BGG News

New Game Round-up: Whistling to the West Coast, Shopping for Accuracy, and Reliving the Wars of the Roses

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/638…west-coast-shopping-accur

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3472683_t.jpg]• While at the 2017 GAMA Trade Show, I noticed a second new title for 2017 from Bézier Games

(aside from the recently announced

The Palace of Mad King Ludwig

), but we had no slots in our broadcast schedule, so I took a pic and made a note to look into it later — only to find out that Bézier's Ted Aslpach had sent me a press release weeks ago. Ha ha, so much for my tidy inbox

!

In any case, Scott Caputo

's tile-laying game Whistle Stop

is set to debut from Bézier at Gen Con 2017 in August. Here's a rundown of the setting and gameplay:

With the driving of the golden spike in 1869, the first transcontinental railroad was completed in the United States — but really it was only the beginning of a rapid expansion of railways that would crisscross the entire country.

In Whistle Stop, you make your way west across the country, using your fledgling railroad company to build routes, pick up valuable cargo, and deliver needed goods to growing towns, creating a network of whistle stops that you and your competitors can leverage as you continue to expand your networks. Along the way, you gain shares in other railroads and watch your reputation soar with each successful delivery before making a final push to complete long hauls to the boom towns of the West.

This design is a new twist on pick-up-and-deliver games. As players move their trains west and pick up goods, they can deliver those goods to small towns to gain shares in railroads, or hold on to them for a bigger payout when they reach the west coast. At the same time, they try to optimize their actions (and gain extra ones), lay down new track tiles, block the other players, gather and use valuable whistles for special moves and abilities, and carefully manage their coal resources.

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3418868_t.jpg]• Another title that's been lurking in my inbox is Shop 'N Time

from Daryl Andrews

and Mercury Games

, with this design featuring an app that allows for a The Price Is Right

-style "guess the price of this stuff without going over" game that avoids any calculation. Here's an overview of the gameplay:

How about some nice aftershave from 1949? Or maybe you're looking for a fancy fly swatter from 2014? You just found a magical store that has all of these products and more! All it takes is a good eye and a fast hand, and these bargains can be yours!

Shop 'N Time is a real-time, app-assisted card game with simple rules. In the basic game mode, "Price Target", each player is given the same budget, then dealt a hand of seven cards. You pick one to purchase, pass the rest, possibly pick another, then pass, etc., and you keep going until you have at least three cards but think the price of those items is still within your budget. Once everyone passes, each player scans the items they've purchased to see who's come closest to spending the budget without going over.

Shop 'N Time includes four different games to play with two different playing modes: real-time and strategic.

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic147290_t.jpg]• UK publisher Surprised Stare Games

has announced a new release for the 2017 UK Games Expo, which opens June 2, with The Cousins' War

from David J. Mortimer

being a two-player game on a big topic that clocks in at thirty minutes. Klemenz Franz supplies the artwork.

The Wars of the Roses were fought between the Houses of York and Lancaster for over three decades during the 15th century in England. The houses were both branches of the royal family, therefore the Wars were originally known as "The Cousins' War". Each player represents one of the houses as they fight battles and gain influence to control England.

The Cousins' War is played over a maximum of five rounds, with each round representing between five and ten years of the conflict. Each round involves gaining influence across England and preparing for a climactic battle.

In each round, the players decide where the current battlefield will be, playing action cards to deploy troops to the battlefield, while also increasing or decreasing their influence in the regions, after which they fight. Players resolve the battle by engaging in bluff and counter-bluff, using three dice, until only one side has troops remaining on the field. Winning the battle helps to consolidate your house's influence on the board.

You win The Cousins' War either by dominating all the regions of England or by controlling the most regions at the end of the fifth round.

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic1903816_t.jpg]• White Wizard Games

has something new in the works for its well-loved card game Star Realms

. Star Realms: Scenarios

is a pack of twenty scenario cards, with each card changing one or more rules — or introducing new rules — for that particular game. WWG has posted an overview of different ways you can put the scenario cards into play

should you not want to opt for the simple option of shuffling the deck and revealing the top card. We talked with Star Realms

co-designer Rob Dougherty

about the scenarios pack at the 2017 GAMA Trade Show.

Game Previews from GAMA Trade Show 2017 IV: Custom Heroes, Lovecraft Letter, Sorcerer, Stronghold Games, and The Dresden Files Cooperative Card Game

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/639…show-2017-iv-custom-heroe

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3460055_t.png]Time for more game overview videos shot in the BoardGameGeek booth at the 2017 GAMA Trade Show, starting with a title that we previewed at GTS 2016 ahead of its Kickstarter campaign and which is now in the hands of backers ahead of a U.S. retail release in June 2017. That game is Eric Vogel's The Dresden Files Cooperative Card Game

from Evil Hat Productions

, and it pits characters from the first five novels in the "Dresden Files" series from Jim Butcher against a scenario based on one of those novels.

• Some publishers brought only a game or two to feature in their time on camera at GAMA, and some brought everything and the kitchen sink. Stephen Buonocore from Stronghold Games

is an example in the later category, with him running through nine games in less than thirteen minutes. Three of the titles were released at SPIEL 2016 — Flamme Rouge

, Cottage Garden

, Not Alone

— so you might already know something about them, with the main takeaway from this video being that Stronghold will release this titles in the U.S.

• White Wizard Games

has released three successful card games — Star Realms

, Epic

, Hero Realms

— and its next release, Sorcerer

from Peter Scholtz, sticks to its card game roots while combining an RPG-type element as you create a character in the game by shuffling together different decks that will combo together in varying ways.

• The latest iteration of Seiji Kanai's Love Letter

coming from Alderac Entertainment Group

— their annual premium version, as it were — is Lovecraft Letter

, which gives you an opportunity(?) to go insane during a round in order to make use of special "insanity" powers but at the risk of being booted out for being too mad for the table.

• AEG seems to specialize in spinoff games or games that can be iterated in multiple ways, and this specialization is evident in Custom Heroes

, which takes the transparent cards from John D. Clair's Mystic Vale

and uses them in a trick-taking game that allows you to level up cards during play, with those changes persisting in future rounds, thereby altering the nature of the deck from which everyone is receiving their cards.

New Game Round-up: Take to the Air in Scythe, Revisit the Red Scare, and Put Yourself in Big Trouble in Little China

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/639…cythe-revisit-red-scare-a

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3163924_t.jpg]• Jamey Stegmaier

of Stonemaier Games

has announced a new expansion for Scythe

with The Wind Gambit

including two modules that can be used independently or combined in any manner with the base game and the earlier expansion.

The airships module, which introduces a new unit to the game, originated from Kai Starck

, who shared his creation in the Scythe Facebook group, after which Stegmaier helped develop it to this final form. The resolutions module throws one of eight new ending conditions into play, which will naturally have ramifications for how you'll play before that time.

Scythe: The Wind Gambit

is due out Q4 2017, with Stegmaier hoping to have it ready in time for SPIEL 2017.

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3487995_t.jpg]

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3485529_t.png]• In April 2017, Twilight Creations

will release Zombies!!! 15: Another One Bites the Dust

, with players now fighting dehydration in the desert in addition to the usual crop of zombies.

Also, Twilight Creations has noted

that its original design for a Zombies!!!

collector case hasn't worked the way it intended, so the company has gone back to the drawing board and expects to receive a sample of its new design in the near future.

• Benjamin Kanelos

' Red Scare

, due out in September 2017 from Pandasaurus Games

, has a great look and a great hook in this design for 4-10 players. An overview:

The threat of Communist infiltration is at an all-time high, and red panic is everywhere. It's on you, trusted patriots of the FBI, to scour the files of any and all that may be promoting the Soviet agenda and threatening these sacred shores. The nation trusts you to detect, then publicly accuse and deport these traitors. But watch out because double agents are everywhere! Even your closest colleagues
are not to be trusted.

Perhaps even you have something to hide…

Red Scare is a hidden role/social deduction game with a delightful wrinkle; the only way to discover the truth about your friends is with a pair of secret decoder glasses! The game features no player elimination, so everyone is in on it until the end.

The "secret decoder glasses" have red plastic lenses, and when you don them, some of the material on the game components will now be invisible to you, revealing things previously unseen...

• Speaking of things unseen, somehow I've overlooked the announcement of Big Trouble in Little China: The Game

for nine months, but better late than never. Everything Epic Games

announced this Christopher Batarlis

and Boris Polonsky

prior to Gen Con 2016, and the current plan is to open preorders "soon". Here's an overview of this miniature-filled, cooperative game for 1-4 players:

The game plays in two acts: Act One uses the front side of the game board: Chinatown, while Act Two takes place on the back: Lo Pan's lair. Players will choose from six characters, each with unique abilities, and will use custom dice for actions, quest tasks and combat. They will also be able to use the communal fate dice, which come with a fun risk/reward mechanic. After completing quests and upgrading their characters, players will move to the back of the board for the big showdown with Lo Pan! Will the heroes stop Lo Pan's evil scheme in time, or is everything gonna go to hell?

Everything Epic Games has been posting teaser pics of the miniatures, as well as other pieces of art, on its Facebook page

.

Fragor Games Announces Wallace & Gromit License for Next Release

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/640…llace-gromit-license-next

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic154145_t.jpg]Gordon and Fraser Lamont of Fragor Games

have issued this pictorial press release to announce their next title:

While a Wallace & Gromit

game — or perhaps a design based on multiple Aardman Animations titles — might seem like an April Fools' Day joke, Gordon Lamont has assured me that it's not, stating that he and Fraser were at the Aardman Animations studio in Bristol to play the game on the afternoon of March 31, after which they were given the okay to announce the license. Adds Gordon, "Nearest Fragor ever got to an April Fool was to post a picture of a white box with white cards and call it 'Snow Tails: Blizzard Edition'!"

Further evidence comes from the September 2016 announcement

by the Lamonts that they wouldn't have a game for release at SPIEL 2016. To quote part of that announcement:

We got the opportunity in 2010 of working with a particular license. For reasons unrelated to us, it did not go further at that time. Now, with the advent of Kickstarting, the opportunity of using the license became possible again around last Essen. This makes a change for 2016 in how we will finance/sell the game. It means that our 2016 game will be Kickstarted rather than sold at Essen...

In the near future, we will make a major announcement regarding a license. We are absolutely thrilled to be involved with it.

This is now their 2017 game, of course, but so be it. Congrats to Jez Overton for calling it correctly

, and I can't wait to see Gordon looking shifty in a giant penguin outfit at SPIEL 2017!

Links: Play Catan, Play with CMON, and Don't Play More Games Than You Ever Thought Possible

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/640…n-and-dont-play-more-game

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3489173_t.png]Let me lead off by stating that I hate April Fools' Day, so I have nothing tricky posted below. Everything is a legit link unless someone has uploaded new pages on me after the fact. I loathe that I even have to give such warnings, but there it is.

With that anti-caveat in mind, let's get to some industry happenings, starting with the announcement

of CMON Play

, an exclusive promotional program for brick and mortar game stores in the U.S. and Canada from CMON Limited

. An excerpt from the press release:

This new program is designed to help promote the growth of retail stores by offering exclusive access to Game Night Kits, Pre-Release Kits, Demo Copies, and Kickstarter Retail Pledges from CMON's wide library of titles.

The board game industry and culture is here because of brick and mortar stores, and CMON wants to ensure our retailers have the tools they need to keep their businesses and communities thriving. Ruby Nikolopoulou, CMON's Marketing Director, explains, "Throughout the creation of the CMON Play program, retailers, their stores, and their customers have been front-and-center in our minds. They are the cornerstone to our industry, and CMON Play give us a chance to connect with them and support them in exciting, new ways."

Game Night Kits allow stores to run events for popular CMON games, such as Zombicide: Black Plague, Blood Rage, Potion Explosion, and Bloodborne: The Card Game. Kits will be available every two months, beginning with Black Plague in June [2017], and will offer game content that has never been available before. Running these Game Night Kits as events also allows stores to earn points that can be spent through CMON directly.

Continuing the retail-first philosophy of CMON Play are the Pre-Release Kits. For specific, high-profile games, CMON is offering retailers the ability to sell the title two weeks before any non-CMON Play store and online retailers, beginning with the highly-anticipated The Godfather: Corleone's Empire from designer Eric M. Lang.

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3489293_t.jpg]• Asmodee North America

plans to host Catan Days 2017 on April 21-23 at the Fantasy Flight Games Center in Roseville, Minnesota. The event opens with a preview of upcoming titles from Catan Studio

on April 21, followed by a two-day Catan

tournament with up to 96 players that serves as a qualifier for the Catan

National Championship to be held at the 2017 Origins Game Fair in June. Saturday, April 22 will also see a " Catan

Big Game" tournament in which up to eighty players compete in the same game simultaneously. You can preregister for the event on the Catan Studio website

.

• Plan B Games

, which will debut at Origins 2017 with Century: Spice Road

(game preview and designer interview here

), has been rolling out names of future design collaborators without any mention yet of what those games might be. Those collaborators include Pandemic

's Matt Leacock

(as announced here

), Ubongo

's Grzegorz Rejchtman

( announcement

), and Anita Landgraf

from White Castle Games Agency in Austria ( announcement

).

• Daniel Solis

has designed a number of games, including Kodama: The Tree Spirits

and Belle of the Ball

, but he might be better known in the industry for his layout and graphic design work. He oversees a lot of different artists on these projects, and to help himself and them work toward inclusive art direction, he's compiled a number of tips

, such as these two:

Question the "default."

You know how Earth is moving around the sun and the sun is moving through the galaxy, but we don't recognize it because we are born into it? That's sort of like the "Default." My beliefs, body, culture, class, or anything else is not the "default." The "default" is just the motion we're born into and assume is the standard forever. In truth, the "default" is the inertia of history, family, and culture. If I stop putting in effort, just trying to remain "neutral," I turn into debris floating along with that inertia, harming people in my path who can't go along with that inertia. It takes ongoing effort just to keep myself standing still, holding what little progress I've made in improving myself. It takes even more effort to actually move against that inertia, to change what is considered "default."

Accept responsibility.

Sometimes I see questionable art direction justified by "It's what the market wants" or "It's historically accurate." Even granting that, which I do NOT necessarily, it is still an art director and creator's choices that rule the day. A fictional character doesn't have an ethnicity, gender, body, or pose by accident. It's a creator's choice to present a character a certain way. Even in video games with character customization, the creators set the options available. If an option is available, that's a choice. If it isn't available, that's a choice, too. Deferring and defaulting is a choice; one that I'm trying not to make whenever possible.

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic1094805_t.jpg]• Travis Severance, owner of Millennium Games in Rochester, NY, invited folks from various parts of the game industry to address this topic — "The Deluge of Board Games" — and he published their essays on his blog

throughout March 2017. Here's a sampling from each writer:

— Designer perspective

from Travis R. Chance

of Indie Boards and Games:

As a small publisher, it can be extremely tough to land games from more established designers. This often means approaching newcomers to design. This potential compounded lack of experience is very likely to produce an altogether forgettable game, one that ends up on a crowdfunding platform, funds in defiance of all logic, and in turn inspires someone else to do the very same. It is an unending process of facsimile wherein people are in such a hurry to "create" that they never stop to question if their game NEEDS to exist. Any more, this is true across most creative mediums. If you have a camera on your phone, you are a photographer. If you have a simple audio recording/editing program on your laptop, you are a music producer. People are no longer good at one thing, they are mediocre at many — but I digress!

— Publisher perspective

from Jeff Tidball of Atlas Games:

[T]here's truly a game for everyone, and everybody's game is for somebody. I've seen lots of games published by all kinds of people. And I'm not shy about thinking a whole lot of them are awful. But I've seen so many people who're honestly in love with games that I think are just garbage that I'm completely convinced that every game is for somebody. Even if you push the argument to the most ridiculous extreme, consider the designer's mom. Everybody's game is for somebody.

Specifics are valuable, so here's an example: I made a game called Band or Album last year. I made it because I think the premise is hilarious, and because I wanted it to exist in the world. It's not for everybody. In fact, it's hardly for anybody. But the people who it is for think it's great. One of the ways I can tell is that since it came out, it's been featured in a short film and been directly referenced in at least two other games whose designers have approached me to make sure it's cool to do that...

I made Band or Album because I think the premise is funny and because I wanted it to be out there for others to enjoy. Markedly absent: The desire to make a buck. So to put food on the table, I work with other people to publish games other than Band or Album, which have the potential to make better money.

I've been working on a miniatures game called Gravstrike for years. My partner and I are getting close to the point where it'll be time to release it. It'll be the first release for a new company we created specifically to publish it, and the idea that it'll come out in a marketplace that might bury it for no easily discernible reason is not pleasant.

But that same marketplace has already made Gravstrike immeasurably better than it ever would have been in a less competitive world. We've gotten great feedback from friends and colleagues, and tested the game with dozens if not hundreds of actual gamers — not to mention store owners and journalists. We've found new factories who're working hard to provide components and materials that were unheard of in tabletop games ten years ago.

If we had pushed Gravstrike out even two years ago, it would be a remarkably worse game. Flat out, full stop. So I'll realize that competition in the marketplace is making me stronger, and I'll keep in touch with actual fans, and pretty soon we'll pull the trigger.

— Distributor perspective

from Mike Paschal of Peachstate Hobby Distribution:

Everything is being ramped up. More games, designers, publishers…you name it, they are joining the ranks of this industry. How does the little guy stand a chance of being noticed? Should they be noticed? Harsh reality but a fair amount of products just shouldn't have made it to market, just to be found in liquidation bins next quarter. This is something I am very cognizant of when vetting new publishers/games. Sometimes I pass on a publisher's first game as to not tarnish their company name with our customers for their second game that will be a much better product. Retailers are quick to notice dust on a product; best to not have anything to collect said dust.

Ultimately, we are kind of hand-tied and dependent on publishers marketing correctly — not just for their 3-4 new games that month but also properly marketing their back catalog of products. We have gone from a spike in initial sales, followed by a slow decline, to now just a spike in the first few days, followed by a flat line. In the cult of the new we are in, it's hard to justify spending marketing bandwidth on last month's games when you have an abundance of new releases coming out every other week. This has been our discussion in the office as of late. How do we keep sales up for last month's games? Just like when dealing with the up-and-coming KS folks, do we? If the publisher is no longer pushing it, why should we? Do we sell out of these few cases and not reorder? At some point we are going to go from trying to market for "last month's games", to "last week's games", to "yesterday’s games."

With so many new products releasing now, I have been a little tighter on ordering titles in the middle or lower tier of the "hype train". I am ordering less from the start and immediately adding those items to the order I have due for NEXT week's new releases. This is opposed to ordering enough to last for the lines until it's time for a normal restock. Any given month we have 200+ board games (related) and selectively we do not carry everything on the market. We have to sell 80-85% of what we purchase, just to break even. If we pay freight coming in and going out, which happens most times, it's even more we have to sell. Back when we had 20 new items a month, we could afford to take deeper stances on new releases, as they would have a longer "new release" period. The number of new evergreens coming to market remains the same for the most part, annually. The number of products that have a higher chance of not hitting that 80-85% sell through is what is increasing. The biggest risk for us in taking this safer approach is under-produced products and thus not getting enough for our demand.

— Marketing perspective

from Ruby Nikolopoulou of CMON Limited (her again!)

Deciding where to invest your time

From the first time we play them, some games just strike us as total winners. We know we have something quite exciting on our hands. Every now and then we fall in love with a title, and we feel that magic will work on others. We cannot guarantee it will sell for years, but we know it will probably make the finish line of highly successful releases (however we define that). Let's assume this represents 10% of all games we see. Am I too pessimistic? Okay, let's give this category a generous 15%.

Then, one could argue, other games deserve to see the light of day, yet we are almost certain they will not be with us for long. We hope they prove us wrong, but the hunch is quite strong. Can we assume these represent 20% of the games we see?

That brings me to the third category, which includes games that may speak to us but are not compelling enough for us to jump into certainty. Maybe the game mechanics are just all right, or the theme reminds us of previous ones we've played, or they play very well but what about that cover or the price point? In brief, the proposal does not come across as a certainty. We know it could do well, but have no clear indication it actually will. If my above assumptions are correct, this category accounts for 65% of games released. In reality, even if this percentage is off a little, we are talking about thousands of games and expansions per year. It's this 65% that has us all running in circles. Is it necessarily a bad thing? Depends on how you deal with it. Some of these games will become solid contenders if they are treated right.

The real question is: "Where should we devote our time as a marketing person?" The obvious answer is that we should focus on the best games. If only it were that easy! Looking at the other 65% with a critical eye to select the ones you think should be promoted is the real challenge. A choice needs to be made because marketing budgets are not infinite, neither are marketing teams or time. When finding an optimal solution is not possible, a heuristic method of decision making — call it at an educated guess or an intuitive judgment — is the approach to take. So we will invest marketing time and effort in that "absolutely sure this will kill it" category and then, with the help of our team (sales, development, marketing) we choose some titles from the "hold on, there might be something here" category. The choices from both categories become our short list of games. And we pour all our energy and creativity into this list. Of course, we then keep an eye out for any signs that validate or discredit our choices and adjust if necessary. After all, as Talleyrand would say: Only fools never change their minds!

— Consumer perspective

from Al Autovino:

Is this the "Golden Age" of gaming or is it the demise of gaming as I once knew it? The answer is YES!

What do I regret about the deluge? Most games are "strangers" to me. I own over 400 games but most games have less than 10 plays. Back in the 1980s, we played Cosmic Encounter numerous times (probably numbering over hundreds of plays). We knew the game so well that we created a "Law Book" to document the decisions that we made when it came to rule ambiguities. When I played competitively at the local game convention (SimCon in Rochester NY), I would have to inquire about the differences between our group's "Law Book" and the game master's interpretation of the rules. CE was no "stranger" to me. Other games in the 1980s and 90s that were played extensively include Risk, Diplomacy, Civilization, Acquire, Conquest of the Empire, Fast Food Franchise, Kingmaker, Kremlin, Settlers, Airlines, and the early 18xx games.

In recent times, it is a rare game that gets over 10 plays. Some small and quick card game like Love Letter or Fuji Flush will get over 10 plays, but I want to focus on the board games. The most recent board game that I have gotten over 20 plays is Scythe. I love the game and think I know it well, but I still have a lot to learn. However, the honeymoon is over, and it is getting table time less and less as new games emerge to take its place. I own a copy of Scythe and its expansion, but most of the plays have been on somebody else's copy. It makes me wonder whether I needed to purchase my own copy. Being a game collector and a player made that question easy…of course I needed to own a copy of Scythe! Other recent board games that have gotten over 10 plays include Terra Mystica and Concordia. I'm sure that other games in my collection have gotten numerous plays but those plays come in spurts. Then the game may sit on my shelf for a number of months or years before the game is played again. The games become "strangers" to me once again because I have to reread the rules to be able to play the game again.

— Brick-and-mortar retailer perspective

from Travis Severance:

Small publishers: You've got a lot of work to do. You can't hit a single or a double and hope to catch my eye. It needs to be a grand slam. I know that if your game is good and you make it into distribution your stock numbers are going to be wrong. You may not have the capital for a reprint. You may decide that short term gain is better than long term growth and make the decision to crowd fund the reprint. Why do I want to risk bringing in your game? There's lots to choose from.

