to the game’s already innovative combat  and new social policies that will help guide your civilization’s path to victory.  Expect to see this one in stores during the third quarter of 2013!

Now, I know what you’re thinking – “Ryan, are you mad?  Why would you lead with a news story about a Civilization board game?  How are you going to top that?”  Well, worry not, because I know how to keep the hits coming.  WizKids has been working hard on a new Star Trek game based off of Fantasy Flight Games’ incredible X-Wing miniatures game.  After licensing the game mechanics from FFG, WizKids set designer Andrew Parks to work on adapting it for Trek.  The result is Star Trek: Attack Wing and Parks has been posting his development notes over on the Board Game Geek forums.  Here’s what he has to say about the changes in shields –

After some discussion, we realized the key was finding a way to lower your Shields, or to divert power from your Shields, without actually losing your Shield Tokens. And so we concluded that we should make the Shield Tokens double-sided, with an active side (blue) and a disabled side (red).

Now, you can have a crew member like Montgomery Scott flip two of your Shield Tokens over to their disabled sides in order to increase your Primary Weapon value by two attack dice. The disabled Shield Tokens cannot be damaged, but they also don’t protect the Hull. In order to facilitate the use of such abilities, we allowed players during the End Phase to flip all of their Shield Tokens back to their Active Sides for free.

It should come as no surprise that I am eagerly anticipating this title.  I’m nuts over the X-Wing minis game and this one looks to have even more going for it with Klingon, Federation, Romulan and Dominion ships in the works (and yes, I am excited in that order).

If you’ve been keeping up with the latest episodes of Tabletop Bebop, you’ll know all about the DC Comics Deckbuilding Game and how much fun it is.  While Cryptozoic has remained tight lipped on the rumored expansion, a few retailers have decided to start taking preorders.  Gryphon Games has posted the following description on their site –

In the DC Comics Deck-building Game: Heroes Unite, each player takes on the role of a Super Hero such as Shazam or Hawkman. Your Super Hero has an ability that will guide your strategy throughout the game. Each player starts with his own basic 10-card deck and draws a hand of 5 cards each turn. Power is the currency you will use to buy new, stronger cards to add to your deck. There are five different types of cards that can be acquired: Villains, Heroes, Equipment, Super Powers, and Locations.

Only time will tell if this blurb proves accurate, but I know that my interest is thoroughly piqued.  Adding more heroes and villains is one of the easiest ways to expand the game, but given the title “Heroes Unite”, I’d love to see a dedicated co-op mode as well.

Table Term of the Week: This week, we’re going to look at the acronym “FLGS”.  This simple stands for Friendly Local Game Store and is commonly used on forums and social media to discuss those stalwart bastions of brick and mortar that house all our very favorite dice, minis and games.

As always here on GonnaGeek, I’d love feedback on the column.  Let me know if there’s something lacking or if the lingo is too obtuse.  See you next week, folks!