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Energy Apex

Energy Apex, from Moaideas and Blue Magpie Games, is an easy-to-play card drafting game for 3-5 players where you're not just collecting cards but also manipulating the market so that it's the cards you've collected that score rather than those collected by your opponents. The game is notionally themed around competing energy sources but Yu Wang has designed an essentially abstract game where you'll be thinking in terms of collecting the various different colour cards rather than mithering over which energy source each colour represents.



The game is played over three rounds. To set up each round, you randomly place the eight sector tiles around an orthogonal central hub, and the cards are randomly placed face up below each tile. For the basic game, turns are super simple: you just take a card from the end of the line at a sector other than the sector from where the last player drew. The game ends when the very last card is taken from any sector. At that point, the central hub is rotated so that the red three-bar section is lined up with the empty sector and players score. However, they only get points for those cards that match the colours of the locations indicated by the central hub... The values on the scoring cards vary according to the position of the central hub; so, for example, purple cards score 4 points if the purple sector ends up in any of the scoring positions but most other colours score more points for being in the red three-bar position, less for being in a yellow two-bar position and least for being in a green one-bar position - tho' black cards reverse that.



There's more. The eight energy sector tiles are double-sided, with special powers on their flip side. These can be activated when you draw a card from below that sector. You can play with all the tiles flipped or with just some of them triggering their special powers. Play the game in basic mode and it's a fun family game, but with the powers activated it switches into a potentially more tricksy tactical game where players are able to use their card draws for even more manipulation of the board state. We said at the start that this game is 'easy to play'. We should perhaps qualify that: turns are easy but you may not find it quite so easy to play well...


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