How are you spending your marketing dollars? Oh, you don't really have marketing dollars because you didn't understand logistics and the shipping for your project is killing any profit that you would have made. That's okay. Sell me a case and I can treat this product the same way you are likely going to end up treating it, as a one and done. There's a number of smaller publishers that aren't in distribution that I buy direct from. It's pretty simple. I contact them when stock is low and they ship me a case of product. I really enjoy this relationship.

Publishing owes me nothing. They produce games and I sell games. They are doing their best to make as much as they can. I am doing my best to help shape them in a manner where I can sell as much as I can. I don't like the direction all of them take. That's okay. They need to eat, too. They don't ever come into my store and tell me how to retail. Supply is a very real issue. They ultimately decide who gets what when it comes to product allocation. Some put their heads in the sand when it comes to this. Others are much more active and do a much better job of making sure the health of the industry as a whole is being looked after when it comes to their brand and titles. Many could be more proactive when it comes to this.

The current issue, as I see it, is two-fold with distribution. They are buying far too wide instead of buying deep. Some distributors are putting in orders with that are far more than they have pre-orders for and when the game gets allocated and it's a flop, back-dooring that game through online vendors at an unhealthy rate before it even hits retail shelves to try to get out from under a bad purchase decision. The game hits, it sits on distribution shelves, it sits on retail shelves and we all chalk it up as a loss.

In the meantime, the publisher has no idea what hit them. They sold out, they pressed the re-order button when they did, now they are buried in cardboard. If I was a publisher and I wasn't sure who was playing this game, instead of giving a blanket percentage allocation to all distributors based on pre-orders, maybe take the time to adjust the dial per distributor a bit and see what happens.

Consumers, when it comes to board games, go through this very unique evolution. Many times we are the first to introduce them to a game that isn't simply "You are the player, represented by this piece. Here is the method to get around this board. If you do so successfully, faster than everyone else, you are the victor. Decisions, you will make none." Introducing people to the world of board games now is an amazing experience. Being able to show them different products each time they come in is not only fun but rewarding.

It's odd though in that most cases, the better we do introducing them to the category, the more apt we are to lose them as consumers. Their purchase patterns increase and then they disappear. We see them when we have a promo. We see them when we have a game that's more expensive online. They wander over to our sale table and browse for games that they could possibly get a better trade for. They utilize our buying program for used games. We are no longer their hub for front end purchasing. It's sad when the retailer/consumer relationship gets to that point. We did our best to introduce them to this new world and they supported us during their growth. Now that they are purchasing more, our role to them changes. I understand. The volume has increased to the point where price is their primary drive. They can find it cheaper for sure. They are pledging for crowdfunding because they want that new "it" game. I don't blame them. I would likely do the same. If I could survive on smaller margins and still being you the shopping experience I do, I would.

There's nothing in the world I hate more than having to say "it's out of stock/we don't carry that". If ordered every new game that comes out, I would go out of business in about a month. It's just not sustainable. I understand your desire to not want to backorder. If you wanted to wait two days, you could probably find it elsewhere. Please understand though I am trying my best to curate stock that I think will provide you with the most compelling tabletop experience you can find. If you wanna know what I find most compelling, look at my demo tables. The rent for the space of those tables is pretty significant. If the games on those table weren't good, they wouldn't be on them.

Thank you for your continued support. Without it, I wouldn't be able to keep doing what I love to do in this industry.

Crowdfunding Round-up: Stop Greedy Cytosis to Dragoon a Dicey Thief Warp

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/639…reedy-cytosis-dragoon-dic

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3157131_t.jpg]• Designer John Coveyou of Genius Games

has previously released games titled Covalence: A Molecule Building Game

, Ion: A Compound Building Game

, Virulence: An Infectious Card Game

, and Peptide: A Protein Building Game

. You might think that he designs for a certain niche, and you would be right, with his latest offering being Cytosis: A Cell Biology Game

, a worker placement game that takes place inside a human cell. ( KS link

)

• Arclight

and Japanime Games

are publishing Sword Art Online Board Game: Sword of Fellows

, an adaption of the Sword Art Online anime by designer Seiji Kanai with players rolling dice and working together to take down enemies. ( KS link

)

• Another co-op game looking for funding is DiverCity

from Maxime Tardif and Sphere Games

, with the scuba-diving players trying to save species on a coral reef to ensure diversity (wink, wink) in undersea environments. ( KS link

)

• Dragoon

got a lot of love at Gen Con 2016, and now designers Jake Given, Zach Given, and Jonathan Ritter-Roderick are raising funds for a new printing of the base game as well as Dragoon: The Rogue and Barbarian Expansion

, which adds two new human characters to the game and allows for play with up to six at the table. ( KS link

)

• The driving mission behind Restoration Games

is to take well-loved games from past decades, remove all of the bad stuff about their designs that nostalgia has made you forget, then return them to market. They plan to debut three titles at Gen Con 2017 in August: Indulgence

(previously Dragonmaster

), Downforce

(previously Daytona 500

and many other iterations), and Stop Thief!

, with this latter title being the only one to hit Kickstarter. The funny thing about this design is that the most loved element of the game — at least by me, who played it frequently with my family — was the electronic noise gizmo, and a large percentage of the population now carries something far more advanced than that electronic noise gizmo on them at all times. ( KS link

)

• Another nostalgic blast in game form is Greedy Claw Crane Game

from David Sheppard and Twitch Factory

, with players rolling dice to "claw" toys from the 6x6 field that creates the floor of the claw machine. Dig in to grab the toys you want for the best sets. ( KS link

)

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3177840_t.png]• Warp Speed

from Andresakis, Cimino, Mamouris, Seretis and JAM Games

is a new design, but the look of it strikes the same 1980s note as Lazer Ryderz

from Greater Than Games, another 2017 release. In Warp Speed

, players use their spaceships to sweep asteroids from play(!), discover planets, and complete objectives in order to score fame. ( KS link

)

• A similar-sounding project is Zebulon: Galactic Control

from Jacob Hardin, Brandon Monahan, and Apocto Games

as the description highlights your efforts to zip through space on a modular board while picking up fuel, battling others, and completing missions. ( KS link

)

• Magmeda Monsters

designer André Forsblom of Rapid Leaf Productions

says that he first started working on this two-player card-driven battle game when he was twelve, which means that at age 25 he's spent more than half his life with this game bopping around his head. Now he's trying to bring it to life to share with others. ( KS link

)

• Frequent Kickstarter participant John Clowdus of Small Box Games

has a trio of projects underway on a ten-day project that celebrates the ten-year anniversary of SBG. Hard to believe that a decade has passed since he started releasing tiny self-published games, but we're staring at the proof in front of us, so I should start believing. The three games in question — Cartouche Dynasties

, Hemloch: Dark Promenade

, and Seii Daiymo

— are all updated and revised versions of earlier SBG releases. ( KS link

)

• Another frequent Kickstarter inhabitant — this being designer Scott Almes — has created an uncomfortable-sounding environment for himself this time: Dicey Peaks

from Calliope Games

, with these peaks being of the Himalayan variety and with players needing to roll their way to the top of the mountain before they freeze or have their arms yanked off by a yeti. ( KS link

)

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3407111_t.png]• Frank West's The City of Kings

from publisher The City of Games

is a cooperative tactical roleplaying board game for 1-4 players that features tons of choices:

You start by choosing one of seven stories, then select your hero, with each of the six heroes featuring twelve unique skills and nine customizable stats that allow you to specialize in attacking, healing, tanking, worker management, or whatever you desire. Aside from your hero, you need to manage your workers, who must gather resources in order to trade for new items and build structures to gain powerful bonuses.

You explore across the Ageless Realms by turning over tiles, discovering resources, side quests, hazards, building sites, traders and creatures as you continue to power up whilst preparing to enter Azure Rise.

At its heart, The City of Kings is a complex puzzle featuring endless strategic battles. Each creature is generated from a pool of spells, characteristics and stats offering over 10,000,000 unique battle situations. There are no dice, damage is persistent, it’s up to you to customize your characters and work together to come up with a strategy to defeat whoever stands in your way.

More than ten million unique battle situations! Sounds like a fine weekend project to try them all out. ( KS link

)

• Level 99 Games

has taken an interesting approach with the second set of games for its EXCEED fighting system

, with the sixteen characters in these four games all coming from L99's forthcoming game Seventh Cross

, a huge design in the works for release in 2018. Level 99 is effectively advertising for a future release, while giving you the chance to fight now with the characters outside of the alternative-Earth 1920s era that forms the setting for Seventh Cross

.( KS link

)

I'm also enamored by the cocky arrogance of the aggressive limbo-er in the EXCEED

cover image: "Look at me, man. I've got this even while wearing my favorite hat!"

Editor's note: Please don't post links to other Kickstarter projects in the comments section. Write to me via the email address in the header, and I'll consider them for inclusion in a future crowdfunding round-up. Thanks! —WEM

Kobe Game Market 2017 Report from Table Games in the World

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/640…-report-table-games-world

by Saigo To follow up the translation of Nicobodo's report on the 2017 Kobe Game Market, Saigo — who frequently translates game rules from Japanese to English and who tweets a lot about new JP games — has translated several reports from Takuya Ono, who runs the excellent Table Games in the World blog. Mr. Ono has also given permission to reprint the photos from his posts, and I've linked to each post in the section title. My great thanks to Saigo for the effort involved in getting permission and translating these reports! —WEM

Kobe Game Market 2017 Report

(original post in Japanese)

On Sunday, March 12, 2017, Kobe Game Market 2017 took place at Kobe International Exhibition Hall (Chuo Ward, Kobe City, Hyogo Prefecture). This was the sixth Game Market in the Kansai region and the second Game Market after the event moved from Osaka to Kobe. The 198 groups of participants — including board game publishers, board game stores, and doujin game circles — sold and displayed doujin board games (including 84 new titles), imported games, used games, books, and other board-game-related items; the attendance was later announced at 4,700 people.

Over one thousand people waited in line before the opening for the limited number of items sold at the event. This year's Kobe Game Market was held approximately one month later than in 2016, with the weather showing some signs of spring. Still, it was below 10º Celsius in the morning. When the venue opened at 10:00 a.m., many people rushed to board game stores DDT and Trickplay. Both of these stores sell unique games imported through their original routes. Many attendees rush to imported games before doujin games. This may be a notable characteristic of the Game Market in the Kansai region.

On the other hand, doujin games are gathering attention as well. Many booths were constantly crowded until late afternoon with many games becoming sold out. With people crowding in front of booths, it's become vital to plan in advance to visit some booths. Otherwise, it would be difficult to simply wander around and casually seek games that may interest you.

Still, with fewer participants compared to Tokyo Game Market, I had relatively ample time to have a look at the games. The venue was open for seven hours, the same as at Tokyo Game Market — but compared to TGM in late 2016 in which 539 groups participated, I could, at a rough estimate, spend more than twice the time at each booth. I heard both participants and attendees saying, "This is just the right size." At the venue, I tried out quite a few games, nine titles in total. I hope to report about them separately.

At TGM in late 2016, Oink Games

set up a large booth like those seen at the SPIEL game fair in Essen, Germany. They recently established a German branch — Oink Games GmbH — to spread their games farther in Europe. I heard that the female German staff member who helped the Oink Games booth at SPIEL will be the branch manager to market their games. I was also told that Oink Games is considering participation next year in fairs like Gen Con (USA) and the Cannes International Games Festival (France). Such activities would open up a new field for Japanese board games, which so far have been introduced overseas through license contracts with overseas publishers.

At the venue, some news was also announced, such as that of the Osaka-based Kiwi Games board game store opening their second store in late April near Shin-Osaka Station and Kobe-based Group SNE

planning to start publishing an analog game magazine, Game Mastery

, in August. Let me also note that Toryo Hojo, a Kansai-based satirical game designer, released two new games, namely Oden no Shukusai

( A Feel for Oden

) and a free-distributed game Trump Wall

.

As I did in 2016, in Kobe I attended a gathering on the previous day of the Game Market as well as a gathering held right after the Game Market. There, I met and talked with the people sharing the hobby, both local people of the Kansai region and people from distant regions, such as Kyushu. On both days, after the gatherings, I visited Trickplay where I had long talks until 11:00 p.m., some of which were recorded for the board game podcast "Buta no Nakigoe". With the attendance to the Game Market having increased by one thousand from last year, it's difficult to stay at "the right size". Meanwhile, it was still a cozy event with a feel of "knowing each other's face", a feel that we may be losing rapidly at Tokyo Game Market.

Kobe Game Market 2017: Attended by 4,700 People

(original post)

Arclight

, the organizer of Kobe Game Market 2017, held at Kobe International Exhibition Hall on March 12, 2017, announced that 4,700 people attended the event. From Kobe Game Market 2016 (with 3,700 attendees), attendance increased by 1,000 people, approximately 30%.

In 2017, the number of participants was 198 groups, five groups fewer than last year. (The second-round application was not launched so as to keep some space in the venue.) The number of new games released at this event was 84 titles, which is 17 titles more than last year. Along with them, many previously-released games, imported games, used games, accessories, and self-published books were displayed for sale.

Tokyo Game Market 2017 Spring will be held two months later in Sunday, May 14 at Tokyo Big Sight. The attendance at Tokyo Game Market has constantly increased by approximately 1,000 people at each event, having reached 12,000 attendees at Tokyo Game Market 2016 Autumn [in December]. It seems that the attendance in the Kansai region is increasing at the same pace.

Kobe Game Market 2017 Game Report: Mask of Moai, Bon Voyage: Weather vs Navigator, Garimpeiro

(original post)

At a Game Market venue, I try to play as many games as possible without spending too much time on buying games or talking. It's partly for gathering information for the Game Market Award and personally due to the fact that buying the games tends to result in leaving them unplayed while many other new games are released almost daily these days. Furthermore, after hearing a request from overseas asking for information on new games, this time I played games at the venue more actively. Most of the booths have only one demo table, so you often wait until the previous group is over. On the other hand, it was a lot of fun to play the games with the playful gamers of Kansai. I'd like to thank the staff who explained the rules and the people who played the games with me.

Mask of Moai

(Publisher: GIFT10INDUSTRY

)

Following Mask of Anubis

, Mask of Moai

also uses the smartphone for a cooperative game incorporating virtual reality (VR). First, attach a smartphone with the supplied application installed into the paper VR goggles. Then describe what you see to your team members, who try to create a map of a temple by arranging tiles and pieces based on your information. The goggle-wearing player's position in the temple changes each time the players change their turn. Combine the information from each player to create a large map.

Certified by Mu

, a magazine about paranormal phenomena, the game is set in a unique world with a moai statue at the bottom of the sea. Using clay to create the shape of extraterrestrial strange creatures named Rapa Rapas, the players win by helping the Rapa Rapas reach the landing place of their spaceship.

The map and the shape of Rapa Rapas are automatically generated at each game with approximately one million variations. Exploring the fun factors of a board game, there is also a variant with additional puzzle elements along with communication restrictions using yes-no questions and onomatopoeia.

First, describe the landscape above the water, then dive into the water and describe what you see inside the submarine temple. Your communication skills are challenged by a time limit. Furthermore, if you encounter a Rapa Rapa, remember its shape so as to reproduce it with clay after removing the goggles. Getting totally absorbed in the game made me feel somewhat like wandering into the submarine temple.

Mask of Moai

Designer: Takashi Hamada

Artist: Haruka Kajikawa, Toshi Murase, Masashi Sato

Publisher: GIFT10INDUSTRY

(2017)

2-6 Players / 10+ / 30-60 Min / 4,600¥

Bon Voyage: Weather vs Navigator

(Publisher: COLON ARC

)

This voyage card game is a remake of Koukai no Hibi

( Days of Voyage

), which was released by Jiyu Rakka as a 500-yen game at Tokyo Game Market 2012 Spring. It's a light game from COLON ARC, following To Unlimited, and Beyond

and Sly Knight Robbery

.

The players hold their crew chips in their hands and disclose them at once. After that, flip the current event card and pay or receive chips in order from the first place. Mostly, being first is advantageous with less payment, but it may occasionally lead to a loss depending on the event, thus making you wonder how much you should hold in your hand.

You keep flipping the event cards until the "Touching Land" card is flipped. This provides some ideas to assess the cards that haven't been flipped with some elements of counting. The game ends when the crew chips of one of the players are used up, and the player with the most crew chips wins.

There is also an additional set of rules to use special event cards with drastic effects for a more dynamic game. The variety of events, some of which imposing a penalty for holding too few crew chips, also led to lively conversation, like "That card would come out soon", "No, no, it's still early".

Bon Voyage: Weather vs Navigator

Designer & Artist: Yusuke Soraji

Publisher: COLON ARC

(2017)

2-6 Players / 8+ / 15 min / 1,800¥

Garimpeiro

(Publisher: Group SNE)

In this board game, the players compete in gold mining at the Amazon river. A game which received an honorable mention at the first Group SNE Board/Card Game Contest was developed into this game. With this, all the games which won prizes at the said contest have been made into products: two games which won the awards, namely Space Ninja

and Gambler × Gamble!

, and three games which received the honorable mention, namely Animal Mind

, Demon Worker

, and Garimpeiro

.

In this game, the players first put out planning cards all at once, disclose their cards one by one in order, then replenish their hand with money or workers along with raising their workers' status. Since you cannot choose the same item as the player before you, select your planning card while considering what other players are likely to play.

After replenishing your hand, place workers in descending order of their status and take action. To perform an action already chosen by another player, more workers are required.

While various actions, such as buying victory point cards to gain special abilities and carrying over your money to the next year, are available, the main action lies in what to do with the gold mine. In this phase, you draw special dice from the bag according to the number of workers you've placed and roll these dice. You gain points according to the number of gold nuggets on the dice roll. The special dice vary in probability, ranging from the white die to get gold with a one-sixth chance to the purple die to get gold with a half chance. It was exciting to both draw and roll such dice.

In the long run, you cannot win by the simple gambling of sending more workers to the gold mine. The special abilities of the victory point cards also become increasingly effective. This is a gamer's game designed precisely down to details.

Garimpeiro

Designer: Kazuto Masukawa

Artist: Kouji Ogata

Publisher: cosaic

(2017)

3-4 Players / 12+ / 45-60 min / 4,500¥

Kobe Game Market 2017 Game Report: Wild Gold, Putzroboter, Across the Universe

( original post

)

Here is my second report of the games that I played at Kobe Game Market 2017 on March 12.

Wild Gold

(Publisher: 6jizo [Rokujizo])

In this card game, the players create tools from cards and use them to dig a gold mine. It's the first time for this circle to participate in a Game Market. The name of the circle 6jizo (Rokujizo) comes from Rokujizo Station in Kyoto. This game was quickly sold out at the venue and its reissue is to be waited.

At the start, each player has a "small axe" made of one stone card and one wood card. Using the small axe, you can draw one card from the play area. In the play area, there are item cards — wood, stone, iron, and fire — and treasure cards. As you collect item cards in your hand, you can assemble various tools, such as a "big axe", "small pickaxe", "spear", and "wood bomb".

I found it interesting to assemble each tool by placing the item cards in the shape of the tool. By this rule, it's easily recognizable what you can do in your turn. With the "small axe", you can draw one card from the play area. With the "big axe", you can draw two cards. With the "small pickaxe", you can choose and take one card from the discard pile. With the "spear", you can draw one card from another player's hand and snatch it if it's a treasure card. With the powerful "wood bomb", you can choose to draw four cards from the play area or draw one card from each player's hand and snatch the cards if they're treasure cards. The tools' effects vary, but their easily recognizable shapes were helpful to play the game.

Initially, I thought it would be advantageous for the start player to make more tools than others, but such an advantage is nullified by the rule to "check the upper limit". According to this rule, the active player can have only up to seven items in total of the cards in their hand and their tools. Because of this, the player may have to discard some tools or treasure cards in their hand. You can win the moment you gain 10 points through treasure cards, but because of the upper limit, we often encountered cases where you stop at 9 points and have your cards snatched from other players before your next turn, resulting in a seesaw battle.

I managed to win narrowly by making two "swords", each of which allows you to announce a type of card in another player's hand and snatch it if it's there; I snatched gold (2 points) cards from other players. It's a game with depth in which you need to change your tools flexibly according to the situation.

Wild Gold

Designer: Narasen

Artist: Junta Kamura

Publisher: 6jizo (Rokujizo)

(2017)

3-4 players / +8 / 30 min

Putzroboter

(Publisher: Butagoya

)

In this game, you slide the robot vacuum cleaner "Putzroboter" to collect only the paper clips of your color. It was designed by Mr. Otsubo, a.k.a. "Attack". Mr. Otsubo is the manager of B-CAFE, a board game cafe in Himeji, Hyogo Prefecture. Putzroboter's robotic movement is fun.

First, spread all the players' paper clips, then launch Putzroboter from a distance. Putzroboter is a simple structure made of a bowl covering a magnet ball. If you launch it while spinning, it makes a sharp turn. Then remove the paper clips that are pulled to Putzroboter by the magnetic force. The first player to have Putzroboter remove all the paper clips of their color wins.

Since the paper clips of all the players are mixed, it's difficult to remove only the clips of your color, as in Bellz!

Along with the luck factor, this game would also require dexterity skills, especially near the end, when only a few paper clips remain, to move Putzroboter to the clips of your color.

Putzroboter

Designer & Artist: Attack

Publisher: Butagoya

(2017)

2-4 players / +6 / 10 min

Across the Universe

(Publisher: Spieldisorder

)

This game was made as a homage to the British musician David Bowie, who died in 2016. In the first new game from Spieldisorder in two years (its prototype was demoed at Game Markets in 2016), the players collect stars through bidding and link them to help "the man who fell to Earth" return to his home planet.

In each round, the star cards are placed in a row of four seasons. The players plot their cards face down to bid on each of the star cards in spring, summer, fall, and winter. After all the players have placed their cards, they bid four times, starting with the star card in spring.

The player who bid by the card of the highest number receives the star card (with points) in each season and discards the card played. Meanwhile, other players, in turn, choose what to do with their card played, from among the following actions:

(1) Carry it over to the next bidding,

(2) Return it to their hand, or

(3) Add it to the card pool in front of them.

If you carry over your played card to the next bidding, you can add its value to the next card you play for bidding.

Adding the played card to your card pool is an important action in this game because at the end of the game you can score only up to the total points of the cards in your pool. If the total points of the star cards you've gained through bidding is higher than that of the cards in your pool, you must discard the star cards until their total points fall below that of the cards in your pool. Furthermore, the number of cards in your hand is less than the number of auctions, so you're required to lose some biddings, to add some cards to your pool, and to return some cards to your hand. It's very tactical to carry out this adjustment along with simultaneous bidding.

The star cards also have various marks on them as bonus set-collection and majority points. It's interesting also to take such factors into consideration when you assess the value to bid for the star cards.

Across the Universe

Designer: hi-life

Publisher: Spieldisorder

(2017)

3-4 players / +10 / 38 min

Kobe Game Market 2017 Game Report: Long Long Line in HELL, Kikka-Sai, Startups

( original post

)

Here is my third report of the games that I played at Kobe Game Market 2017 on March 12.

Long Long Line in HELL

(Publisher: March Hare Games

)

In Long Long Line in HELL

, ogres queue at supply stations for beautiful gems. It's another dice game from March Hare Games following the fishing-themed dice game Lord of the Die-Angler

(2016).

