It's been a while since I've talked about any board games. Fortunately, I have a couple of really good ones for you. In reverse chronological order (to start with the better photo), we begin with Revenant. This game was in the works for a long time and was clearly inspired by Battlestar Galactica (the show, not the game), but Mindclash re-themed it as a prequel to Voidfall, with a human fleet fleeing in the immediate aftermath of the Voidborn breaking through into our universe.
Revenant is a worker placement game, but despite the absence of direct PvP violence, it can feel more interactive than Voidfall. The ships surrounding the Revenant belong to seven different factions that players will having varying degrees of influence with, and this effectively functions as a stock manipulation game -- nobody wants the Revenant destroyed, but players will happily feed ships from factions they don't care about to the Voidborn while deploying ships from the factions they're invested in.
Each player has two cadets and one captain, as well as their own frigate along with the faction ships. The captain's rank can be increased giving him additional abilities, while cards can be played giving powers to the cadets, so your workers end up being unique. Meanwhile, cards can also modify your frigate, giving extra abilities to any of your workers that use it.
This game is excellent. The other two players in my first play said they like it more than Voidfall. I wouldn't necessarily go that far, but it will almost certainly end up in my top 10.
Next up is Ada's Dream (note: the picture here is of the solo game against a bot). This is a dice-drafting game about an alternate history where Babbage has empowered Lovelace to build his difference engine, and they players are all competing to make the best one.
Each player starts this game with a deck of eight cards, which can be replaced with better cards later. The thing is, even the starter cards feel extremely powerful but you have limited opportunities to play them. When drafting dice, you typically want bigger numbers, because the final scoring of your engine is based on arithmetic expressions, But many cards can only be played when drafting lower-numbered dice, or have a monetary cost equal to the number of pips.
This game was difficult to acquire, so I won't recommend other people try to buy it. But it is a lot of fun as well as very attractive on the table if you have the chance to play it.