First, each player rolls their 15 ogre dice. There are big and small ogre dice. At the start, you can only use big ogre dice. Small ogre dice are placed on each player's sleep card. To use them, you need to wake them up by rolling big ogre dice.

In your turn, as in Las Vegas

, roll your dice and place all dice of one number on one of the three supply stations. Each supply station has a capacity, and when it becomes full, gems are distributed in ascending order of the rank of players who placed dice on it. The ranking is determined according to the number, size, and roll results of each player's dice placed on the supply station. There are not many big ogre dice, so you need to promptly wake up small ogre dice as reinforcements.

You can wake up small ogre dice only by rolling one big ogre die and achieving the dice roll matching that of some small ogre dice. You can re-roll the die, but one big ogre die is consumed for that, too. Used big ogre dice rest for one turn, after which they can be used again.

When a supply station is nearly full, you can choose in your turn whether to place a die in order to rise in the ranking, or instead increase the number of your dice so as to gamble more on your next turn. Even if you choose to increase the number of your dice, your dice rolls are still uncertain, leading to dramatic outcomes.

The game ends when two of the supply stations become full. Calculate your score according to the gems you've collected. You can score more by collecting the same type of gems. Thus, the players collect the gems tactically, like "I don't need this very much, but I can't allow that player to take this." With the dice rolls' unpredictability and careful calculation for the area control, this game is rich in variety.

Long Long Line in HELL

Designer: Satoru Nakamura

Artist: Mamiko Taguchi

Publisher: March Hare Games

(2017)

3-4 players / 12+ /30-40 min

Kikka-Sai

( Shinojo

)

Kikka-Sai

is a two-player game in which you try to meld three chrysanthemum dice to win at a chrysanthemum show. It's the latest game by Shinojo, which has published simplified mahjong card games ALL GREEN

and Yaochu!

This game, also called "a two-player dice mahjong game", has a flavor of mahjong, but it's a quite distinctive game along with the theme of a chrysanthemum show. At the Game Market venue, its demo booth was constantly busy with people such as couples and pairs of female visitors playing the game.

There are three types of chrysanthemum dice, namely white, yellow, and orange. You're required to collect three dice, a sequence or triplet, of the same color or all different colors. The game starts with each player drawing two dice from the bag and rolling them behind their screen.

On your turn, draw a die from the bag and choose to swap it with one of the dice behind your screen, discard it, or add it to your two other dice to win a hand (tsumo). You can also win by claiming a discard (ron). After one of the players wins, calculate the score. There is a predetermined dice roll in trend (dora). If you win by its matching color or value, you gain an additional score.

According to your score, your opponent's "point die" value (starting with 6) is reduced. If it falls down to 0 or below, you win.

I played a game with Mr. Ikeda, the manager of the Foyer Pikkorino board game café in Matsue, Shimane Prefecture. Right from the start, Mr. Ikeda melded chrysanthemum dice in trend to achieve a high score. Aiming for a come-from-behind victory, I tried to collect the dice roll in trend, but he melded again while I was still struggling. The scoring points varies depending on whether or not you have the dice roll in trend, leading to an enjoyable dynamic play.

Kikka-Sai

Designer: Takahiro Shinozaki

Artist: Kotori Neiko

Publisher: Shinojo

(2017)

2 players / 8+ / 15 min

Startups

(Publisher: Oink Games)

In this card game, the players invest in six companies to make profits as top shareholders. This reimplementation of Rights

(2015), supporting more players along with a Knizia-esque dilemma and tasteful company logos, is quite intriguing.

On your turn, all you do is draw a card and play a card from your hand. Basically, you play cards in front of you. At the end of the game, the player who has played the highest number of cards of each company (i.e., invested in it) receives payment from other players who invested in the same company.

Naturally, you don't wish to play the cards with which you're unlikely to become the top shareholder. In this case, in Rights

you pass such a card to the player to your left; in Startups

, you place such a card in the play area ("market") in the center of the table. The next player can choose whether to take that card from the play area or draw a card from the draw pile. When drawing a card from the draw pile, the player must pay money and place it on the card in the play area. The player who takes the card in the play area also takes the money on it. If taking the card can make you a top shareholder, it's a timely offer, though it could be a trap.

Furthermore, the antimonopoly chips make the game even more exciting. These chips are initially given to the first player to take each company's card, then move to the current top shareholders during the game. Having these chips makes it difficult to take cards from the play area, thus preventing the current top shareholder from taking a strong lead. It might be wise to stay in second place and achieve a come-from-behind victory at the end, but can you really do that?

In the end, the players also reveal their hand, so you won't really know who'll eventually become the top shareholder. The top shareholder receives money from other shareholders according to the number of cards each shareholder invested in each company, and the player who has earned the most money wins. During the payment, each one money paid is flipped and becomes three money when received. Thus, it would be wise not to give up early and instead extend your investments for a chance.

At the demo table, I enjoyed an exciting game of five players in which the winner was unpredictable until the very end. Compared to Rights

, which supports up to five players, Startups

can be played with up to seven players. The gameplay would also vary according to the number of players.

Startups

Designer & Artist: Jun Sasaki

Publisher: Oink Games

(2017)

3-7 players /10+ / 20 min

Designer Diary: Heptalion, or Seven Steps to a Finished Game

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/632…or-seven-steps-finished-g

by Néstor Romeral Andres Heptalion

is a simple combinatorial tile-placement game (and associated set of puzzles) designed in 2011. This diary describes the various design problems that arose when trying to create a child-friendly game that adults would also enjoy, and the steps I took to resolve them.

This diary is an excerpt of a paper released in issue 1 of The Game & Puzzle Design Journal.

1. Introduction

I will present a combinatorial abstract strategy game and its derived puzzles, focusing on how "keeping it simple" revealed unexpected problems and how these were tackled, while finding interesting design techniques along the way.

I describe my design goal first, instead of following an exploratory process, and how the mechanisms, components, and victory condition naturally followed. This process shows how design constraints can lead to the discovery of interesting mathematical properties and new combinations of components and mechanisms. Finally, the game is transformed into a puzzle, which turns out to be as interesting as the game itself.

2. History

I designed Heptalion

in 2011 and published it through my company nestorgames

in 2012. The published set is shown in Figure 1 above. A version for Android smartphones

was released in 2014. A short description of the game:

Heptalion: Players draw an equal number of tiles from the bag at random, then place them face up for all to see. Players take turns placing one of their tiles on the board, face down, to cover a pair of symbols that match the two symbols on the tile. The last player to move wins.

Heptalion

has its roots in 2010, when another of my games — Hippos & Crocodiles

— was rivaling the sales of my most successful game, Adaptoid

. Hippos & Crocodiles

(Figure 2) is very simple. Players take turns placing one of their animal-shaped tiles, either a hippopotamus or a crocodile, onto the board until one player cannot make a legal move, thereby losing the game.

Realizing that the complexity of a game is not correlated with its market success, I decided to design another game that was even simpler than Hippos & Crocodiles

to see whether its success could be reproduced. This time, though, I wanted to focus on the parents, them being the ones who buy the game and have to play with their kids, but have no time to play it themselves. I wanted to create a game that was easy and quick to learn and play, mistake-proof, short and replayable.

With these objectives in mind, the first step was to create a list of design goals, consisting of a set of obvious design problems and potential solutions.

3. Design Problems

The following list describes the design problems I faced when creating Heptalion

and their solutions:

1. Problem:

Steep learning curve and resistance to change on behalf of players.
Solution:

Use an already existing and well-known game component (e.g., cards, pawns, dice, etc.) so that players feel comfortable with it.

2. Problem:

Too many rules force players to check the rulebook frequently and also may lead to misinterpretation and conflict.
Solution:

Move the rules to the components, in a "poka-yoke" approach, so that mistakes and misinterpretations are almost impossible.

Poka-yoke

is a Japanese term that means "mistake-proofing", and it refers to any mechanism in a manufacturing process that helps an equipment operator avoid ( yokeru

) mistakes ( poka

) by drawing attention to human errors as they occur. More broadly, the term can refer to any behavior-shaping constraint designed into a process to prevent incorrect operation by the user.

3. Problem:

Game length may scare young players and parents.
Solution:

Keep the number of turns low (around 10–15), as well as the duration of each turn, to avoid "analysis paralysis".

4. Problem:

Be able to accommodate several players.
Solution:

Make it multiplayer without extending the duration of the game through a finite number of pieces shared among all players.

5. Problem:

The set should be affordable.
Solution:

Use a small and cheap to manufacture set of components.

6. Problem:

Allow a high degree of replayability, so the players get value for money.
Solution:

Random set-up based on a combinatorial distribution of the components.

7. Problem:

Games that are easy to make at home lose sales.
Solution:

Use components that are not usually found at home.

Note that item #7 is not a design problem as much as a business problem. However, I have to take such considerations into account when designing since I am also the publisher. Many amateur game designers seem to ignore such issues when designing their own games, even though they can be very important to publishers.

4. Problem-Solving Process

This section describes the problem solving process used to tackle the problems listed above. The key to most of these was to find a magical game component that:

* is widely known (solves problem #1),

* does not have many parts (solves problem #5),

* is sufficiently complex (solves problem #6), and

* is hard to replicate if customized (solves problem #7).

A standard dominoes set satisfies these criteria nicely. A set of standard dominoes has 28 tiles, showing all possible pairs of numbers from 0 to 6. Although a larger set could have been used for my game, 28 tiles proved to be sufficient. One tile per turn gives each player 14 turns in a two-player game, which solves problem #3.

For a four-player game, each player has only seven turns. This is a bit small, but the game nature encourages players to play several games in a row, which is a desirable feature in games, showing that the game is appealing and replayable.

Thus, problem #4 was partially solved. In order to fully solve it, I released an expansion pack called Octalion

that uses a larger board and increases the number of tiles to 36 (so that each player has nine turns in a four-player game).

Octalion

also solves problem #7 as a set of 36 dominoes is non-standard and thus difficult to find. The design hurdles seemed to be dropping quickly so far, except for problem #2; trying to solve it was like trying to open a matryoshka or babushka doll, in which solving each layer just revealed further problems to the solved.

I then focused on the victory condition, which for me is the meaning of a game and the most important part of the rules. The components are the tools that the players use to achieve the goal.

I decided to use the same victory condition as Hippos & Crocodiles

and many other successful tile placement games: The last player able to make a move wins. This is a very powerful victory condition as it does not need to be checked every turn (as with a checkmate in chess) and avoids the need for scoring; the game simply ends when it is not possible to play anymore.

It made sense that players would start with the tiles split amongst themselves, which is simpler than players needing to draw a tile each turn or keep track of the number of tiles in hand, etc.

Players would take turns placing a tile on the board only where it could fit (which feels natural), but they must be forced to choose from several places to fit them (as otherwise the game would be boring).

The ideal board would fit all tiles and allow each tile to be placed in several different places. Each move should eliminate some other potential moves so that the number of legal moves reduces and the game converges to a result that is not trivially predictable. Moreover, the shape of the board must be roughly rectangular to fit an A4 sheet as this is the size of the boards that I print.

A 28-tile set of dominoes contains 56 half-tiles (i.e., squares) in total, so I first tried using a 7x8 grid of 56 squares for the game board. This proportion roughly matched the shape of an A4 sheet, with some room for the game title, but there was a problem.

A 7x8 grid has the desired 56 squares, but it has (6x8) + (7x7) = 97 pairs of orthogonally adjacent squares, as shown in Figure 3. These represent the places that double-square domino tiles can be placed, but in order to have the same number of available placements for each tile (for a balanced distribution), this total should be a multiple of 28.

The nearest multiples of 28 are 3x28 = 84 and 4x28 = 112. Since 7x8 allows the maximum number of paired squares, it is impossible to reach 112 with 56 squares, hence 84 pairs became the target number. The problem can now be stated as:

Find an orthogonal grid shape with 56 squares and exactly 84 adjacent pairs.

Having no idea what shape such a grid might take, I started with a 7x8 rectangle and began moving squares around. Moving a border square to another place on the perimeter (except corners) reduces the number of pairs by two (-3 for the removal and +1 for the placement), as shown in Figure 4.

But it's not possible to reach an even number by repeatedly subtracting 2 from an odd number, so I then tried the corners. Moving a corner square to another place on the perimeter (except corners) reduces the number of pairs by one (-2 for the removal and +1 for the placement), as shown in Figure 5.

This meant that 13 squares would have to be moved to reach the target number of 84 pairs — but there was a faster and more flexible way; moving inner squares to the perimeter reduces the number of pairs by three with each movement (-4 for the removal and +1 for the placement), as shown in Figure 6.

Furthermore, removing a square adjacent to a hole and moving it to the perimeter reduces the number of pairs by two (-3 for the removal and +1 for the placement), as shown in Figure 7, which is conveniently an even number.

Playing around with these square movements for a few days, I came across the diamond shape shown in Figure 8. This shape was perfect; it was symmetrical, appealing, had 84 pairs and 56 squares, and worked well within an A4 page ratio.

However, finding the right shape was only part of the solution, and the actual distribution of symbols within this shape posed a new problem:

Find a distribution of numbers 0–6 within the diamond shape such that each occurs exactly eight times, and each pair of numbers (28 in total) occurs exactly three times (3 x 28 = 84).

This new problem was a hard one for a nonprogrammer, and brute force enumeration would be too time consuming, so it had to be attacked from a different perspective. I looked for simpler patterns that might occur in a valid distribution, hoping that this easier task would allow me to build the board.

The breakthrough came when I considered the A-A tiles that contain matching numbers: 0–0, 1–1, 2–2, etc. We want each A-A tile to have three possible placements, the same as any other tile, and it turns out that this can be achieved efficiently if each number occurs in one of the patterns shown in Figure 9.

These shapes, called tetrominoes, are used in many games and puzzles, such as the well-known LITS puzzle

from Japanese publisher Nikoli. Note that this set includes only tetrominoes with exactly three adjacent cell pairings and excludes the fifth 2x2 tetromino with four adjacent cell pairings; the fewer the better in this case.

The trick was to then place seven of these tetromino patterns inside the diamond grid, then number the corresponding grid cells accordingly.

After a few hours' work with the help of a spreadsheet, I found the final distribution shown in Figure 10. The numbers were replaced by colored symbols (Figure 11), and after playtesting, the game was ready for release. It has since proven popular with players and does not show any obvious first or second player advantage.

5. Other Solutions

Shortly after releasing Heptalion

, Mark Tilford and Grant Fikes used computer analysis to find other valid distributions for the diamond shape as well as other shapes with valid distributions. Two of these, shown in Figures 12 and 13, have since been released as expansions for the game.

6. Android Puzzle App

A few months later, Kris J. Wolff (designer of Pilus

) proposed developing an Android version of Heptalion

. Kris had previously developed an Android app for my game RED

, but that app lacked something important: a set of puzzles.

We therefore included some puzzles in the Heptalion

app. The rules for the Heptalion

puzzle emerged naturally from the board game. The aim is to place a subset of the Heptalion

pieces, according to the game's rules, to exactly cover a predetermined board shape. This is different from the board game as all pieces in the solvers' hand must be placed in order to complete each challenge.

The app creates challenges involving 3-19 randomly placed pieces such that each challenge has a unique solution. Since not all pieces are included in a challenge, there are usually some unplayable adjacent board spaces, and this adds a new twist in the deduction process for the player. The algorithm for creating challenges is described in Appendix A.

The difficulty of each challenge is estimated as the product of the number of ways each piece can be placed in the initial challenge. For example, the challenge shown in Figure 14 has a difficulty score of 983,040, which makes it of medium difficulty.

Heptalion

puzzles are designed with some pieces being removed in order to have unique solutions and increase their degree of deducibility.

7. Conclusion

In finding a board of the appropriate shape and size for a certain set of tiles, acting under a certain set of constraints, I had to solve a number of design problems in order to achieve the game that I wanted. This diary describes the design steps that led to my game Heptalion

and the associated Android puzzle app.

I believe that the techniques discovered along the way — the application of poka-yoke to board game design; the use of maths to tweak the board shape and define the exact subproblems to be solved, and so on — will help with the development of future games.

Néstor Romeral Andrés

Appendix A: Puzzle Generation

This Appendix describes Kris J. Wolff's algorithm for creating unique Heptalion

puzzles in his Android app for the game.

1. Start with an imaginary 11x11 board.

2. Choose between 3 and 19 pieces to use. The most interesting and difficult puzzles seem to be those with 17 out of the 28 available.

3. Place a piece in a random location.

4. Place each other piece in a random location, such that its two squares each touch at least two squares on pieces already placed. This avoids single square protrusions which would have trivial instantiations.

5. Run through all possible ways to place the chosen pieces on the board. If more than one solution exists, discard and restart.

6. Check that each piece has more than one valid placement (as otherwise its placement is trivial). If any pieces have only one valid placement, then discard and restart.

7. Each level is given a "difficulty" rating, which is calculated as follows: Start with difficulty=1, then for each piece multiply the difficulty by its number of valid placements.

Special thanks to Cameron Browne and Russ Williams for revisions.

New Game Round-up: Going Deep with Leder Games, Gardening in Japan, and Moving Brass to New Cities

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/641…-leder-games-gardening-ja

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3495334_t.png]• U.S. publisher Leder Games

has announced what might be considered a spiritual successor to 2016's Vast: The Crystal Caverns

, a cave-crawling adventure for 1-5 players in which each player had unique attributes and goals. Now you get to try something similar in the stars in Samuel Bailey

's Deep: Enemy Frontier

:

For a thousand years the Empire of Humanity has grown, conquered, and ruled with strength and order, but now resources grow scarce and unrest mutters under the thin veneer of tranquility. Out in the distant void, ancient enemies sense weakness and band together to bring down those who defeated them and sent them running. Humanity's only hope is to reach once more for the furthest stars, discover new worlds rich with resources, and build an new Empire that can survive for another thousand years.

Deep: Enemy Frontier is a highly asymmetric sci-fi strategy game for 2-4 players. Each player takes a unique role during a period of intense conflict in our quadrant of the galaxy. The Empire seeks to shore up its weaknesses and once more establish itself as the dominant force in the galaxy. The Usurper threatens to bring the Empire down from within and establish a free and open society ruled by the people rather than a dictator. The Rival sweeps in from the remote edges of the galaxy, a coalition of aliens burning with revenge against an Empire that conquered and harried them over the past hundreds of years. The Captain throws himself out into the stars, to explore and have grand adventures, his exploits broadcast to the entire Empire; perhaps his fame will lead him one day to sit upon the throne of all humanity...

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3495485_t.jpg]• Osprey Games

has been doing a fantastic job with their revamped editions of older games — Odin's Ravens

, The King Is Dead

, Escape from Colditz

, The Ravens of Thri Sahashri

, and more — and Samurai Gardener

is the latest example, this being a new edition of Hisashi Hayashi

's Edo Yashiki

, first released by his own OKAZU Brand in 2013. Okay, all we have so far is a cover, but it's impressive. As for the gameplay, here's a summary:

Samurai Gardener is a tile-laying game with an historical Japanese theme in which players try to construct as impressive gardens as possible.

Each card consists of six sections of several types of areas (pond, floor, garden, etc.). Players lay the cards side by side or overlapping in order to create long rows of the same area type. Each round, rows/columns of the same area type are awarded points, and the player with the most points when all building cards are depleted wins.

If you want to see the gameplay in practice, here's an overview video of the original game that I recorded in 2014:

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic261878_t.jpg]• In January 2016, Gavan Brown of Roxley Games

announced

that it had signed a deal with Martin Wallace

to release a new version of his 2007 design Brass

. What's more, Roxley was developing a new map with Wallace that would essentially create a second game from the Brass

game system.

Roxley has now revealed some details of both games, along with two of the most eye-catching covers of the modern day — which each cover working beautifully on its own while pairing to make something bigger. Brass

has been renamed Brass: Lancashire

, and aside from new artwork and components, Roxley has made these small-ish changes to the rules:

—The virtual link rules between Birkenhead have been removed.

—The three-player experience has been brought closer to the ideal experience of four players by shortening each half of the game by one round and tuning the deck slightly to ensure a consistent experience.

—Two-player rules have been created and are playable without the need for an alternate board.

—The level 1 cotton mill is now worth 5 VP to make it slightly less terrible.

"Slightly less terrible" — that phrase always look great in marketing copy!

Brass: Birmingham

adds a new action to the game (Scout) and three new industry types (brewery, manufactured goods, pottery), while requiring beer for certain things to happen in town: "Brewing has become a fundamental part of the culture in Birmingham. You must now sell your product through traders located around the edges of the board. Each of these traders is looking for a specific type of good each game. To sell cotton, pottery, or manufactured goods to these traders, you must also "grease the wheels of industry" by consuming beer. For example, a level 1 cotton mill requires one beer to flip. As an incentive to sell early, the first player to sell to a trader receives free beer."

Roxley plans to launch a Kickstarter funding campaign for both titles on April 17, 2017.

New Game Round-up: A Renewed Five-Year Mission for WizKids, and Another One Deck Dungeon

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/642…ve-year-mission-wizkids-a

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic1731799_t.jpg]• U.S. publisher WizKids

has announced

a "renewed multi-year license with CBS Consumer Products", and accompanying that announcement comes word of a wave of Star Trek

items, such as card packs and faction packs for Star Trek: Attack Wing

, with the former debuting in mid-2017 and the latter coming in Q3 2017. As for what they are:

Each Star Trek: Attack Wing Card Pack will include cards, token sheets, and the necessary dial connector pieces. Most of these cards and tokens will be brand new content, while some cards in each pack will be reworded versions of existing cards. Each Star Trek: Attack Wing Card Pack now has a lower price point than previous expansion pack releases, and will point to at least one existing release for players to acquire the correct ship sculpt, if they don't already own a copy.

Each Star Trek: Attack Wing Faction Pack will include four pre-painted plastic ships with cards, token sheets, dial connector pieces, bases, and pegs to accompany them. Many of the cards and tokens in these faction packs will be brand new and will allow a player to field a never-before-seen fleet from right out of the box.

For those who want to paint their own minis for Attack Wing

, in mid-2017 WizKids will launch Star Trek: Deep Cuts Unpainted Miniatures

, and for those who want different

painted minis from those included in Attack Wing

there's Star Trek Tactics: Series IV

, which I believe is the fourth series of ships for the Star Trek HeroClix

line. From the press release: "Play with fan-favorite classic factions such as the Federation, Klingon, Romulan, Dominion, and Borg as well as the all new Xindi and Andorian factions! Unlike previous Star Trek Tactics

sets, all ship sculpts are used only once within the set! That's right, Series IV brings 28 unique dials and sculpts to the Milky Way!" Who knew that WizKids was producing dials and sculpts with materials acquired outside the Milky Way?! Seems cost prohibitive, but perhaps that's why I write about games instead of manufacturing them.

The HeroClix

line will also see the release of Star Trek HeroClix Away Team: The Original Series

, with this Q4 2017 release featuring "the most iconic characters from Star Trek: The Original Series

with Kirk, Spock, Uhura, and more".

Finally, in August 2017 Star Trek: Frontiers

will get bigger with the release of The Return of Khan Expansion Set

, which boosts the player count to five and which features "Khan's Jem'Hadar Battle Cruiser, 'The Pequod', and a new playable ship — the U.S.S. Enterprise NCC-1701-A", according to WizKids, which describes this expansion as equivalent in size as The Lost Legion

expansion for Mage Knight Board Game

.

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3496794_t.jpg]• U.S. publisher Asmadi Games

has announced a Q3 2017 release date for One Deck Dungeon: Forest of Shadows

, a standalone expansion for the 2016 release One Deck Dungeon

from Asmadi owner Chris Cieslik

.

As with the original game, One Deck Dungeon: Forest of Shadows

is a dungeon delve, with each card in the deck depicting both an obstacle to overcome and the potential rewards for doing so. This release, which will hit Kickstarter in April 2017, contains new heroes, new dungeons, new perils, new foes, and new mechanisms (Poison and event Perils), and its heroes and dungeons are compatible with the original game should you want to combine them or mix-and-match in some way.

Asmadi Games plans to talk about this title, along with Mottainai: Wutai Mountain

, Invasion of the Garden Gnomes

, and Innovation Deluxe

, during a Twitch presentation

on Thursday, April 6 at 13:00 EDT (GMT -4).

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3408867_t.jpg]• Renegade Game Studios

has announced many titles for release in 2017, and while we briefly covered J. Alex Kevern

's Sentient

in a video overview of five upcoming Renegade titles

at the 2017 GAMA Trade Show, but I thought I'd highlight it here as well, mostly so that I can show off the striking cover by Chris Ostrowski. As for the game, here's an overview of the setting and gameplay:

The next great technological revolution is here. Sentient robots for information, transportation, industry — all at our fingertips. Building them is now the easy part. Programming them has proven to be more complicated. A handful of companies have emerged claiming to pull it off, but only one will win out. Your mission is clear: Procure valuable bots and plug them into your network. They'll have an effect on your systems. Anticipate it correctly, program your bots effectively, and attract the right investors to win and lead the sentient revolution.

In Sentient, players are tasked with choosing from available robots to program in their factory. Each robot that is added modifies your board and attracts the interest of investors for your company. Program your bots efficiently and collect the support of your patrons to build the most formidable operation.

Designer Diary: New York Slice, or Today's Pizza Originated in San Marco

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/638…lice-or-todays-pizza-orig

by Jeffrey Allers

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3211823_t.jpg]

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic174180_t.jpg] When the Moon Hits Your Eye Like a Big Pizza Pie…

In this case, it wasn't a celestial object that struck me; it was Alan Moon. Fifteen years ago, I had officially entered the boardgaming hobby here in Germany, and I was playing catch-up with a steady diet of Knizia, Kramer, Teuber, and (especially) Moon. When I began to design my own games, this prolific quartet of the "German school" of streamlined "themed abstracts" were my inspiration.

I enjoyed playing most of Moon's games, with one of those being San Marco

, co-designed with Aaron Weissblum. I thought it was a brilliant marriage of the pie-division problem with an area majority game, but the division part was possible only for 2-3 players. In fact, I almost preferred their two-player variant of the system — the tiny card game Canal Grande

— to its beautiful board game parent, because even with three players, downtime was an issue.

I wondered whether it was possible to make a pie-division game that was accessible by more than 2-3 players. I thought about this off and on for a long time. Years passed and I would churn ideas through my head in those in-between times when I was on my bike, in the shower, on the subway, or drifting off to sleep at night. (Some people count sheep; I "count" game mechanisms.)

One of the issues that held me back was finding an appropriate theme. Then, quite suddenly, I had one of those revelations of the obvious, like an apple falling on my head to remind me of the power of gravity. Why not make a pie-division problem about…pies?

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic387320_t.jpg]Suddenly, everything fell into place. It would be a set-collection game, with different types of pies worth varying amounts of points if you had the most at the end of the game; the more valuable pies would also appear with greater frequency, making it more difficult to collect a majority. To reduce downtime, the slices of the pie would be have to remain in the same order that they were revealed.

I also wanted another choice, another option to score points and a dilemma to add more tension to the game. Instead of collecting a slice, players had the option of "eating" them (i.e., flipping them over); the player would receive guaranteed points from these slices, but they would not be counted for the end-game majorities. That was it. Fifty-five slices, and five pies later, I tested the game to immediate success. It was the first and last time my battle-hardened playtesters were satisfied on the first run-though, and it did not take long to secure a contract for what would become the best-selling game of my modest career: Aber bitte mit Sahne

, Piece o' Cake

, Una pointe de Chantilly

, Sla je Slag (room)

…

The pies looked great on a table in a café and always attracted a crowd. Gamers found it to be an appropriate "filler", and best of all, scores of my friends who do not play games enjoyed it as well.

Making Games in a "Cult of the New" Industry

For better or worse, the industry has changed dramatically since I entered the hobby. Gamers have always been excited about new games, and a sharp increase in game publishers has met the demand. Admittedly, this has probably helped me find publishers for my game designs, giving me more options — but it also means that very few games remain in a publisher's catalogue for more than a couple of years. Thus, it was inevitable that sales for Piece o' Cake

would eventually decline and the game would disappear from the original publisher's catalogue.

The upside to the current state of the industry, however, is that a good game can be published again, sometimes with a new theme and even new variants. With this in mind, I began shopping the game around again after it was off the market for a few years.

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic534327_t.jpg]Shortly after releasing the original game, the publisher asked me to brainstorm ideas for an expansion to include in Spielbox

magazine. Because the original game was so streamlined, it was quite easy to come up with multiple ways of adding new twists and variety to the game. The Joker Slice

was chosen for the magazine: a slice that could be added immediately to any other flavor or eaten for 2 points.

The other expansions included combination slices that would count as a ½ slice for two different flavors, and slices with special actions or end-game bonuses on them, such as "You receive 1 bonus point for every different flavor you collect" or "You choose first on a future round". Since all of these ideas worked well and the publisher had no plans for a larger expansion, I posted them on BGG for fans of the game to print and play.

When I began pitching the game to publishers again, I went back and revised the expansions and included them in the pitch. The main change was that the special action slices were now tiles that could be placed with any group of slices.

A Different Kind of Pie

In 2016, Ted Alspach of Bézier Games

and I were chatting about doing a project together, and he suddenly remembered Piece o' Cake

and asked whether that was available. Soon he was testing and developing the game together with my expansions and was excited about the possibilities. His suggestion to change the theme to pizza was perfect and led to some brilliant production decisions: the expansion adding bonus actions and rewards would become the "daily specials", the rules would be printed as a fold-out menu, and a scoring pad would be included in the form of a restaurant check. And, of course, the game box art would look like a pizza box!

Although the theme is based on the thin, New York-style pizza, the game is deeper due to the new mechanisms, and it also offers more variety to each game. It's rewarding for me to see it in print again with all the extra "toppings", and even more so to see the attention to detail that Ted has given the game.

I hope that New York Slice

is a welcome main course for those who enjoyed the dessert of Piece o' Cake

, and best of all, that many new players will want to dig into the game — and the hobby — thanks to the update.

Jeffrey D. Allers

Crowdfunding Round-up: Impulsively Rise to Peak Apocalypse

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/641…ively-rise-peak-apocalyps

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3496684_t.jpg]• Here's an odd situation to lead off this crowdfunding round-up: Polish publisher Czacha Games

, which released a Polish edition of Carl Chudyk

's Impulse

in 2016 with fan-created art

by Zak Eidsvoog, is now releasing an English-language edition of their version of the game, along with two expansions — All Your Base

and Brake for Launch

— that have never before appeared in print. ( KS link

)

Original publisher Asmadi Games

is dropping Impulse

from their line and won't release the expansions in a style compatible with the first edition of the game, according to

Asmadi owner Chris Cieslik, who later wrote

, "The point at which it made sense to start considering printing the expansion is right about when they decided to go forward with a Polish version of the game with the fan-made artwork. It made it no longer worth pursuing for us, so we let them do what they wanted to." Did the publication of fan artwork on its own kill sales of the original release? Or was it the appearance of a non-English version with this artwork, similar to how people lavish praise on the Polish edition of Castles of Mad King Ludwig

and complain that Bézier Games won't release a version with this artwork. Perhaps there's a lesson in here for publishers about what licensees are allowed to do with new editions of games...

• Speaking of Asmadi Games, they're on KS with a project of their own: Invasion of the Garden Gnomes

, a revamped version of Reiner Knizia's majorities-based card game Vampire

that now contains 100% fewer vampires — so maybe I should have gone with "devamped" instead. ( KS link

)

• Another new title emerging from old is Hardback

, a "pre-quill" to Tim Fowers

' deck-building, word-building game Paperback

, and that pun makes sense only when you look closer at the game to discover that you're playing as 19th century author Penelope Quill. In any case, this game, co-designed with Jeff Beck, is both playable on its own and an expansion for Paperback

, and like most titles from Fowers Games

, it will not be available in regular retail stores. ( KS link

)

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3259102_t.png]• Tobias Gohrbandt and Heiko Günther's Peak Oil

from Spanish publisher 2Tomatoes

puts you in charge of a petroleum corporation that's trying to squeeze out as much profit as possible from the world's dwindling supply of oil, then plowing that money into new industries to exit the oil market while the getting is good. ( KS link

) We shot an overview video of the game while at the Festival International des Jeux in Cannes, France if you want to see the game in more detail:

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[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3446599_t.jpg]• Worker placement and resource management combine in King's Champion

from Jason Washburn and Talon Strikes Studios

, a 60-90 minute two-player game that's all about improving your knights so that you can outjoust the other guy. ( KS link

)

• Before you can joust, though, you might need to visit Smiths of Winterforge

so that you can have the right tools in hand. This design by Dylan Shearer, Aaron Sparke, Rule & Make

, and Table Tyrant Games

pits dwarven guilds against one another to get components to complete crafting contracts. ( KS link

)

• Mike Gnade of Rock Manor Games

is following up his 2016 debut title Brass Empire

with Maximum Apocalypse

, a "cooperative roguelike adventure game for 1-6 players" in which everyone needs to avoid monsters, collect gas, and drive to safety before another scenario begins. ( KS link

)

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3133483_t.jpg]• What do you get when you a cross a Norseman with a pirate? Vikingar

, a joke that makes sense only when said aloud in the right way, in addition to being a plundering/fighting/trading game from Jean-Thomas Rioux, Étienne Rioux, and JackBro Playful Creation

that will have you throwing runes on the way to Valhalla. ( KS link

)

• Emanuele Santandrea's latest title from his VentoNuovo Games

is Bloody Monday

, which recreates the Sept. 7, 1812 Battle of Borodino, which the publisher dubs "the single bloodiest day of the entire Napoleonic Wars period". ( KS link

)

• Are you looking for a game that contains "an educational workbook about stellar evolution and the history and mythology of constellations"? If so, then Constellations

from Dante Lauretta, Ian Zang, and Xtronaut Enterprises

might be your thing. Word is that it also contains a game in which you collect different star types to complete constellations, which will then tile the night sky. ( KS link

)

• "This could be the hottest dice/worker placement game in 2017!" That teaser pull-quote leads off the KS project for Rise to Nobility

from Vojkan Krstevski and Final Frontier Games

, and while that tagline must appeal to some — given this project's $124k take in its first five days — I feel somewhat like we've fallen down a hole if that jargon is meant to appeal to people at large. Then I look above at some of the descriptions I've used to describe these games, and I see that I'm in that same hole. How about this instead? "Become a lord and take your seat at the Stone Council of Caveborn." ( KS link

)

Editor's note: Please don't post links to other Kickstarter projects in the comments section. Write to me via the email address in the header, and I'll consider them for inclusion in a future crowdfunding round-up. Thanks! —WEM

Game Preview: Reworld, or Shape the Ships into Shipshape Order

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/643…hape-ships-shipshape-orde

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic152084_t.jpg]In addition to the previously announced Frogriders

and Ghost Catchers

(preview videos here

and here

), German publisher eggertspiele

has a number of titles in various stages of development, including a new Wolfgang Kramer

and Michael Kiesling

title for SPIEL 2017 that's all about terraforming a non-Martian planet for fun and profit.

In Reworld

, 2-4 players each attempt to terraform a newly discovered planet on their own, and to do that they need to use terrabots to establish new cities and shuttles to deliver materials that will populate those locations. I've played the prototype once — entirely bungling my terraforming efforts in the process, mind you — so let me give you a rundown of this typically tactical eggertspiele design that will challenge you to think from front to back in a new way.

Over five rounds, players fill the five levels of their spaceship with tiles featuring terrabots, shuttles, material vessels, and satellites. Each round, twenty of these tiles are placed at random around the perimeter of a large mother ship, and each player receives a hand of 7-13 cards depending on the number of players. On a turn, a player can play one or more cards to claim a tile following these rules:

• If neither tile adjacent to the desired tile has been claimed, the player can lay down any card next to this tile, claim it, then place it in the leftmost space of the level of their spaceship that matches the number of the card played. If you play a 4, for example, then you must place that tile in the leftmost position of your spaceship's fourth level.

• If one tile adjacent to the desired tile has been claimed, then you must lay down a card of the same number used to claim that previous tile or any two cards of your choice (with those two cards thus serving as a joker). Whatever number is topmost on the card(s) played indicates the level of your spaceship on which you must place this tile.

• If both tiles adjacent to the desired tile have been claimed and the cards used to claim them show the same number, then you do the same as described above. If the cards have different numbers, however — e.g., 1 and 3 — then you must lay down the same two numbers (1 and 3), one matching number and any other two cards, or any four cards. You then place this tile on your spaceship in the same manner previously desired.

Once everyone has no cards in hand or cannot play further, the round ends. Any remaining tiles are thrown away, then you reset the board and deal out a new hand of cards. After five rounds, players now deploy these tiles onto the new planet, taking turns to deploy 1-3 of the leftmost tiles from the spaceship level of their choice to create their personal terraformed world. If you deploy a terrabot, which are labeled A-E, you start a new city with this letter or extend an existing city of yours. Material vessels, which come in five colors, can be delivered to the planet's surface only if attached to shuttles, and each city can have vessels of only a single color. Satellites provide bonus scoring when added to a city. Shuttles and satellites can also be used for shields to protect your newborn planet.

Players earn points during the first half of the game for picking up terrabots and having cards left in hand. (You'd rather acquire tiles, of course, but at least you receive a compensatory point for each card wasted.) During the second half, players score for deploying satellites and for meeting targets set at the start of the game, e.g. being the first to have a city with eight tiles in it, have a city of each letter, empty a level on your spaceship, have a certain number of shields, score a certain number of points, etc.

Once all the spaceships are empty, players score their final points for how well they've developed each city and their shields in comparison with their fellow terraformers. Whoever scores the most points wins!

At first blush, Reworld

might remind you of programming games such as RoboRally

, Space Alert

, Colt Express

, but the game challenge is more along the lines of you loading a handful of moving trucks. Whatever you place into the truck first is likely going to come out last, so if you start a level with an E terrabot, you need to keep in mind that (a) you won't reach that terrabot until you deploy everything to its left first and (b) you can't place anything to the left of this terrabot into your E city unless you have another E terrabot somewhere else on your spaceship that will be deployed first.

As everyone knows, you want to load the bedframes, mattresses and sheets last, but sometimes you can't help it. In Reworld

, Kramer and Kiesling have baited the hook with more points for loading terrabots in the early rounds — and sometimes you just don't have the cards for anything else — so you take a terrabot anyway and leave worries about planting it until later.

Everyone cursed their hand of cards at one point or another during our demo game, partly because others occupied spaces that would require you to pay cards you didn't have (thus upping your costs) and partly because you didn't want to place tile X on level Y. You squirmed and screwed up your nose, sometimes grabbing a second-best tile and sometimes just plopping a tile on the level anyway and letting that worry meter ratchet up a little higher.

Satellites push players in different directions — I want a lot of red materials; she wants a long city; he wants shields — which then has us valuing tiles in different ways, but they're all jumbled together anyway, so we're often going to have to step on toes or overpay to get what we want. The goal tokens counter this push toward diversity as we're all competing for these bonus points, while simultaneously knowing that we can't grab them all, so we just need to make sure that we do certain things one turn faster than everyone else in order to take more bonuses than others.

While getting the rules rundown, I missed the line about shuttles being required to move materials to the planet. I thought shuttles just let you bring down more materials in one go, with you deploying slower without them, but no, your materials will just be jettisoned into space if you can't dock them shuttleside. Don't make this same mistake; fight for shuttles early and often, while still keeping in mind that if you have nothing good to shutt, then they're not worth that much in the long run unless you want to end up with a bazillion shields protecting a terramalformed planet...

New Game Round-up: Evolution Goes Deep and Ticket to Ride Returns to Germany

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/643…goes-deep-and-ticket-ride

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic2558560_t.jpg]• North Star Games

has two items in the works related to its popular Evolution

board game. First, as noted on the iOS Board Game blog

, North Star is working on a digital version of the game and is taking sign-ups for alpha testers

of a desktop-only version through April 22, 2017 (with tablet and phone versions to come). North Star had a test version of digital Evolution

at PAX East in March 2017, and I played a few rounds, finding the system quite intuitive, despite me having next-to-no digital gaming experience.

Second, former North Star employee Nick Bentley

is working on a standalone spinoff game that bears the working title Evolution: The Oceans

. As Bentley explains in his introduction to the game

, Evolution

players have long been interested in exploring deep waters with their card-created creatures, but (1) North Star first wanted to create expansions for the existing game, which it did with Flight

and Climate

, and (2) they couldn't figure out a good way to integrate oceanic creatures with land-based ones given that their evolutionary traits would not mesh in any meaningful way.

After leaving North Star, however, Bentley crossed paths with marine biologist Brian O’Neill, and they melded minds to figure out what Evolution: The Oceans

should be look should such a game exist. They now have a licensing agreement with North Star to make the game happen and plan to deliver the design to the publisher by Gen Con 2017 in August so that North Star can develop it ahead of a Kickstarter in Q2 2018 and a scheduled release at Gen Con 2018. Time to start that convention preview!

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic1420706_t.jpg]• Zug um Zug: Deutschland

, first released in 2012 in Germany and Austria by Days of Wonder

as a replacement for Alan R. Moon

's Ticket to Ride: Märklin

, is finally coming to the U.S. and the rest of Europe. What's more, Ticket to Ride: Germany

will include the extra tickets and the passenger tokens from the Deutschland 1902

expansion for Zug um Zug: Deutschland

.

To clarify, Ticket to Ride: Märklin

used the basic Ticket to Ride

formula of collecting cards to claim train routes and score tickets when you connect certain cities. To that vanilla cake, it added a passenger mechanism in which three times during the game you could move a passenger token along routes that you had claimed to collect city tokens which decreased in value as more passengers visited a city. The mechanism added tension to the base game since you wanted to build up long connected routes in order to hit as many cities as possible, but at the risk of having others move passengers first and taking more valuable tokens. The drawback was that you had to set up stacks of wobbly tokens all over the board prior to play.

Zug um Zug: Deutschland

stripped out the passenger mechanism and left only the map of Germany and accompanying tickets. Deutschland 1902

then added passengers back in, but in a new way. At the start of the game, players added one colored passenger to most cities and up to five in others. Whenever a player places a route on the board, they claim a passenger from the two cities that form the endpoints for that route (assuming that the passengers have not already been claimed). At the end of the game, whoever has the most passengers of each of the six colors scores 20 points for that color; whoever has the secondmost passengers in a color scores 10 points. Whoever has the most points at the end of the game wins.

The ticket count of Ticket to Ride: Germany

doesn't seem to exactly match that of the Deutschland

base game and expansion, but it's close. In any case, Ticket to Ride: Germany

is scheduled to be available in June 2017 in Europe and to debut at Gen Con 2017 in August, with a €44/$50 MSRP.

New Game Round-up: Attract Visitors to Your Bear Park, and Be the Best Demon Lord in Halloween

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/643…sitors-your-bear-park-and

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3508448_t.jpg]• Dutch publisher Quined Games

has announced the 20th title in its Master Print Edition series: Angelo de Maio

's 2-4 player miniatures game Halloween

, which will have a Kickstarter funding campaign ahead of its expected October 2017 release date. Here's a short description:

It's Halloween — time to haunt poor unfortunate humans who think the holisday is all fun and games, but wait until you unleash ghosts upon this little town. Use your knowledge and wit to summon ghosts, move them around town, scare people, and even fight other ghosts because only one demon lord can boast of being the scariest demon lord of them all.

Halloween is a tactical game for 2 to 4 players in which you take on the role of a demon lord that controls the many ghosts on the board. Carefully plan your actions through a unique mechanism that allows you to manage multiple ghosts to try to outwit your opponents. Summon ghosts, move them round the board, fight other ghosts, or use one of the numerous action cards that can give you great tactical advantage.

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[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3196304_t.jpg]• We missed out on featuring Upper Deck Entertainment

in our 2017 GAMA Trade Show coverage as we never heard back following our request for news of upcoming titles — it's hard to feature what you don't know! — but UDE has a number of titles in the works for 2017, including Dungeon Draft

, a card-drafting game from Ascension

designer Justin Gary. The description is meager so far, but it's enough to set the table for the game: "Over the course of multiple rounds, players draft heroes and weapons, then use them to defeat monsters and complete quests in an effort to earn the most victory points. As with any good drafting game, the choice between helping yourself or hindering an opponent is always in play..."

Dread Draw

, from Ryan Miller

, is a strategy card game of "press-your-luck competitive fortune-telling" for 2-5 players due out in July 2017 that bears this short description: "The game pits players against each other trying to summon cards. As play escalates, players run the risk of elimination. Will you be the last one standing? Will fortune smile on you?"

Miller is also the designer of Pack of Lies

, a noir fantasy originally announced at Gen Con 2015 for release in 2016 and now bumped to a 2017 release. Two other original titles announced in 2016 and due out in 2017 are Mike Elliott

's RPS-style The Dingo Ate The Baby

and Richard Launius and Pete Shirey's Shark Island

, for which BGG shot an overview video

at Origins 2016.

Quest for the Antidote

is a 2-6 player game bearing this description and no other details:

You and the other players have been poisoned by the mad king! Armed with only your wits and a list of antidote ingredients, you must battle the wilds, monsters, and your fellow players to be the first to return to the apothecary with the items you need.

Each turn in Quest for the Antidote, players roll dice to move their pawns around the board in search for the specific ingredients that are scattered across the land. Monsters of varying difficulty block your path, but each victorious die roll may yield powerful items.

Do not dally as time is of the essence. Every move and roll of the dice will deplete your fading life in your quest for the antidote!

In terms of its licensed games, in addition to the previously announced Legendary: Buffy The Vampire Slayer

, due for release at Gen Con 2017, and the already released Legendary: Noir

, Upper Deck will release Legendary: X-Men

in June 2017, with this being a large set featuring nothing but X-Men-related heroes.

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[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3486218_t.jpg]• Mayfair Games

has announced a trio of games with a June 30, 2017 U.S. release date: a new edition of Uwe Rosenberg

's Glass Road

(with minor tweaks, I believe, to prevent the infinite cycling that could rarely happen in the original release); a new edition of Darwin Bromley

and Tom Wham

's Iron Dragon

, this being a fantasy-based take on Empire Builder

's pick-up-and-deliver game system; and Phil Walker-Harding

's Bärenpark

, a tile-laying game that, yes, will have the same German name on both the German and U.S. editions of the game. Consider this an experiment from Mayfair Games.

The latter two games will debut at the 2017 Origins Game Fair ahead of their retail release, while Glass Road

will be available only for demo games at that show, not for purchase.

I played Bärenpark

at PAX East 2017 and thought that I had written something about it, but a search of the archives shows that my mind has tricked itself once again. Clever, that mind — just not in the right way!

In the game, players each run their own bear park, and they want to build it up from scratch to be as point-rich as possible. To do so, you want to have the first tile of the various types — forests, tunnels, icy pools, etc. — since audiences are easily jaded, and the more that they've seen something, the fewer points you'll score. If you group certain tiles together, you'll score bonus points for creating something so awesome that newspapers far and wide will include your park in their annual destination guides.

In terms of the actual gameplay, each player starts with a 4x4 tile that has a few construction symbols on it — a wheelbarrow, a cement mixer, a manhole, and men at work — along with a single tile. On a turn, you place a tile from your reserve somewhere on your board, then take one tile from the common reserve for each symbol you cover; covering a wheelbarrow nets you a small common tile (covering 1-3 spaces) worth no points, while covering a cement mixer gets you one of the four basic types (covering 4 spaces) worth a few points. Cover an excavator, and you get one of the sweet pentomino tiles. Cover the workers, and you're rewarded with a new 4x4 board, with each player taking at most three such boards.

As soon as you cover all but the manhole cover, you cap that tile with a manhole worth 16 points minus however many other manholes have already been covered. Yes, park visitors even tire of admiring manhole covers, the louts.

Once someone has finished covering their fourth board, players collect bonus points based on how well they met the randomly chosen scoring categories, similar to the Lookout Games title Isle of Skye

. Then everyone tallies their points and gives the winner a bear hug.

New Game Round-up: Reliving the Middle Ages in Twenty Minutes, and Reading the Path of Light and Shadow

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/644…iddle-ages-twenty-minutes

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic1653744_t.jpg]• German publisher Hans im Glück

has (at least) two items on its release schedule for SPIEL 2017 in October, with one of them being an expansion for The Voyages of Marco Polo

from designers Simone Luciani and Daniele Tascini. Moritz Brunnhofer, the HiG representative I spoke with, gave no details other than that an expansion is coming, but BGG users are speculating on what it might contain

should you care to join them.

The other item coming from HiG is a Marc André

design tentatively titled Middle Ages

, with this game bearing the distinctive micro-action hallmark of earlier André designs such as Splendor

, Barony

, and Sail Away

.

In this game for 2-4 players, each player has a set of eight tiles that represent their city. A deck of cards is shuffled, then six cards laid out in a row, with each card showing one or two symbols that match seven of the city tiles. (The eighth tile is a graveyard of sorts, and no one puts anything in there willingly!) On a turn, a player takes one of the cards in the row, paying for each card they skip, then they add this card to their city, earning a benefit based on the matching tile where the card is placed. Some cards give you money (which equals points at the end of the game), some let you attack everyone else, some give you defense against attacks, some pull cards from the graveyard, and some give you more buying tokens so that you can take the card you want and not whatever is at the front of the line.

Players take twelve cards total, then the game ends and players score points for having the most of a card type for each of the seven types as well as a diversity bonus for having lots of different types of cards. Majority vs. variety is the basic tug-of-war at play in many games, and it works well here, with the desire for variety having you look inward while the need for a majority has you look at everyone else — not to mention the need for defense.

I played Middle Ages

twice, and I wish that Brunnhofer hadn't told me the designer's name as I'm sure that I could have guessed it given how streamlined and bite-sized everything was. One explored aspect of the game during those plays is that the city tiles are double-sided, so once you have experience with side A, you can try side B to relearn the game all over again. Brunnhofer stressed that players use all side A or side B tiles and don't mix-and-match them, but once you take the game home, you can do as you like, of course. Just don't expect Hans im Glück to answer any rule questions about your illicit set-up...

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[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3509530_t.png]• Travis R. Chance

, co-designer of Path of Light and Shadow

from Indie Boards & Cards

with Nick Little

and Jonathan Gilmour

, has started posting a series of articles about the origins of the game, its central choice between being cruel or merciful

(which drives your interaction with those you recruit from the provinces), how culling works

, and the nature of the nomadic Hordes of Zurd, which "drag with them the Mother Stone, a massive black rock that fell from the sky before their time".

• Tasty Minstrel Games

has picked up Jesse Li

's The Flow of History

, first published by Moaideas Game Design in 2016, with a Kickstarter funding campaign planned for April 2017. Jesse Li stopped by the BGG booth at SPIEL 2016, where we recorded an overview of this card-based civilization-building game

.

• TMG is also releasing a new edition of Hisashi Hayashi

's Okey Dokey

, a cooperative card game first released by the designer's OKAZU Brand in which players try to assemble a music festival by placing the fifty performers in the ten available columns.

New Game Round-up: Automata Comes to Noir, Witches Come to America's Aid, and Port Royal Comes to the U.S.

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/644…omes-noir-witches-come-am

by W. Eric Martin

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[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic1790789_t.jpg]• People have been asking for months, if not years, when Alexander Pfister

's Port Royal

will be released in the U.S., and for nearly as long German publisher Pegasus Spiele

has answered that someone had licensed the game and any announcements are in the hands of that licensor.

Now Steve Jackson Games

has revealed itself

as that licensor and announced an August 2017 release date for its edition of the game, and while I can understand a publisher wanting to put its own spin on a game — doing something to make sure the game fits in their catalog — I'm baffled as to why SJG has gone with that cover art while keeping the Klemens Franz artwork inside the hood. Seems like a mismatch, but I haven't been in business publishing games for nearly forty years, so maybe I'm overlooking something that SJG knows better.

• Want to playtest a Caverna

expansion? Alex Wilber, who in August 2016 uploaded files on BGG containing fourteen (!) new races for use in Caverna

other than the default dwarves, says

that he's now working with Lookout Games

on an expansion tentatively planned for release in the first half of 2018. For details on how to get involved, head to this post on BGG

; for details on the expansion itself, you must wait.

• Along similar lines, Cheapass Games

has posted a rough version of Rochi

, a gambling game from James Ernest

and Sonia Lyris that will be featured in Lyris' next fantasy novel. Here's a short description from Cheapass: " Rochi

is a gambling game for 2-8 players, played with a Tarot-style deck with six suits of different sizes. It's a new deck design for us, and it's a whole new way to think about how gambling games should work. There is no betting, very little bluffing, and six different pots!"

The window to provide playtesting feedback closed on March 31, 2017, but if you want to download the current rules and components

, you can still try the game ahead of its release later in 2017.

• In mid-2017, Atlas Games

will release Craig Stockwell

's Witches of the Revolution

, a 1-4 player cooperative deck-building game in which the player witches must play a decisive role in aiding the colonies during the American Revolution. We recorded an overview of the game during the 2017 GAMA Trade Show if you want to see it in action:

• Near the end of 2017, Level 99 Games

plans to release Automata NOIR

, a new version of D. Brad Talton, Jr.

's NOIR

that features the world and characters from the Automata

comic created by Penny Arcade's Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins. The game will still be based on hidden identities and deduction, with updated versions of the "Killer vs. Inspector", "Hitman vs. Sleuth", and "Spy Tag" game modes, along with two new game modes: "Buddy Cop" and "Dragnet".

Links: Sales Figures from Asmodee and Steve Jackson Games, and an Unrivaled Opportunity to Play to Win

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/643…ee-and-steve-jackson-game

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3507567_t.jpg]• In mid-March 2017, French investment company Eurazeo posted a report ( PDF

) of its 2016 fiscal year, and that's of interest to gamers given that Eurazeo owns game publisher Asmodee

, which itself consists of Fantasy Flight Games

, Days of Wonder

, Z-Man Games

, and several other publishing brands. Here's the Asmodee section of its report:

ASMODEE (fully consolidated)

■ Continued robust organic growth and an ongoing international acquisitions policy

In 2016, Asmodee posted revenue of €377.2 million, up +39.5% on a reported basis compared to the previous year, and solid organic growth of +18.5% at constant scope and exchange rates.

This growth was spurred by all product lines and regions: international activities now represent 75% of Group revenue, particularly in the US and the UK. The year was marked by a particularly robust performance in the cards segment, driven by Pokémon which benefited from favorable trends in all the Group’s European countries.

The Group's EBITDA totaled €65.2 million, resulting in a 17.3% margin. EBITDA increased by +57.5% on a reported basis and +23.7% at constant scope and exchange rates.

Asmodee is also pursuing its strategic initiatives: enhancement of its editorial contents in all regions and on all media, ramp-up in new regions, primarily the US, and creation of its digital platform offering.

Pro forma of the external growth transactions carried out at the end of 2016 (F2Z, Heidelberger, Millenium and Edge), revenue in 2016 totaled €402 million and EBITDA amounted to €78.1 million, i.e. a +19.4% margin.

Net financial debt totaled €223.6 million following the June 2016 refinancing and the acquisitions at the end of 2016, i.e. a leverage now lower than 3.0x EBITDA.

Eurazeo is a shareholder in 34 companies. (HT: Sebastian Wenzel)

• To follow up on this April 2017 post

about Catan Days 2017, Asmodee North America has announced that "due to an unforeseen circumstance" Catan Days has been postponed, with a new date still to be announced at a later date.

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic202458_t.jpg]• Phil Reed has posted Steve Jackson Games

' annual stakeholder report for 2016

, which always provides fascinating insight into one of the longest-lived U.S. game publishers still active on today's market. An excerpt:

2016 was a challenging time for many of us in the office. It was our second year in decline, with gross income just over $6 million. Additionally, this was the first year in over a decade that we showed a loss. Our insistence on perfection resulted in our two biggest planned releases — the Munchkin Collectible Card Game and Car Wars Sixth Edition — being pushed back (keep reading for more information on both of these games). That meant our time invested in both games did not benefit the bottom line in 2016, and that led to lower than expected revenue. Fortunately, our management team saw early enough in the year that these games would miss 2016 that we kept our cash flow stable and avoided potential cash crunches. Our cash flow report — first mentioned by Steve in the 2010 report — continues to protect us from unexpected harm.

• On March 31, 2017, Identity Games

managing director Erik Spindler transferred his shares of the company to new owners. To quote from the press release: "With a number of global titles like Escape Room: The Game

, Poopyhead

and the original Mouthguard Challenge

, this is a good time for Spindler to take on a new challenge. Founder and managing partner Albert Meuter and managing director USA Emile Kalis, as well the new shareholders" — Jeroen Nugteren (General Manager International) and Jan-Maurits Duparc (Chief Creation) — "are now the new management. Jelle Marcus is the new manager for tailor made games."

• Want to watch players compete in tabletop games for money? Oomba

hopes so, Oomba being "a specialized social media company that is creating an interactive social network for tournaments, leagues and teams".

The specific event that Oomba has created is the Unrivaled Tournament Series

, which features six games — Munchkin

, Ascension

, King of Tokyo

, Nevermore

, Villagers & Villains

, and Epic Spell Wars of the Battle Wizards: Rumble at Castle Tentakill

— for which 284 retail stores will hold satellite tournaments through June 2017, ahead of regional tournaments from July through September and the finals in October 2017 in Las Vegas. Oomba promises $250,000 in cash and prizes for those who make the grand final, with sanctioned satellite venues receiving payouts matching those of their players, thereby giving them an incentive to host in the first place (beyond, of course, simply encouraging people to come to their store).

An excerpt from a Forbes article

about Oomba and the Unrivaled tournament series:

"Unrivaled is a celebration of social aspects of tabletop gaming," says [Oomba CEO Michael] Williams. The company and its partners are betting that the excitement generated by the tournament gets more people into the world of tabletop games, and generates greater outside attention to the marketing, sponsorship and engagement opportunities for organized play. If their strategy pays off, it may open a whole new field of play for the esports model and a new point of engagement for the fan economy that has taken over popular culture.

New Game Round-up: Level Up with Super Mario, and Play Games with Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick and Morty

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/645…r-mario-and-play-games-ri

by W. Eric Martin

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[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic2461346_t.png]• Games come and go for any number of reasons, but sometimes they come back, whether through deep love for an out-of-print classic or through the fortunate juxtaposition of design and marketing, the latter of which is the case for Super Mario: Level Up! Board Game

. USAopoly

has taken Stefano Luperto

's King Me!

— first published in 2004 by dV Giochi, which was called "daVinci Games" at that time — and married it with the world of Super Mario

, which makes perfect sense given that players each have secret candidates that they're trying to move up the charts, and these characters level up during the game in order to score you more points. When a character reaches the top of the charts, everyone votes on whether that character can stay or not; if it does, the round ends and players score points based on where their characters stand.

Interesting to see a game more than a decade old that will be new for most people who play it, but that's pretty much the case for all hobby games that reach the mass market...

• In a mid-April 2017 post

, I mentioned a forthcoming expansion for The Voyages of Marco Polo

that Hans im Glück intends to debut at SPIEL 2017 in October. Folks asked in the comments about availability of the base game (and other HiG titles) in English, so I reached out to Steve Kimball, head of the Z-Man Games

studio within Asmodee North America. Kimball says that a reprint of the Marco Polo

base game has been ordered and it should be available no later than October 2017 when the expansion is scheduled to debut.

As for other titles, Kimball says, " Stone Age

is reprinted fairly regularly, and it looks like the next print run should arrive in Q3 [2017]." For Russian Railroads

, the news is not so good, and Kimball provide back-up detail to explain the situation: "In order to obtain the volume necessary to make a reprint viable, Hans im Glück obtains interest from their publishing partners about which titles are selling well enough to warrant a reprint. Once there is sufficient demand from enough territories, HiG schedules a reprint. At the moment, there is no reprint scheduled for Russian Railroads

."

This explanation matches what Sophie Gravel, former owner of Z-Man Games, told me years ago about why The Palaces of Carrara

never went back to print in English. Copies were plentiful in other languages, which would mean that Z-Man Games would be paying on its own for a tiny print run (with a resulting higher per copy cost), which would mean that Z-Man would need to sell a higher percentage than usual just to make back its costs — so rather than risk seeing inventory pile up in the warehouse, you express regrets to potential buyers and move on to the next thing. Witch's Brew

suffered the same fate, with English-language copies selling for a mint and people begging Rio Grande Games to publish more while German-language copies were hitting clearance bins. Game publishers tend to be conservative, and the ever-increasing number of titles hitting the market will only make them more so, given that the spotlight window for new titles seems increasingly flighty.

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3510969_t.png]• Speaking of flighty, I tweeted cover pics of these games at NY Toy Fair, but never covered them here in more detail. As it did in 2016, Cryptozoic Entertainment

plans to release two licensed Rick & Morty

games in 2017, with each game being inspired by a particular episode in the series. Matt Hyra

's Rick and Morty: Close Rick-Counters of the Rick Kind Deck-Building Game

uses the Cerebus deck-building engine seen in other Cryptozoic titles, but the hook for the game is that each player is a different version of Rick, and you'll face off against one another as in the episode. In more detail:

Each player's deck starts with the following cards: seven Genius Waves cards that give you Power, one Beth, one Jerry, and one Summer. The Beth, Jerry, and Summer cards do nothing, but can activate other cards. The "Kick" stack in other Cerberus games is now the Portal Gun stack. The Portal Gun activates the Portal deck, which transports a player's hero to a random location from the episode or other popular places from the series. That player may then utilize that location during their turn and has the option of paying the cost of the location to put it into their deck.

The other title, due out July 12, 2017, is Rick and Morty: Anatomy Park

, a tile-laying game with the following description:

Based on the hilarious "Anatomy Park" episode, each player in Rick and Morty: Anatomy Park attempts to construct the world's greatest theme park inside of a homeless guy named Reuben. Players build while battling both monstrous diseases and fellow park-builders with creative differences concerning how the park should be laid out. The object of the game is to score points by placing your park tiles into the best spots within the body. Move your character pawn around the park to scout out the best locations and stay away from (or shoot) the monster diseases that will pop up and cause chaos. Whoever has the most victory points wins and is the master builder of Anatomy Park!

BGG shot an overview of this game at the 2017 GAMA Trade Show if you want to get a taste for it in action:

New Game Round-up: Chimera Reborn, Colonists Rerun, and Questions Rephrased

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/645…eborn-colonists-rerun-and

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic1958140_t.png]• Games cycle on and off the market quickly these days, with many games then returning to the market in a new form. One example of this phoenix-like rebirth is Chimera and More

, a new version of Ralph H. Anderson

's Chimera

, which was published by Z-Man Games in 2014.

Chimera

is a shedding card game along the lines of Tichu

, but for precisely three players, and in each round players will bid for the right to be chimera, with the other two players then teaming up to try to keep the chimera from exiting the round first. The game has lots of possible card combinations — pairs, triples, sequences of pairs or triples, triples with one attached card, etc. —and for more details, I refer to this preview

I wrote in April 2014.

Chimera and More

includes the basic Chimera

game for three players, but it adds two additional suits of cards so that the game is also playable with exactly five players. Players bid to be chimera as before, but then the chimera will choose a partner, and this pair of players then competes against the remaining three, with the goal again being for the chimera to exit the round first or to keep this player from doing so. In the five-player game, each non-chimera player additionally receives a Q — a messenger bird — and once during the round a player can play their Q to throw the lead to any other player; alternatively, the Q can be played as any ranked card from 0 to 12.

Chimera and More

will be co-published by Eagle-Gryphon Games

and Anderson's own Flightless Goat Workshop, with the game hitting Kickstarter for funding on April 18, 2017.

• In early April 2017, Rio Grande Games

released Jeff and Carla Horger's Orient Express

, which was announced in early 2016. Scott Tepper of RGG says that Joshua Gerald Balvin's Oktoberfest

, Kris Burm's LYNGK

, and Donald X. Vaccarino's Temporum: Alternate Realities

should also hit the retail market before the end of April 2017, along with a restocking of Mac Gerdts' Concordia

.

Adds Tepper, "We are (slowly) working through the Dominion

expansions to update them to go along with the second edition base game and second edition Intrigue

. This has meant rewriting the rule books, and we're also updating the copy on all the cards to unify the text. We have already updated Hinterlands

and Prosperity

. The next one in the queue to be updated is Seaside

, which we should get in late May."

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[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3195482_t.jpg]• A Ravensburger

representative in Germany tells me that an English-language edition of Reiner Knizia's deck-building/exploration game El Dorado

will be released in the U.S. No word on a release date yet, but the German version was released in early April 2017 should you care to dive into the game now rather than later.

• On its website, Mayfair Games

has posted

"The Imperial Post", a solitaire scenario for Tim Puls's The Colonists

focusing on the Envoy Colony. In more detail: "Your goal is to establish relations with it and fully develop the relationship over the course of four eras, while also completing specific objectives in each Era."

• I've already shared a video overview

of Codenames Duet

, a cooperative version of Vlaada Chvátil's hit party game that will debut at Gen Con 2017 in August, but Czech Games Edition

has a number of other titles in the works as well.

That's a Question

, which is not the final title, is another party game from Chvátil, and the game takes the familiar format of challenging others with questions, then voting on what they'll say. In more detail, each player has a hand of hexagonal cards, with words or phrases in three color blocks on the card. On a turn, you choose a player that has a token in front of them, take that token, then present them with a question by choosing one of the three question prompts (which are all color-coded), then choosing two cards from your hand and adding the properly-colored section of those cards to the question. In the pic below, for example, the player has been presented with this question: "What would you miss more if it ceases to exist: Facebook or doors?" That player secretly votes on A or B, while everyone else but the questioner secretly votes A or B depending on how they think the person will answer; a voter can optionally add their 3x scoring token to their vote.

Once everyone votes, you reveal the tiles. Everyone who voted correctly moves ahead one or three spaces on the scoring track, and the questioner moves ahead one space for each person who voted incorrectly. If you pass a certain space on the scoring track, you retrieve your 3x token (if you've used it). Since you can ask a question only of those with a token in front of them, everyone is asked roughly the same number of questions, and whoever has the most points after a certain number of rounds wins.

Other titles in the works from CGE include:

—A science-fiction Eurogame tentatively titled Pleiades

that features an "interesting dice mechanism".

—An expansion for Adrenaline

that adds components for a sixth player, character-specific weapons, and rules for team play to the game.

—More leaders and wonders for Through the Ages: A New Story of Civilization

.

—A new player deck for Tash-Kalar: Arena of Legends

based on time travel.

Crowdfunding Round-up: Circle the Enemies of the Abandoned Morels Station to Combat Dungeon Genesis

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/645…-enemies-abandoned-morels

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic2982166_t.jpg]• Phil Eklund

's Bios: Genesis

from Sierra Madre Games

debuted at SPIEL 2016, and now he's on Kickstarter for the first time ever to fund a second edition of this "gaming from the dawn time" creation, which now features revised graphic design on the cards, placards, and rulebook, as well as "4 extra bionts" _ and who couldn't use a few more bionts now and then? Aside from a reprint of the "only board game recreating current scientific evidence behind the origins of life", Eklund offers word of his plans for 2017, mentioning that a new edition of Bios: MegaFauna

and Bios: Origins

(a reworking of Origins: How We Became Human

) are due for release in 2017, and the revised rules in Bios: Genesis

include a campaign mode that "allows you to start from the origins of life in Bios: Genesis

all the way to interstellar travel in the reprint of Bios: Origins

". ( KS link

)

• To continue our trip through human history, we jump to Enemies of Rome

from Grant Wylie, Mike Wylie, and Worthington Publishing

, which allows you to relive six hundred years of history in a couple of hours, with players leading Roman legions around Europe, northern Africa, and the Middle East to become Caesar and have people eat salads in your honor. ( KS link

)

• Paul Ali's Capere

from Playford Games

offers a far different take on the topic of Roman legions, presenting a seeming abstract strategy game that is actually driven by random card draws that determine the movement and abilities of your pieces, with you trying to capture opponents or reach their side of the board in order to score. ( KS link

)

• Columbia Games

' Combat Infantry

from Leonard Coufal and Tom Dalgliesh is a fast-paced World War II tactical level game that uses Columbia's hallmark wooden blocks and has been in the works for at least six years under various names. ( KS link

)

• Jumping to the future, in 2050 (Humans, We Have a Problem...)

, Alan Gallart of Fiction Non Fiction presents players with the challenge of sourcing renewable energy, changing business practices, and developing better environmental policy so that they can have better ice cap and glacier coverage on their place on Earth than any other player. ( KS link

)

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3506049_t.jpg]• Brent Povis of Two Lanterns Games

is funding an expansion for his well-regarded two-player game Morels

— now five years old! — with Morels Foray

, which includes rules for three- and four-player games, new components for use at all player counts, and fancy handcrafted bits that have not yet caused Povis to lose a finger, but with your support, it could still happen. ( KS link

)

• Another expansion in the offing comes from Vesuvius Media

, which released Constantine Kevorque's cooperative 4X science-fiction game Centauri Saga

in 2016. Centauri Saga: Abandoned

(which is subtitled "Season 1") is a legacy expansion for that game in which a number of scenarios can be played together in a larger campaign with the results of one game having ripple effects on future scenarios. Once you finish the campaign, two additional scenarios can be played on your legacied game board. The publisher emphasizes that the legacy element applies only to the expansion materials, not the components in the base game. ( KS link

)

• I like to feel that I'm on top of things and have some idea of what's going on the game industry, but I receive daily reminders that I'm missing out on many things, such as not knowing about the existence of Sam Coates' Dungeon Dice

, which Potluck Games

released in 2014. (The Dungeon Dice

I know about was released in the 1970s and my brother and I played that game at least one thousand times.) The more recent Dungeon Dice

is an adventuring game in which everything you do involves dice in some manner, with players acquiring lots of dice during play. Potluck is running a crowdfunding campaign for The Lost King

expansion, which it calls the final expansion, with the base game and the entire line also being available. ( KS link

)

• Mark Major's Chimera Station

— a worker-placement game in which the workers are aliens that you can modify during the game by combining different plastic bits — is on Kickstarter...again. Tasty Minstrel Games funded

an edition of the game in October 2016 ahead of a planned release in June 2017, and now Belgian co-publisher Game Brewer

is trying to fund additional versions of the game in European languages beyond English, French, German and Dutch. ( KS link

)

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[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3380851_t.png]• Button Shy

is back on Kickstarter with another trio of tiny games: Mint Julep

, a racing-and-betting game from Dan Letzring; That Snow Moon

, a Dave Chalker design in which rebel troops try to assemble forces on the table while the evil Dynasty tries to drop cards on the rebels to expose and remove them; and Circle the Wagons

, a design from Aramini, Devine, and Kluka that has you overlaying cards divided into four sections to build your own boomtown. ( KS link

)

• Daryl Andrews, J.R. Honeycutt, and CSE Games

are following the release of Fantasy Fantasy Baseball

with Fantasy Fantasy Football

, a game in which players serve as team managers who fill their roster with fantasy creatures, then hit the field. ( KS link

)

• Ben Mora's Wages of War: The Uncooperative Siege Game

from Mora Games

gives you the five-second summary in the title: Players are collectively sieging a castle, but they want to individually cause as much damage as possible since that's all the matters in the end — yet you can benefit from the actions of others along the way since you're all sieging elbow to elbow around the castle. ( KS link

)

• Petrichor

might have you searching for a definition in order to determine what the game might be about, but publishers Cloud Island

and Mighty Boards

have made things easy for you by placing the definition on the box itself: the pleasant earthy smell after rain. In this design by David Chircop and Dávid Turczi, you are the one responsible for that pleasant earthy smell because you are a cloud, and you want to float around, make more clouds, and rain on things to grow more plants than any other cloud. ( KS link

)

• Desginer Mitsuo Yamamoto of Logy Games

creates abstract strategy games from ceramic and wood in small print runs — typically with multiple versions so people can choose the images they want on the pieces — and his latest offering is a new version of Safari-Dual

, a two-player game in which players try to remove the opposing lion from play or else move their lion into the opponent's den. During play, you remove opposing animals by sandwiching them between two of your animals of the same type, with their animal becoming the meat in your sandwich. Yum. ( KS link

)

Editor's note: Please don't post links to other Kickstarter projects in the comments section. Write to me via the email address in the header, and I'll consider them for inclusion in a future crowdfunding round-up. Thanks! —WEM

New Game Round-up: Be Cryptically Clear in Decrypto, and Fight Ghosts Anew as a Treasure Hunter

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/646…ally-clear-decrypto-and-f

by W. Eric Martin

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[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic2838413_t.png]• At a recent gaming event, I ran into Christian Lemay of Le Scorpion Masqué

, and while I suppose we could have, you know, actually played games

, instead we talked about art, French literature, and one forthcoming game release: Thomas Dagenais-Lespérance

's Decrypto

, which Lemay anticipates releasing in early 2018 (although there's an outside shot of the game seeing publication in late 2017). Note that the cover artwork shown isn't final.

On later days at this event, I did see others

playing Decrypto

over and over again, with some saying it was their favorite game of the show. Here's what I missed out on and what we all can now anticipate:

Players compete in two teams in Decrypto, with each trying to correctly interpret the coded messages presented to them by their teammates while cracking the codes they intercept from the opposing team.

In more detail, each team has their own screen, and in this screen they tuck four cards in pockets numbered 1-4, letting everyone on the same team see the words on these cards while hiding them from the opposing team. In the first round, each team does the following: One team member takes a code card that shows three of the digits 1-4 in some order, e.g. 4-2-1. They then give a coded message that their teammates must use to guess this code. For example, if the team's four words are "pig", "candy", "tent", and "son", then I might say "child-mouth-tail" and hope that my teammates can correctly map those words to 4-2-1. If they guess correctly, great; if not, we receive a black mark of failure.

Starting in the second round, a member of each team must again give a clue about their words to match a numbered code. If I get 2-4-3, I might now say, "sucker-finger-grass". The other team then attempts to guess our numbered code — not the hidden words themselves, only the numbers! If they're correct, they receive a white mark of success; if not, then my team must guess the number correctly or take a black mark of failure. (Guessing correctly does nothing except avoid failure while giving the opposing team information about what our hidden words might be.)

The rounds continue until a team collects either its second white mark (winning the game) or its second black mark (losing the game). Games typically last between 4-7 rounds.

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[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3329975_t.jpg]• U.S. game publisher and manufacturer of other things Mattel

will be at Gen Con 2017 in August. Yes, Mattel! "As you know, the hobby market has really begun to grow recently", game designer Nick Hayes, who develops titles for Mattel, told me. "It's an exciting time for the gaming community, and we'd like to be a part of that." Mattel will debut Hayes' Wizards Wanted

at Gen Con, while also featuring Marc André's Sail Away

(which debuted in German at SPIEL 2016), and Brian Yu's Ghost Fightin' Treasure Hunters

, with a new mini-expansion for GFTH

being available at the show. Yu also designed this mini-expansion, which consists of four new gameplay variants that can be added to the base game.

• On May 25, 2017, Fully Baked Ideas

— the adults-only imprint of Looney Labs

— will release Stoner Loonacy

, a marijuana-themed version of Andy Looney's real-time card game Loonacy

. In the game, everyone has a hand of cards with two images on them. One or more face-up discard piles are started based on the number of players, then everyone free fires cards from their hand onto a discard pile as long as one of the images on their played card matches one of the images on the card on top of the discard pile. The first player out of cards wins.

Obviously the particular images in Loonacy

don't affect the gameplay, so you could make a version of the game with anything you like on the cards. On its website, Looney Labs has a page for what it calls " Game Store Loonacy

", with game stores being able to order custom copies of Loonacy

that feature the game store logo as one of the 22 images in the game, with the other images being somewhat generic game bits. These games could be used as giveaways during an event or a freebie if someone spends $X in the store. I'm confident that if you approached Looney Labs with 22 custom images, you could probably get them to manufacture an entirely custom version for you. Create your own wedding favors!

• Late news here, but in February 2017 Pegasus Spiele

announced that it would release select titles from Finnish publisher Lautapelit.fi

in German in addition to now handling all distribution of Lautapelit.fi titles in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. Rustan Håkansson's Nations: The Dice Game

will be the first such release — as Nations: Das Würfelspiel

naturally — in June 2017, with German-language versions of Eclipse

and Nations

due out before the end of 2017.

• In vaguely game-related news, in August 2017 Oni Press will debut the first issue of Dead of Winter

, a comic book based on the Plaid Hat Games title, with the comic featuring the exploits of Sparky the Stunt Dog. From the press release:

In the pantheon of heroes, none are more lovable and loyal than everyone's beloved good ol' dog, Sparky. Surviving in the wintery apocalypse of the undead, this former TV star turned zombie killing machine just wants to make friends and be a good boy. As his fellow survivors scavenge for supplies in the frigid wasteland, will Sparky be able to protect his companions from threats both undead and not yet undead?

Latin American New Game Round-up: Chasing Nazis, Treasures, and Rabbits

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/637…ound-chasing-nazis-treasu

by Hilko Drude As Latin American games are still fairly unknown outside their countries of origin, I have decided to do a Latin American new game round-up once in a while. If you have any news to share, please contact me (here or at gamenews at lidude dot net). Let's see how much interest there is for it.

Argentina

The Geek Out Festival

in Buenos Aires on the May 6, 2017 is the launch date for Corona de Hierro

("Iron Crown").

In this game by Franco Toffoli

, the players assume the roles of nobles in the days of Charles III, last emperor of the Carolingian Empire. They try to extend their power bases in the battle for succession. Power in this card-based board game is gained by laying siege to castles, sending emissaries to the Pope or foreign powers, or controlling important prisoners. When somebody reaches for the crown, the most powerful player wins the game. The game was illustrated by Luis María Dumont

and Emiliano Mariani

and will be published by El Dragón Azul

.

Another last minute announcement was made for the festival; it will also be the launch date for Geek Out! Masters

by Matias Saravia

, who was one of those geeks who triggered my interest in Latin American games. Geek Out! Masters

is a press-your-luck game using the dice from the Geek Out! logo

. The goal is to roll the number 42 (which is a die face) as often as possible. Other results can make this difficult by removing dice, flipping others over, or making you lose your entire score from the turn if you cannot remove them.

In the meantime, the three finalists for the Premio Alfonso X

have been announced. Aside from the well-received Conejos en el Huerto

and Mutant Crops

, La Macarena

made it into the finals. The judges had a lot to say about every participating game, and I agree to their assessment that La Macarena

's main drawback is its length (which my family has house-ruled a little), while they suspect that Conejos en el Huerto

might look deceptively like a children's game (not something that would ever have bothered me). I am certainly curious who will come out on top.

Brazil

Brazil has its own game award as well. It's called Prêmio Ludopedia

and there are two categories, one for the game of the year in general and another one for domestic games. In each category, there is a jury vote and a public vote. For the most recent awards this didn't matter as the jury and the public were in agreement. In the general Category, Terra Mystica

won — I guess most of you are familiar with it — and the domestic prize went to Space Cantina

by Fel Barros

und Warny Marçano

. Both designers have cooperated before, for instance with Sapotagem

which I had the pleasure to play last year (a similar concept to Pi mal Pflaumen

).

In Space Cantina

, which was illustrated by Lucas Ribeiro

and published by Ace Studios

, the players try to successfully manage a restaurant in a giant space station. Planning your menu can't be all that easy when your next customer might very well be a robot...

Chile

A much noted new release is D.50: Las Redes del Reich

("The Network of the Reich"), a partly cooperative game about Nazi spies who infiltrate Chile during WWII. One of the players is playing such a spy, while the others represent the police unit D.50 and try to put a stop to the spy's evil plan. The game is based on historical events and was sponsored by the Fondo Nacional para el Desarrollo Cultural y las Artes (FONDART), which could be translated as "National Foundation for Cultural Development and Arts". In Chile, the release date (April 15th) seems to be eagerly awaited. Publisher Cuatro Quesos

("Four Cheese") consists of three

people ( Diego Aravena

, Isadora Cárdenas

and Wladimir Gárate

) as well as "fun and creativity".

Careta

("Mask") is a game by Nico Valdivia Hennig

, released by Niebla Games

on March 30, 2017. Niebla Games is currently working on a computer game named Causa

, and Careta

is set in the same fantasy universe. Says Valdivia:

Careta was born with the desire to simulate the experience that traditional games are known for. This is why we’ve drawn inspiration from traditional games such as Truco, Cheat, and Liar's Dice to create a game that, despite its novelty, gives a sensation of an ancient tradition.

To accomplish this, it was decided to set the game in the vast universe of our most ambitious project: Causa, Voices of the Dusk. Within the world of Causa, Careta is one of the greatest legacies of the Rumah culture, an ethnicity loaded with mysticism that is known for its cleverness, seafaring mores, and their aptitude for business. Due to this, Careta holds this mystic character of the Rumah, serving not only as a game, but also a tool for divination and narration of their most ancient traditions.
Careta

was illustrated by Thomas Heim

, Víctor Peña

, Julio del Río

and Sebastian Rodriguez

.

Another recent release is Los Tesoros del Rey Pirata

("The Treasures of the Pirate King") by Pablo Céspedes

and Víctor Hugo Cisternas

. Players are moving across an archipelago and collect treasure maps, which should ideally be as valuable as possible. Since the other players try the same, it is advisable to challenge them to duels or open fire outright (in order to be able to steal hand cards or treasures). To execute an action, you need a number, with the numbers being printed on the cards. If you need a specific number, you can discard a hand card with that number. If you are somewhat more adventurous, you may as well just draw a card from the stack and use whatever number comes up. Illustrations are by Dan Rodriguez

, and the publisher is Ludoismo

.

Costa Rica

There She Is!!

is the name of a mini-series of five short Korean films about the love of a rabbit and a cat who try to overcome the resentment and racism of society at large. (You can watch it here

.) Strange stuff, but it's got its fans; in Costa Rica, for example, where iN'sanity Games

has dedicated its second game to the series. Players cooperatively try to help the unusual couple. A Kickstarter campaign is being prepared for it. As until a few days ago, I had never heard of the films, I cannot judge the size of the target group, but the looks of this are so unusual that I'll keep an eye on it. It will be published in Spanish, Korean and English. The designer is Yo Leiten

.

Hasbro Links Round-up: Q1 Revenue, Quarterly Gaming Crate, and Corporate Citizen Status

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/647…enue-quarterly-gaming-cra

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic1015189_t.jpg]• Hasbro

has issued a revenue report for Q1 2017

, noting that revenues are up 2% — $849.7 million vs. $831.2 million — compared to Q1 2016. Net earnings compared to Q1 2016 are up 41%: $68.6 million vs. $48.8 million. These increases follow Hasbro's record-setting 2016, the first year that it topped $5 billion in net revenues

. From the press release:

"Our first quarter results are in line with our previously communicated expectations and we are well positioned to execute against 2017's rich content slate and diverse new initiatives," said Brian Goldner, Hasbro's chairman and chief executive officer. "Revenue grew in the quarter and we drove strong consumer takeaway at retail, both compared to a robust first quarter last year and with a shift of Easter into this year's second quarter. Over the coming quarters, we are supporting significant new initiatives including major theatrical films for both Franchise and Partner Brands."

Hasbro Gaming posted 43% revenue growth to $142.9 million driven by Hasbro's diverse gaming portfolio. The strong revenue increase was led by several new games, including SPEAK OUT, TOILET TROUBLE and FANTASTIC GYMNASTICS, digital gaming, and several other gaming brands, including DUNGEONS & DRAGONS, BOP-IT and PIE-FACE. Hasbro's total gaming category grew 10% to $253.3 million.

Hasbro divides its products into four brands — Franchise Brands, Partner Brands, Hasbro Gaming, and Emerging Brands — and some of its game sales hide in the Franchise Brands category, as noted elsewhere in the press release: "Hasbro's total gaming category, including all gaming revenue, most notably MAGIC: THE GATHERING

and MONOPOLY

, which are included in Franchise Brands in the table above, totaled $253.3 million for the first quarter 2017, up 10%, versus $231.1 million in the first quarter 2016. Hasbro believes its gaming portfolio is a competitive differentiator and views it in its entirety."

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3525176_t.jpg]• To take advantage of its "competitive differentiator", in mid-2017 Hasbro will debut the Hasbro Gaming Crate

. Four times a year, Hasbro will ship subscribers who pay the $50 fee either a party or family-themed game crate that contains three games. An excerpt from a Fortune article

:

"We've seen the subscription trend and how strong it has become outside of our industry and we thought 'Gamers are into their games and they want to try new games all the time,' said Jonathan Berkowitz, senior vice president of marketing for Hasbro Gaming, in an interview with Fortune. "It is a perfect marriage for the gaming category." ...

Berkowitz explained that the party themed boxes will incorporate more "edgy" games that are ideal for adults, while the family crate is for all different ages and more inclusive. Hasbro built a new separate team within the broader Hasbro Gaming segment that will focus exclusively on the Hasbro Gaming Crate service. The idea is that all the games that will be shipped will be new — so consumers that order the crate won't be getting boxes of Candy Land and Jenga shipped to their homes.

The service is also a way for Hasbro to innovate at a faster pace than is typical for the industry.

In an interview with CNBC's Jim Cramer

, Hasbro Chairman and CEO Brian Goldner referred to the Hasbro Gaming Crate as "profitable experimentation" since those who buy the Crates are encouraged to give feedback on the titles, which might then make it into general distribution depending on the results.

What might you find in these new games? Nothing has been announced, but the Fortune

article includes this paragraph about how Hasbro turned around its games division after initially trying — and failing — to incorporate "tablet functionality" into its existing game brands:

One critical source of inspiration has been viral videos. Hasbro saw the web-driven buzz around the Pie Face game and bought the rights to manufacture and distribute the game after it became a viral hit. Other games that have been inspired by viral videos have included Egged On (based on a gag utilized by late-night host Jimmy Fallon), Flip Challenge (inspired by the bottle flipping trend on YouTube), and Speak Out (also inspired by viral web videos).

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3525208_t.png]• CR Magazine

has ranked Hasbro first in its annual list of the " 100 Best Corporate Citizens

", with the companies being ranked in these seven categories: environment, climate change, employee relations, human rights, corporate governance, financial performance, and philanthropy and community support. The "CR" in the magazine's title stands for "corporate responsibility". ( ranking PDF

)

• By chance, I recently ran across a 2016 article

in The Times

, a UK-based newspaper, that detailed how "women housed by the Good Shepherd Sisters in Waterford packaged board games for the global toy franchise Hasbro in return for 'pocket money' as recently as 2012". Excerpts from the article:

"In the 1980s, Hasbro entered into an agreement with the Good Shepherd Sisters in Waterford to provide materials for packaging by our residents," said the Good Shepherd Sisters in a statement. "The residents who participated in this activity were regularly given what was then known as their 'Hasbro money envelope'."

The Good Shepherd Sisters said that the order "in no way profited from this commercial relationship with Hasbro, which ended in 2012".

A former factory employee from Hasbro Ireland said her mother had been housed by the Good Shepherd Sisters and had also packaged Hasbro toys, but for "pocket money rather than wages".

The former employee, who asked not to be named, also claimed that the women who worked on the site of the Good Shepherd convent in Waterford worked longer hours than employees in Hasbro’s Waterford factory

When asked about its business relationship over three decades with the Good Shepherd Sisters in Waterford, [Hasbro] said that it had no direct commercial involvement with the order. Instead, the company said, it had a business relationship with Rehab, a charity that aims to help those with a disability in the workforce.

Julie Duffy, a spokeswoman for Hasbro Inc, said: "Rehab in Waterford, many years ago, approached Hasbro to provide small work tasks for the clients they serve. Hasbro viewed this as a community service."

Duffy said that, between 1999 and 2008, Hasbro paid Rehab approximately €25,000 a year.

New Game Round-up: Returning to Sailor Moon, Resetting Fantasy Defense, and Raising an Army of Alices

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/648…sailor-moon-resetting-fan

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3526662_t.jpg]• In 2001, Canadian company Guardians of Order

co-published a standalone expansion for James Ernest

's Button Men

that featured characters from the Sailor Moon

anime. Guardians of Order had previously released a Sailor Moon

RPG in 1998 and the Sailor Moon CCG

in 2000, so the partnership made sense, similar to how AEG partnered with DC Comics license holder Cryptozoic Entertainment to produce Love Letter: Batman

in 2015.

Fast forward to 2017: Cheapass Games has just launched a Kickstarter

for a new button-free version of Button Men

, now titled Button Men: Beat People Up

, which is due out in October 2017. Guardians of Order's Mark MacKinnon is now president of Dyskami Publishing Company

, which has just announced a "North American licensing arrangement with Toei Animation Inc. to design and distribute a line of tabletop board games based on the popular Japanese animation series Sailor Moon Crystal

", an anime series based on the original Sailor Moon

manga.

The first such title coming from Dyskami, due out Q3 2017, is Sailor Moon Crystal: Dice Challenge

, a 2-8 player dice game based on — wait for it! — James Ernest's Button Men

. Dyskami also plans to release the tile-passing-and-bluffing game Sailor Moon Crystal: Truth or Bluff

in late 2017, with more SMC

games to follow in 2018.

I think it's fair to point out that Guardians of Order went out of business in 2006, with many freelance creators accusing MacKinnon of using their work in GoO publications without paying them, then continuing to sell works following the closure of the business, again without paying them. MacKinnon presented his version of what happened to GoO

in 2013 when starting Dyskami and attempting to fund Upon a Fable

on Kickstarter, with many of those freelancers responding in that same BGG thread.

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3060153_t.jpg]

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3484589_t.jpg]• One of the many titles distributed by Japon Brand at SPIEL 2016 was Yoshiyuki Arai

's Defense Three Kingdoms

, a solitaire game in which a player had to defeat an invading army while losing defense forces to attrition in each combat and taking damage when avoiding combat. That game included a competitive two-player mode in which one player would take charge of the attacking forces to make the game's AI a little less A.

Now Sweet Lemon Publishing

and Mandoo Games

are partnering on a new version of the game titled Fantasy Defense

, with the game featuring new artwork by Yann Tisseron, a new cooperative two-player mode, a new setting (with humans and elves now partnering to defend against orcs), and a new "campaign" mode that unlocks new cards after meeting certain criteria in the game.

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic2080840_t.jpg]• To stay with Japanese games this post, let's look at Alicematic Heroes

, a new game from Kuro

that will be co-published by Japanime Games

and his own Manifest Destiny

. The game debuts at Tokyo Game Market in May 2017, with Japanime demoing the game at Origins 2017 in June ahead of its U.S. release. Here's an overview of the gameplay:

The Queen of Hearts has summoned Alice to rebuild Wonderland, which has been devastated by an invasion of Nothing, which is devouring the dreams of all in the land — but the Queen has mistakenly summoned whole armies of Alices! Dozens of Alices abound, and now they're taking sides and forming teams to see who can put the land back together best.

In Alicematic Heroes, you take charge of one of these teams, and you'll have a handful of Alices to use in your efforts. Alices come in five colors, with each player having a set of player boards in these five colors. On a turn, you first summon an Alice to your kingdom, playing that card from your hand onto the player board of the same color, but only if you can pay the cost in dream power; each Alice has a cost, and you must have at least this many dream cards (yellow) or be able to make up the difference by paying dream tokens. If you can, you immediately use the power — or Megalomania — of that Alice; if you can't, choose another card or lay an Alice face down as a commoner. Playing a commoner doesn't cost anything, lets you draw another card, and builds up the power of one of your five colors, but you don't get a Megalomania bonus and your turn ends immediately.

If you played an Alice, you can then invade a territory in the playing area, which is composed of modular hex tiles. To conquer the territory, you need enough military power (red cards) or supplemental military (red) tokens, and if the territory is not on a hex where you occupy a city, you must have enough food (green cards) or food tokens to reach that space. If you conquer it, you receive a bonus based on the territory's color: military, food or dream tokens; Alice cards; or points. If you conquer a city, you score points and now have a foothold on that hex.

If you lack enough military and food, you can still place the territory under attack and finish it off on a later turn, but another player can potentially conquer it in the meantime.

Mystic forests cannot be conquered until they're surrounded by player-controlled territories, and only the player(s) with the most controlled surrounding territories can then capture the forest, which has a toughness and point value equal to the number of surrounding territories.

The game ends after fourteen rounds, then players score points for having the most or secondmost territories controlled in each hex and for having the most Alices in any of the five colors. Players can also score points for Alice Megalomania effects, and whoever has the most points wins!

New Game Round-up: Fallout into a Pile of Miniatures, and Prepare for More Catacombs

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/648…le-miniatures-and-prepare

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic2041956_t.jpg]• The tabletopping of video games continues with the announcement of Fallout: Wasteland Warfare

by James Sheahan

and Modiphius Entertainment

, with this minis-heavy game being due out in November 2017. Here's the game info that's been announced so far:

In Fallout: Wasteland Warfare, players build their own crew from a wide range of factions, allies, and iconic characters from the Fallout series, then play in apocalyptic games of 3-30 high-quality 32mm scale resin miniatures through a huge variety of iconic scenery and settlement buildings, from the Red Rocket to Sanctuary Hills, Nuka-Cola vending machines and wrecked vehicles. Settlements include buildings, defenses, and resources that impact the crew's army list and abilities in the wasteland.

Fallout: Wasteland Warfare includes an entire narrative campaign arc as well as unique random missions with narrative-style objectives, and crew caps recovered in missions can be used to improve the crew's perks, weapons, gear, and upgrades for the next encounter. In either player vs. player or tournament mode, players try to survive the tabletop wasteland.

The game also comes with a customizable solo-play AI deck to control enemies that play to their strengths and replicate a faction's tactics while attempting a narrative mission or perfecting settlement-building strategy. Players can also team up with a friend to defend a larger settlement or explore narrative missions in cooperative games against AI forces or the post-apocalyptic dangers of the wasteland.

• Aron West from Elzra Corp.

has passed along a few updates about game availability and future plans. To start, reprints of both Catacombs (third edition)

and the Cavern of Soloth

expansion should be available "very soon". Second, West will be at Origins 2017 in June, and while he's not exhibiting, we are arranging to demo Catacombs & Castles

(on a production copy of the game) and the Catacombs: Wyverns of Wylemuir

expansion on camera. Notes West, "I was going to run a Kickstarter campaign for the Wyverns

title, but decided to release it directly to retail." Both Wyverns

and Catacombs & Castles

will be released in German by Schwerkraft-Verlag.

Third, Elzra Corp. no longer uses Impressions for distribution, but instead uses both Alliance and ACD in the U.S., Lion Rampant and Universal in Canada, and Brave New World in Germany, with talks underway for distribution in other European countries as well.

Finally, says West, "We have a number of titles in development, including a card game set in the Catacombs

world, an entry-level Catacombs

title, and a new dexterity-based game line in conjunction with Jasco Games

." Should you want to check out their offerings new and old, Elzra Corp. will have a presence at Gen Con in the Jasco Games booth and at SPIEL 2017 with Schwerkraft-Verlag.

• Designer Tom Lehmann says

that the next Roll for the Galaxy

expansion will be titled Rivalry

— and that's all that he says. No other info for now.

• German publisher franjos

will release a new edition of Sid Sackson's Can't Stop

in June 2017, with this edition being (I think) its fifth version themed around mountain climbing. And why not given how well the gameplay fits in this setting?

Crowdfunding Round-up: Hannibal Flippin' Off Barbarian Fantasy Clans of Mars & More

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/649…al-flippin-barbarian-fant

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3477797_t.jpg]• Polish publisher PHALANX

has been working on a new version of Mark Simonitch's classic game Hannibal: Rome vs. Carthage

for years. Defunct Canadian publisher Valley Games had released a new version in 2007 when the game was a decade old, then it announced but failed to get to print the standalone spinoff title Hamilcar: First Punic War

, co-designed with Jaro Andruszkiewicz and John Rodriguez.

Now PHALANX is bringing that second game to life in a package with Hannibal

since the games share some components and can each take one side of the game board for themselves. (KS link) BGG shot an overview video of the design, which was then still in progress, with Andruszkiewicz at Spielwarenmesse 2016 if you want to hear what their goals were for this redesign.

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3511783_t.png]• A game matching Hannibal & Hamilcar

dollar for dollar on Kickstarter right now is the twenty-years-younger Clans of Caledonia

from Juma Al-JouJou and his own Karma Games

. This game is set in 19th century Scotland, with players representing one of eight clans — each with a unique ability — that's attempting to produce, trade, and export agricultural goods and whisky. ( KS link

)

• If you're drinking whisky, you probably want to get Flippin' Off

, which the publisher-to-be describes as "a fun and frantic new bottle flipping game that includes a burping and farting bottle". I'm not sure what else needs to be added to that description. ( KS link

)

• Hard as it might be to imagine, burping and farting are not game mechanisms in Barbarians: The Invasion

from Martino Chiacchiera, Mattia Ciaccasassi, Pierluca Zizzi, and Tabula Game

. As with Clans of Caledonia

above, this game is for 1-4 players, and it "revolves around worker placement on a 3D rotating volcano where you can perform different actions depending on the position of your workers, area control on a map, and the management of an economic engine". I'm not sure why you're doing anything on a volcano other than moving away from it, but that's why I was expelled from my barbarian homeland as a youth. ( KS link

)

• Another solitaire game looking for funding right now is Fantasy Defense

, a new edition of Yoshiyuki Arai's Defense Three Kingdoms

from Mandoo Games and Sweet Lemon Publishing in which humans and elves fight orcs to protect the city. This version adds a two-player cooperative mode, along with new art from Yann Tisseron. ( KS link

)

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3496794_t.jpg]• One Deck Dungeon: Forest of Shadows

from Chris Cieslik of Asmadi Games

is also a fantasy co-op, with this game being a standalone expansion for the dungeon delve One Deck Dungeon

. You can mix and match the heroes and dungeon bits between games for more variety.

( KS link

)

• Another standalone expansion is God Hates Charades: Wrath

from God Hates Games

, which replicates the gameplay of the original God Hates Charades

, but with new cards. In the game, you pair an actor or fictional character with a random situation, then attempt to charade this pairing so that others can guess it. Hilarity ensues.
KS link

)

• A similarly freeform design is Sedis

from Neal Murthy and Nefer Games

, with this being a set of sixty hexagonal tiles with a varying number of pips along each edge of the tile. This article

in Houstonia Magazine

quotes Murthy as saying "There's been nothing even remotely like it in at least 600 years", which makes it seem like Murthy is unfamiliar with any number of other game systems that have been created during that time period. The Kickstarter project includes guidelines for a few games, but the main pitch seems to be that you can create your own designs using these components. ( KS link

)

• Chimera & More

is a new version of Ralph Anderson's Chimera

from Eagle-Gryphon Games

that now includes nearly twice as many cards so that in addition to playing with three players, you can also play with exactly five. As for the gameplay in this rolling-trick-taking game, each round one player faces off against two (or two against three) to try to play all their cards in hand first. ( KS link

)

• Unlike the title above, the trick-taking game Boast or Nothing

from Yeon-Min Jung and A.ger Games

allows for play with four players, as well as three and five, but aside from the enticing-sounding set-up — with players being contestants in the final round of the World Championship of Boasting — the gameplay sounds fairly old-fashioned, with the only difference being a token-ranking stack that determines which card wins when someone plays off suit. ( KS link

)

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic2232689_t.jpg]• Scott Rogers' Rayguns and Rocketships

from IDW Games

looks old-fashioned, but that's because the graphic design is straight out of the pulps of old. In the game, players must manage both the Planeteers who are commanding their spaceship and the spaceship itself while trying to blast others. ( KS link

)

• Néstor Romeral Andrés first published Gardens of Mars

through his own nestorgames in 2011, and now new publisher Big Kid Games

is releasing it anew. In the game, players draft dice to enable movement on the planet Mars so that they can plant plants in the red dirt of the surface to terraform the surface and (more importantly) score points based on the plants adjacent to their most recent plot. ( KS link

)

• Dice also help drive the action in Simon McGregor's Konja

from Pleasant Company Games

, a game in which two players compete to use special powers from travelers, along with cards and tokens, to manipulate dice to cast spell cards and purchase relics. ( KS link

)

• Finally, we have a title that breaks the connection game I've indulged in to this point, but a title that had to be included for its sheer eyebrow-raising nature. It's A Squirrel's Life

was "created by Randy Hecht who rescued an orphaned squirrel named 'Roxy', who in turn inspired him to invent this all-American game both kids and adults will enjoy for years to come", a game designed "to help children develop their math, negotiation and social skills". Few Kickstarter projects include a poem written from the point of view of a grateful squirrel, but this one does. ( KS link

)

Editor's note: Please don't post links to other Kickstarter projects in the comments section. Write to me via the email address in the header, and I'll consider them for inclusion in a future crowdfunding round-up. Thanks! —WEM

Origins Game Fair 2017 Preview Now Live

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/649…air-2017-preview-now-live

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic984281_t.jpg]BGG's Origins Game Fair 2017 Preview

is now live for your viewing pleasure, and while these convention previews normally start small and grow immensely in the weeks leading up to a convention, in this case the 2017 preview already contains 95 titles on it and the Origins 2016 Preview

topped out at 110 titles.

What does this mean? Did I somehow hunt down a greater percentage of the titles showing up at Origins 2017 than in previous years? What's more likely to be the case is that a larger number of games than in 2016 will be on hand when Origins opens on June 14 in the Greater Columbus Convention Center. The number of titles being released each year seems to be ever-increasing, and since Gen Con and SPIEL are already packed to the gills, I'm guessing (but open to being wrong) that publishers will spread out their new releases to Origins as well so that everything doesn't get buried in the rush.

If you're a designer or publisher who plans to have new titles on hand at Origins 2017 — whether new releases or prototypes of games to be released in the near future — and your titles aren't on this preview, please email me at the address in the BGG News header and I'll add your titles to this list.

BoardGameGeek will be at Origins 2017 for all five days, and we will livestream game demonstrations and designer interviews from the show for far too many hours each day. We will set up demo times based on what's listed on this preview (and information about other future releases), and I'll publish the interview schedule on Friday, June 9, which is the last day I'll update the Origins 2017 Preview. Only six weeks until we're live in Columbus — yikes!

New Game Round-up: Solve Crime in Detective: City of Angels, Return to Between Two Cities, and Don't Perish in Hunger: The Show

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/649…e-detective-city-angels-r

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3188811_t.png]• I thought that I had posted something about Detective: City of Angels

from Evan Derrick

and Van Ryder Games

, but alas I only tweeted a cover. Time to fix that oversight with an overview of this 2-5 player game that will be Kickstarted in Q3/Q4 2017 ahead of a planned release in 2018:

Detective: City of Angels, set in the dark and violent world of 1940s Los Angeles, is a game of mystery, deception, and investigation for 2–5 players. Most players will step into the shoes of LAPD homicide detectives, hungry for glory and willing to do whatever it takes to successfully close a case, even if that means intimidating suspects, concealing evidence, and hiring snitches to rat on their fellow detectives. One player, however, will take on the role of The Chisel, whose only goal is to stall and misdirect the detectives at every turn using bluffing, manipulation, and (often) outright lies.

Detective: CoA uses the innovative ARC (Adaptive Response Card) System to create the feel of interrogating a suspect. Suspects do not simply give paragraph-book responses; instead The Chisel carefully chooses how they will answer. When Billy O'Shea insists that the victim was a regular at Topsy's Nightclub, is he telling the truth or is The Chisel subtly leading the detectives toward a dead end that will cost them precious time? Detectives can challenge responses that they think are lies but at great risk: If they're wrong, The Chisel will acquire leverage over them, making the case that much harder to solve.

Detective: CoA includes separate, detailed casebooks for both the detectives and The Chisel. Each crime is a carefully constructed puzzle that can unfold in a variety of ways depending on how the detectives choose to pursue their investigations. As the detectives turn the city upside down, uncovering fresh evidence and "hot" leads, hidden suspects may be revealed and new lines of questioning will open up, creating a rich, story-driven experience.

Inspired by classic film noir like The Big Sleep, the works of James Ellroy (L.A. Confidential), and the video game L.A. Noire from Rockstar Games, Detective: City of Angels is a murder-mystery game unlike any other. Will one detective rise above the rest and close the case on L.A.'s latest high profile murder? Or will The Chisel sow enough doubt and confusion to prevent the detectives from solving the crime?

• Other titles in the works from Van Ryder Games include Hostage Negotiator: Abductor Pack 8

(due out at Gen Con 2017), Saloon Tycoon: The Ranch Expansion

(which gives each player a ranch board to develop), and The BIG Score

, a drafting/press-your-luck game in which you first complete small heists while working your way toward the namesake score at game's end.

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3531563_t.jpg]

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3532789_t.jpg]• In July 2017, you'll have a new way to place yourself Between Two Cities

with the Capitals

expansion from Matthew O'Malley

, Ben Rosset

, and Stonemaier Games

. This expansion, like the base game, accommodates 1-7 players, and it consists of landscape mats that give each city a unique layout, districts that give a majority bonus for connecting certain tiles, and civic building tiles that should be adjacent to two specific tile types. Advance copies of this expansion will be available at the 2017 UK Games Expo.

• Also debuting at that convention will be Pim Thunborg

's HUNGER: The Show

, a Survivor

-style board game from Polish publisher PHALANX

in which players simultaneously reveal location and action cards each round on a deserted island with the hope of collecting food, finding raft parts, stealing from others, and catching thieves.

• French publisher Superlude Éditions

announced

a new edition of Hinata Origuchi

's Colors of Kasane

in 2016, but the title never made it to production. Superlude has now stated that Kimonos

, with new art by Naïade, will appear in Q3 2017.

• Another title appearing from Superlude at the same time is Chawaï

, a 3-6 player game from Bruno Faidutti

about which little has been announced: "Dive into a lagoon in Chawaï

and try to bring back the most delicious fish before your fellow fishers can."

New Game Round-up: Deck-Building Comes to Dungeons & Dragons, More Dead Welcome Winter, and Rambo Assaults Your Tabletop

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/648…ing-comes-dungeons-dragon

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3534544_t.png]• I'm a week late to the party on this news, but Catalyst Game Labs

has announced

the development of a Dungeons & Dragons

-based deck-building game called Dragonfire

. Here's a short description of the game:

In Dragonfire, players choose from a number of races — from dwarf to elf, half-orc to human — while assuming the quintessential roles of cleric, rogue, fighter, and wizard. Equipped with weapons, spells, and magic items, players begin their adventure along the famed Sword Coast, then expand to other locales across the Forgotten Realms, such as Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter, and Waterdeep in future expansions. Along the way, players level up their characters, opening access to additional equipment, feats, and more. Join the quest, and build your own legend!

Catalyst's Randall Bills

is blogging

about the development of Dragonfire

, which is based on the game engine seen in 2014's Shadowrun: Crossfire

. Dragonfire

co-designer Jay Schneider

has posted on BGG

about general changes about a few changes from the original game, but the biggest question for most people is why Dragonfire

is for 3-6 players while Shadowrun: Crossfire

is for 1-4 players. No word on that yet.

While not yet announcing a release date for Dragonfire

, Catalyst does state that it's "sending multiple releases to print simultaneously with the base game. These additional releases will include such expansions as: Wondrous Cache

, a Magic Items deck; Heroes of the Sword Coast

, a pack of new character cards that introduce additional classes and races; and Encounters: Dragonspear Castle

, the first of our storyline expansions that will include a selection of Encounters, Magic Items, and Market cards, along with a new Adventure that will advance the storyline. Future releases, in addition to those listed above, will include campaign boxes that will not only provide additional materials to enjoy, but will move forward the meta-plot adventure that will weave through Dragonfire

." Catalyst also states

that another Shadowrun: Crossfire

expansion is in development.

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3535132_t.jpg]• Plaid Hat Games

has announced a new expansion for its Dead of Winter

series that allows for up to eleven people to feel uneasy about one another. Here's an overview of Dead of Winter: Warring Colonies

, which is designed by Colby Dauch

and Timothy Meyer

and which lacks a public release date at this time:

The Dead of Winter: Warring Colonies expansion includes 15 new survivors, 50 new crossroad cards, 43 new items, and 11 new crisis cards, many of which can be used with either Dead of Winter base set. However, to play either the warring colonies variant or the lone wolf module, you need both Dead of Winter: A Crossroads Game and Dead of Winter: The Long Night.

In the warring colonies variant, which is for 4-11 players, unique main objectives set two colonies against each other as they battle for territory with a new fighting system that includes tactics cards, bullet tokens, and 12-sided combat dice. New and terrible joint-colony crisis cards force cooperation and coercion every round. New simultaneous turn mechanisms and a sand timer keep things moving at a brisk pace.

With the lone wolf module, which can be used with the warring colonies variant or on its own, one player is on a team all by themselves, hiding out in their lone wolf den and carrying out missions that effect both teams.

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3534625_t.png]• Christopher Batarlis

and Jim Samartino

of Everything Epic Games

have announced a licensing deal with Creative Licensing and Studiocanal for the original trilogy of Rambo

movies, with a January 2018 launch date being set for a Kickstarter project to fund Rambo: The Board Game

, the development of which is currently in progress. Here's what the publisher says about the design for now:

Rambo: The Board Game is a thematic, cooperative, tactical, miniatures, scenario-based campaign game that allows 1-4 players to experience the events they remember from the film as well as embark on new, never-before-seen missions.

The game provides sealed "legacy-like" mission envelopes that gradually expand the game as each mission is completed. Each mission tells a story and takes the players on a unique adventure to various locations to save POWs, escape a military prison, raid a jungle encampment, defend a secret air base, survive a treacherous jungle, and more! Missions unlock new equipment and tactics to help players customize their experience and allow for high replayability and great tactical strategy. Taking actions and engaging in combat is done without random dice, but with a card-based system in which the player is in control and where every choice can be life or death!

To set up, players choose from an iconic variety of special forces characters each with highly detailed miniatures, including, of course, John Rambo, Col. Trautman, other members of Baker Team, and other companions that Rambo teamed up with over the years. Each hero has unique abilities and customization options that make them valuable during missions. You control how to approach the mission: Do you go in guns blazing? Or do you take a more stealthy approach? Perhaps you set a trap for the enemy? It's up to you to decide and lead Rambo and his team to victory!

New Game Round-up: A Trilogy of Revivals — The Thing, The Ruhr, and Cartagena

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/650…vivals-thing-ruhr-and-car

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3538203_t.jpg]• In February 2017, USAopoly

announced

the formation of a new designer collectibles division called Project Raygun

, which is intended to pair licensed properties with modern creators to produce collectibles, prints, plush, and other items, including tabletop games. Details on the first such game have been revealed, with Project Raygun partnering with the collectibles company Mondo

for a board game adaptation of John Carpenter's 1982 film The Thing

.

The Thing: Infection at Outpost 31

, a game for 4-8 players, bears a description that will likely sound familiar to anyone familiar with the film:

It is the start of the bleak, desolate Antarctic winter when a group of NSF researchers manning the claustrophobic, isolated U.S. Outpost 31 comes into contact with a hostile extraterrestrial lifeform. Bent on assimilating Earth's native species, this being infiltrates the facility — creating a perfect imitation of one of the Outpost 31 crew. The staff frantically begin a sweep of the base, desperate to purge this alien infection before escaping to warn McMurdo Station that somewhere, out there in the frigid darkness, something horrible is waiting.

In the hidden identity game The Thing: Infection at Outpost 31, you will relive John Carpenter's sci-fi cult classic in a race to discover who among the team has been infected by this heinous lifeform. Play as one of twelve characters as you lead a series of investigations through the facility using supplies and equipment to clear the building. The tension mounts and paranoia ensues as you question who you can trust in the ultimate race to save humanity!

The game will be released in two forms, with the standard edition hitting retail outlets in October 2017. The deluxe edition, which is limited to 1,982 copies, will be sold exclusively through Mondotees.com; this edition features different packaging artwork by Jock, a Mondo print, an enamel pin, and two additional sculpted movers: the Norwegian character and the Palmer Thing.

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3529183_t.jpg]• Leo Colovini

's Cartagena

, first published in 2000, has long been one of my go-to introductory games because when you boil down the gameplay (which is pretty basic anyway!) the game is Candy Land

with hand management. You want to get your pirates to the end of the track first, and to move, you play a card and move a pirate of your choice to the next empty space on the track that has the same symbol as the card played.

Simple, yes? Except that the only way to get more cards is to move backward, and that's when things get complicated. No one wants to move backward when you're supposed to be moving forward, and watching people come to grips with this basic challenge gets me every time. You see them make less-than-ideal moves — inefficient choices, you might say — over and over again, then they start to piece together how to do things better. The lightbulb is on, and it keeps burning brighter as they learn why you might not want to take all three actions on a turn or how to bait someone to take moves that will help you in the future. Like nearly all Colovini games, Cartagena

is heavy on player interaction since me occupying one space enables you to jump farther down the track — yet I have to occupy spaces, so how can I keep such assistance to a minimum?

In May 2017, Rio Grande Games

will release a new version of Cartagena

that includes the base game, components to play Cartagena 2. The Pirate's Nest

, and multiple variants. (Piatnik has already released a German version of the new Cartagena

in Europe, and In more detail:

The game includes eight double-sided game boards, and to play the base game you use only six of them. Use more boards for a longer game, or fewer boards (and possibly fewer pirates) for a shorter game. To replicate Cartagena 2, you can flip over three or more of the game boards to create a secondary path that's separate from the first one. Now when you place pirates in the sloop, you can use an action to move the sloop to the start of the second path — and with two paths, you have a harder time making huge jumps from start to finish.

"Morgan" is a variant in which players can now draw cards by moving an opponent's pirate ahead, drawing one or two cards when the pirate stops at the first space that contains one or two pirates; this variant and all others can be used in any version of the game. With the "Filibusters" variant, whenever someone plays one of the twelve cards with a dark background, everyone other than the active player must discard until they have at most seven cards in hand.

Finally, the "Black Magic Woman" variant introduces special powers to the six symbols on the card, and when you play a card, you can use it for pirate movement like normal or use the card' power. You can play two parrots as if they were any other symbol, or use a lantern to look at the top four cards and keep one of your choice. With the gun, you steal a card of your choice from an opponent's hand, with them getting one free draw in return. The treasure chest symbol lets you pick up the treasure chest from the space where you stand, most likely drawing cards from the deck as a bonus, but possibly suffering a snakebite that will have you running back for rum to help you forget the pain!

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3538036_t.png]• Clay Ross at Capstone Games

has announced a Gen Con 2017 release date for Thomas Spitzer

's The Ruhr: A Story of Coal Trade

, a new version of Ruhrschifffahrt 1769-1890

, which was originally released in 2012 by German publisher Spielworxx. Here's an overview of the game, and what's been added to this edition:

In The Ruhr: A Story of Coal Trade, the second game of Thomas Spitzer's historic coal trilogy, you are transported to the Ruhr region in the 18th century, at the beginning of the industrial revolution. Coal, after being discovered in Haspelknecht, is in high demand as cities and factories throughout the region are in need of this coveted resource. The Ruhr river presented a convenient route of transportation from the coal mines. However, the Ruhr was filled with obstacles and large dams, making it incredibly difficult to navigate. Trade coal for valuable upgrades and plan your route to victory along the Ruhr!

In more detail, the players transport and sell coal to cities and factories along the Ruhr river in the 18th and 19th centuries. By selling coal to cities and factories, players acquire unique progress markers. In the beginning, players have access only to low value coal. By selling coal to certain locations, players gain access to high value coal. In addition to selling coal, the players build warehouses, build locks, and export coal to neighboring countries in the pursuit of the most victory points.

This game includes the standalone expansion The Ohio: 1811-1861. In this game, players transport and trade goods along the Ohio River during a time when Ohio was granted statehood and became heavily populated as its industries flourished. The Ohio is played in a manner similar to The Ruhr, but with new and additional elements.

Five Tribes Welcomes Fifth Player in Whims of the Sultan

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/651…fifth-player-whims-sultan

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic2055255_t.jpg]Practically since the day it was announced, people have wondered why you can't play Bruno Cathala

's Five Tribes

game from Days of Wonder

with five players — which, of course, ignores the small detail that you are not playing as one of the tribes, but rather as someone who manipulates the members of those tribes for your own benefit.

No matter — Cathala and Days of Wonder have finally righted that numerical wrong with the announcement of Five Tribes: Whims of the Sultan

, which bears this description:

The Sultanate of Naqala continues to flourish, and the new Sultan has founded five fabulous cities to take advantage of this time of prosperity — but these cities have attracted more competitors than grains of sand in the desert and the fate of the Sultanate will once again lie in the hand of the five tribes and the powerful Djinns.

Five Tribes: Whims of the Sultan contains all the components needed to play five-player games of Five Tribes and introduces new fabulous cities tiles. Visiting these cities gives players opportunities to win glory as they fulfill excessive requests from the Sultan by completing "Whim of the Sultan" cards. Fierce competition is to be expected, as controlling these tiles can be a major contributor to a player's final score.
Five Tribes: Whims of the Sultan

, which carries a MSRP of $30/€25, will debut in June in Europe and at Gen Con 2017 in August in North America. You can download the rules

in English, French, and German from the Days of Wonder website.

Crowdfunding Round-up: Card Heroes Flow Alone in Land, Air, Sea & Skyways

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/651…eroes-flow-alone-land-air

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3315057_t.png]• After a false start

in February 2017, Gamelyn Games

has rejiggered the bits and pieces of Scott Almes

' Heroes of Land, Air & Sea

— moving components for the fifth and sixth player to the expansion, for example, while consolidating all expansions in a single box — and launched again, garnering more support in a single day than the previous project had seen in two weeks.

As for the gameplay, you represent one of eight fantasy races that's beating on another fantasy race, or possibly several of them. I'm probably overlooking a few details, but that description will get you started. ( KS link

)

• Battle for Biternia

from Chris Faulkenberry and Stone Circle Games

covers similar ground, with players in this MOBA-style board game each taking a team of four heroes, then beating on one another and destroying towers and crystals. ( KS link

)

• Polo Schlemmer's Card Castle

from SHEL Games

also features knights, wizards, and whatnot, but the gameplay is more akin to War

and Slap Jack

, with players slapping the cards to win rounds of combat. ( KS link

)

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[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3540452_t.jpg]• We'll leave such medieval happenings behind thanks to, conveniently enough, The Flow of History

, a Jesse Li

civilization game from Moaideas Game Design in 2016 that Tasty Minstrel Games

is releasing with new art and a supplementary Deluxified™ version that includes metal bits and other upgrades. A search of the USPTO database

doesn't bring up a filing for Deluxified, but perhaps the database isn't updated immediately or that TM is more decorative than real. In any case we've now moved from past to present... ( Indiegogo link

)

• If you're prefer to build something smaller than an entire civilization, you might look at Jeffrey D. Allers

' Skyways

from Eagle-Gryphon Games

, a city-building game that takes the tile-laying mechanism from Allers' Heartland

and has you instead building city blocks, most often pairs of blocks that are connected to one another via a skyway. ( KS link

)

• For another take on city-building, we have Card City XL

from Alban Viard

of AVStudio Games

, which starts you with a single building — City Hall — from which you will place other buildings — residential, commercial, leisure, etc. — while working toward whichever of the five victory conditions you chose at the start of play. ( KS link

)

• To create something even smaller than a city, you can go with The White Box

from Jeremy Holcomb and Atlas Games

, which functions something along the lines of Emperor's New Clothes

, except that it describes exactly what it's offerings: a game design workshop in a box, with lots of generic game components being paired with a 128-page book of essays about game design. ( KS link

)

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3501382_t.jpg]• Designer Martin Wallace

closed Treefrog Games to concentrate on designs that others would publish, with APE Games

taking charge of development for Moa

, a game in which 3-5 players play as bird species in New Zealand who must defend the land against mammalian attackers such as dogs, weasels, and rats, with each of those mammals attacking in their own way. ( KS link

)

• More traditionally game-y combat comes in Dead Man's Doubloons

from Jason Miceli and ThunderGryph Games

, with piratey players taking simultaneous actions to move their ships and captains to steal loot from one another and find yet more loot on an island that they've all just happened to land on at the same time. ( KS link

)

• Brandon Young's Code Triage

from Brando Gameworks

hits notes familiar from other games, with players needing to coordinate care in an emergency room to avoid the three ways of losing. Can you make it to the end of your shift, after which it's all someone else's problem? ( KS link

)

• In 2016 we saw Not Alone

from Ghislain Masson and Geek Attitude Games, with one player being an alien creature that tried to take control of others. In 2017, we have the unrelated game Alone

from Andrea Crespi, Lorenzo Silva, and Horrible Games

in which a single player is the hero who's getting picked on by everyone else, with that hero seeing only tiny bits of the map at a time while the masterminds plot terrible things. ( KS link

)

• Let's end where we began this week, but in space! Galaxy of Trian: New Order

is, as the name suggests, a new version of 2014's Galaxy of Trian

from Seweryn Piotrowski and CreativeMaker LLC

features eight alien races that are beating on one another, with players trying to control planetary systems (which come into play through double-sided triangular tiles) to get resources in order to grow bigger and beat harder. ( KS link

)

Editor's note: Please don't post links to other Kickstarter projects in the comments section. Write to me via the email address in the header, and I'll consider them for inclusion in a future crowdfunding round-up. Thanks! —WEM

New Game Round-up: Titles at Tokyo Game Market 2017 – Path to Yaaru, z3r0d4y, Spirit of Totem, and Korocchi!

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/650…kyo-game-market-2017-path

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3534963_t.png]I'm headed to Tokyo Game Market in mid-May 2017, so I've been compiling a (short) TGM preview

of titles to which (you and) I might want to pay attention. This preview has only a few dozen titles on it — just a smattering of what you can find on the Game Market website

— but since I don't speak Japanese, I've tried to highlight titles that I might actually have a chance of playing. Here are a few of those games, with (I hope) more being added to the list over the next week:

• Tomoki Motohashi

's z3r0d4y

, a.k.a. Zero Day

, from Takoashi Games

is a one vs. many design in which the admin tries to beat the 1-3 hackers and the hackers (assuming there's more than one) try to defeat one another while also besting the admin. In more detail:

In z3r0d4y, the admin aims to fix vulnerabilities in a computer system before hackers steal too much information.

The admin wins by acquiring a certain number of progress tokens based on the number of players, and to make progress, the admin must perform "operations" multiple times successfully while avoiding interference from hackers. To do so, the admin will rely on timing and must secure sufficient credits.

Each hacker wants to steal information before others can do so (and before the admin fixes the vulnerability, of course), and once a hacker steals a certain amount of information tokens, they win the game immediately. To do this, they need to gather information, interfere with the admin's operation, and install virus proxies.

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3488584_t.png]• Path to Yaaru

is the latest from Fukutarou

, designer of Wolf & Hound

, Familiar's Trouble

, and Festival of Thousand Cats

, through the publishing circle Fukuroudou

. Here's a short description of the game from the designer:

Path to Yaaru refers to the Egyptian heavenly paradise of the Fields Of Aaru.

This is a card-drafting game set in Ancient Egypt in which you head to Yaaru, the promised land, with help from the Egyptian gods. The card-drafting system has a twist in that you may not freely pick any card. Hence, while advanced players may plan deeply beforehand to control the later stages of the game, beginners may simply focus on the current state and pick from the smaller choices. Who would be the first to Yaaru, passing the obstacles alongside the path?

With cute illustrations, the game should appeal to a broader audience. The game is published in Japanese, with English rules available online.

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3542342_t.jpg]• Spirit of Totem

is a card game from Junction+

that debuted at Tokyo Game Market in May 2016 and will be present again in May 2017, with this card game being available with either full-sized (88mm x 63mm) cards or half-sized (63mm x 44mm) cards. That option isn't something you see every day — although Blue Cocker Games had a quarter-sized(!) version of its new card game ARGH

at FIS in Cannes — but it's something that can happen more easily in Japan, I suppose, given the possibilities of short-run publishing that the prevalence of name cards makes possible.

As for the gameplay, here's a summarization of the English rules:

In トーテムのこころ (Spirit of Totem), players attempt to create a totem pole from cards before anyone else. Most cards depict one or three color-coded spirit icons at the top of the card, with the colors being repeated at the bottom of the card as well; a few cards picture a thunderbird, and these cards are used to top a totem or cast a spell.

Each player starts with two cards in hand, and on a turn first draws one card, then plays or discards one card. When they play a totem card, they can start a totem or add to a totem — but when adding to a totem at least one of the colored marks on the card being added must be placed in the same column as the card being covered, even if this means the card being placed doesn't line up exactly with the card below. If the top card shows red, yellow, blue, and you want to add a yellow, brown, blue, then you can line up the yellow marks or the blues, but not both.

When a player plays a thunderbird, they can cast one of the four spells in play, after which that spell is placed face down until all four spells have been cast, after which they're all revealed once again. The spells are "Wind blows left/right", "Zap", and "Gift". The caster of the wind spell chooses a height above the first level, then all cards at the level and above are shifted one column left or right, depending on the wind. If parts of a totem have no support, then those cards are discard. Zap removes the top card in a player's totem, and Gift requires each player to pass one card in hand left and the other right.

As soon as a totem consists of at least four cards and the top card is centered with the bottom card (regardless of the positioning of the intervening cards), the player can top the totem with a thunderbird card to win the game. If the player has an earth totem on top — that is, a card showing the same spirit icon in all three spots, then the totem doesn't need to be aligned to be topped with a thunderbird.

トーテムのこころ also includes rules for solo play, with the player needing to build totems of 7, 8, 9, and 10 cards without the use of spells in order to win.

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3514841_t.jpg]• Korocchi!

by conception

's Shimpei Sato

is one of those real-time pattern-recognition games that most everyone I play with hates, possibly because I'm usually good at them and leave others starting at their socks. Hmm, hope that doesn't sound too conceited. Something in my brain clicks for these designs, and I've played a lot of them, and as I've learned time and again, if you do anything long enough, you do get better at it. In any case, here's a description followed by a video showing the traditional "pause-pause-pause-pounce!" effect:

In Korocchi!, you try to find the correct card that is determined by two (or three) unique dice, and whoever touches the correct card first score points. Each of the two dice in the basic game has two pieces of information:

• Color die: Shows you the outside color and inside color.
• Shape die: Shows you the outside shape and the inside shape.

Three different creatures (cat, bat and obake) are depicted on the cards, with these creatures appearing in three colors. Each card depicts one large creature in one color holding a tiny creature in another color. By pairing the two dice, you know precisely which one card to touch from all those face up on the table.

For an additional challenge, you can roll the third die as well. The faces on this die might just show that you play as normal scoring one or two points, or it might show the shapes or colors being reversed — which means you need to look for the opposite card (sort of) instead.

Game Overview: ReCURRRing, or The Art of Spinning Your Wheels

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/652…or-art-spinning-your-whee

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3290384_t.jpg]I love card games. If I had to choose between card games and any other type of games — heck, between card games and all

other types of games — I'd choose card games. Each hand is a mystery, a puzzle of sorts to figure out, a hand of tools for you to cut and extract other players from the game. You pick up that hand of cards, and it's like dozens of other hands that you've held before, but this one is slightly different, just as you know the hands of your opponents are all slightly different, and you have a fresh challenge in front of you.

The game's on the table, yes, with the cards showing who's winning right now and the scoresheet showing who's winning in a larger sense, but the game is also above the table, with you trying to figure out what others are trying to do, with you pondering what they can

do. Good card games involve hand management, a term we record in the BGG database, but they also involve risk management and deduction and bluffing and pressing your luck and memory — so many skills come into play in a game created from the simplest of components, and hundreds upon hundreds of these games exist. So much variety, all at the whims of their creators.

ReCURRRing

from the Japanese design/publisher group team SAIEN

is yet another of these creations, with this being a shedding game, a game in which you want to rid your hand of cards before anyone else, and while you and I have seen dozens of games like this before, we haven't seen precisely this

game, with its simple twist of you being forced to pick up whichever cards you play over — a small change that puts your head in knots as you ponder how to stay in a round and make progress and somehow, unbelievable as it might sound, give yourself a shot at winning.

Game Preview: Taiwan Monsters Brawl, or Lining Them Up and Knocking Them Down

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/652…ters-brawl-or-lining-them

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3536379_t.jpg]Games originate from many sources, and I believe (although I can't now find the source again) that Hung-Che Lin

's Taiwan Monsters Brawl

from Chiaos Creative

originated from Lin seeing the monster-rich artwork of Chiaos Tseng and wanting to create a game to bring that art to the game table. If that story isn't true, it should be.

In the game, 2-4 players each take charge of one of eight legendary monsters — with a brief history of each one included in the rulebook — and in each round of the game you all call dibs on a new piece of land, strip that land of its resources, then (in all likelihood) take a swing at one another to dislodge an opponent from its land to claim that turf for yourself.

Combat is dice-driven, with everyone getting a baseline of dice with which to attack, combined with a puzzle of sorts as you want to fill lines on your monster board with runes in order to supersize your attack. You can use runes to give you a free reroll, to upgrade dice, to draw spell cards, to collect chi to power spells and recharge runes, and to use your ultimate ability, which is unique for each monster. Choose, collect, roll, pummel...score?

Game Overview: Birdie Fight!, or Color Your Nest the Right Way to Win

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/653…t-or-color-your-nest-righ

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3281940_t.jpg]In May 2016, ahead of my trip to Tokyo Game Market, I published

an overview of ButaBabel

from designer Yuo

and design circle Kocchiya

. Since I'm headed to TGM once again in May 2017, I thought I'd do it again, this time looking at Yuo's card game Birdie Fight!

In fact, this game is slightly more than a card game given that it contains ten scoring tokens that are laid out to define the boundaries of a 5x5 grid. Each player has a hand of cards, with the cards coming in four suits numbered 1-7; one card is placed in the center of the grid to start play. On a turn, you place a card from your hand adjacent to a card already in play, and when the game ends you'll still hold one card. That's it!

Oh, wait, there's that small detail about how to score and win — you know, that detail that drives everything else that you do. At the end of the game, you determine which color has the highest sum in each row and column, with tied colors being ignored Raj

-style; in each row, that highest color scores the points shown on the token sitting at left, and for each column, that color scores for the token above it. The card that you hold shows your color, and you score all the points that the color has scored, in addition to 1-7 points to match the value of the card you hold. After two complete rounds, whoever has the highest score wins.

Birdie Fight!

includes rules for solo play in which your score equals the points scored by your color minus the points scored by all three other colors. Yes, you're one small bird up against an unfriendly world, so you'll need to set your enemies against one another to do well.

New Game Round-up: Titles at Tokyo Game Market 2017 – Mini Rails, Animal Village, and Dungeon of Mandom VIII

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/652…kyo-game-market-2017-mini

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3526352_t.jpg]• Not all of the publishers with new games scheduled to be at Tokyo Game Market — which next takes place May 14, 2017 — are from Japan. Many Taiwanese publishers show up with new games as well, sometimes with those games having Japanese editions on the market before editions in any other language!

One such title debuting at TGM is Mark Gerrits

' Mini Rails

from Moaideas Game Design

. The current game description is the briefest of takes, but ideally I can record an overview video while at the show since this title will undoubtedly be available at SPIEL 2017 as well.

Mini Rails distills the essence of the stock-buying and track-laying game genre into a tight experience that can be finished under an hour.

The game includes only two types of actions — "Buy Shares" and "Build Tracks — and you must carefully decide how to best use them. You must do each action exactly once per round, and which company you choose affects the turn order on the next round.

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[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3060124_t.jpg]• Oink Games

first released Masato Uesugi

's Dungeon of Mandom

in 2013, with this game being a sort of press-your-luck dungeon delve in which players essentially boast about tackling a dungeon with less and less equipment (learning about some of creatures lurking inside the dungeon while doing so) until finally only one person remains standing — then this chump sets off into the dungeon to see whether they survive or not. If you don't make it, you're wounded, and a second wound eliminates you from play. Be the last player standing or successfully navigate the dungeon twice, and you win.

French publisher IELLO licensed the design and released Welcome to the Dungeon

in 2015, with this game including four heroes and more pieces of equipment to give players more variety. They followed this title in 2016 with Welcome Back to the Dungeon

, with Antoine Bauza serving as co-designer to add another four heroes and yet more equipment and monsters to the game.

Now with Dungeon of Mandom VIII

, which debuts at TGM in mid-May, Oink Games is putting everything in one box with new artwork. I imagine that this title won't receive distribution in the U.S. and Europe due to the licensing deal with IELLO, but that's something I hope to find out.

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3547577_t.jpg]• Tetsuya Iida

from Yamato Games

typically includes English rules with purchases at TGM — assuming that you ask for English rules, that is — but right now only the Japanese rules are available for Animal Village

, so I've cobbled together this short description for now:

Animal Village is a worker-placement style game played solely with cards in which players try to cultivate both crops and sheep to score points.

Game Previews from Spielwarenmesse VIII: Valletta and Sword & Sorcery

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/651…esse-viii-valletta-and-sw

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic2343815_t.jpg]I attend more game conventions than the average bear, which often makes me anxious to get things learned or recorded at one convention into print as quickly as possible because I've learned from experience that once that next convention arrives, I am pretty much done with the earlier one. Now I have new announcements, new pics, new videos, new things to write about! Everything else is old news, a stratum of data that will be covered be fresher news —but as soon as that new material arrives, the clock starts ticking once again. Hurry!

I have a half-written report about the Festival International des Jeux — the annual con in Cannes, France — that never went to print because as soon as I landed from that show, I started preparing for the 2017 GAMA Trade Show, with someone else processing the videos from Cannes in order to get them on the airwaves before the BGG team headed to Las Vegas. Pardonnez-moi, s'il vous plaît.

Thus, it did not come as a surprise to discover that while I thought

I had published all the game overview videos that we recorded at Spielwarenmesse 2017

— the annual trade fair that takes place in early February in Nürnberg, Germany — it turns out that I had published only 101 out of 103. This past week, while planning for BGG.CON Spring and Origins, I went looking for the overviews of Stefan Dorra

's Valletta

(from Hans im Glück

) and Simone Romano

and Nunzio Surace

's Sword & Sorcery

(from Ares Games

), and found them missing. Thankfully I still had the raw files, and I've now bounced those online, forgetting to trim the opening seconds of nothingness that I'd prefer not be there, but I'll live with the task being done rather than waiting still longer to cut them and upload them once again.

At least I think I'm done. We'll see what I find in the weeks to come...

• Please recall for all dates mentioned in the following video that we recorded this overview in early February 2017. I try to jump in with a year or a quarter of a year, e.g., Q3 2017, when someone mentions only a month or season, but I don't always make it.

• Bonus video! After getting an overview of Günter and Lena Burkhardt's Die Gärten von Versailles

from Schmidt Spiele's Matthias Karl, I felt compelled to ask Karl why Schmidt included the choice of languages that it did across the various products in their line.

Game Previews from GAMA Trade Show 2017 V: Fanhunter: Urban Warfare, Road Hog, Zombie Tsunami, and Immortals

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/651…show-2017-v-fanhunter-urb

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3460055_t.png]To continue my thoughts from [blogpost=65412]yesterday's post[/blogpost], we record a lot of videos at game conventions — 100 or so at Spielwarenmesse, 150 at Origins, 150-175 at Gen Con, and 300-ish at SPIEL, with a few dozen more at various other events along the way — so it might not come as a surprise that we sometimes don't get everything into print, whether in the weeks following the event or, well, ever. I'm not trying to bury videos, but in the rush to get everything to print before preparations for the next event get underway, sometimes I overlook a video (or five) that are waiting for nothing more than a bit of preparation and a push out the door on YouTube, as with these recently discovered videos from the 2017 GAMA Trade Show.

• At SPIEL 2016, Devir

's Matt Hyland raved about the Fanhunter

comic created by Cels Piñol, trying to give me context to appreciate the Fanhunter: Urban Warfare

game from David Esbri that Devir will be selling and demoing at the 2017 Origins Game Fair. Here's a short description from Wikipedia

:

In 1996, in the city of Barcelona, Alejo Cuervo (an insane ex-librarian who thinks he is possessed by the spirit of Philip K. Dick), proclaims himself as the new Pope Alejo I (killing the old one by blowing up Vatican City), submitting (sometimes through bribes) all of Europe to the boring "Dick's Rule" by forbidding almost any form of subculture (video games, comics, DVDs, role-playing games, hopscotch) and allowing just what he likes: religious music, Breakfast at Tiffany's and the works of Philip K. Dick: "Minority Report", "Blade Runner", etc.

Alejo I decided to create a special force, the Fanhunters, and used the cloned soldiers Tintin Macute (who are not so intelligent) to annihilate the civilians who still resist: otakus, gamers, comic fans, and geeks left in Europe. Barcelona is renamed as Barnacity, being now the capital of Europe, which has been renamed Europe of Dick.

To defend themselves, the rebels created a group "The Resistance" to fight against Pope Alejo I and his evil forces. Many fans organized to defend their ideals and lifestyle, stopping the destruction of imagination that moves the world, using their knowledge of movie, comics, TV shows, and books like "V", "M*A*S*H", "Constantine", "The A-Team", and "The Rock".

• Here's a double miss by me, which makes me feel extra embarrassed to mention it. At Gen Con 2016, I recorded an interview with Douglas Morse, creator of the documentary The Next Great American Game

, and Randall Hoyt, whose efforts to license the game Turnpike

are covered in that film. I think that file is on a thumb drive somewhere, but thumb drives are small and possibly I ate it during the madness of that show. I'm not sure. My organization skills excel in some ways, but only at the cost of decelling in other areas.

At the 2017 GAMA Trade Show, Sean Lashagari from Ultra PRO

presented an overview of Road Hog: Rule the Road

, which is the published name of Turnpike

and which hit U.S. retail shelves in February 2017.

• Vincent Vergonjeanne

is co-designer, with Jeremie Torton, of Zombie Tsunami

from Lucky Duck Games

, with this being a tabletop adaptation of the Zombie Tsunami

app. In this game, due out at SPIEL 2017 in October if the Kickstarter funding goes well, each player has their own wave of zombies coming into town and you want to survive the resistance of the humans better than anyone else.

• This final video overview from the 2017 GAMA Trade Show (I think) was not held up as a result of my incompetence, but rather as a result of a name change. Queen Games

was developing a design by Dirk Henn

and Mike Elliot

titled War Eternal

, then right after we recorded this video the German office found out about the Indie Boards & Cards title Aeon's End: War Eternal

and asked not to publish the video until they had settled on a new name. That name is Immortals

, and here's a short overview:

In Immortals, each game is just another episode in the eternal cycle of war between the Light Realm and the Dark Realm in the World of Twilight. The armies defeated in one world are resurrected in the other world.

It is each player's aim to control and make efficient use of the different areas and their resources (inhabitants, gold, energy) in both realms. The player who most successfully implements their ambitions will be the winner of the game.