BGG News

Tokyo Game Market, May 2017: Preview Night — Mini Rails, Crows Overkill, Korocchi!, and Sweet Honey, Bee Mine!

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/653…7-preview-night-mini-rail

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic2489670_t.png]On the day before Tokyo Game Market, which took place May 14, 2017, I attended a preview event hosted by designer Shimpei Sato

( Onitama

, Eggs of Ostrich

) where a number of Japanese and Taiwanese designers and publishers showed off their TGM titles in advance. Here are four of the games I saw and played at that event:

• Mark Gerrits

' Mini Rails

from Moaideas Game Design

is a magically simple rail game for 3-5 players. At the start of each round, you draw colored discs equal to twice the number of players plus one from the bag, then in player order (as shown by the pawns on the player order track) players take one of two actions: buy a share or place a track. Whichever action you don't take the first time, you must take the second time. When you buy a share, its value is zero no matter activity has already taken place in that color. When you place a track, the value of all existing shares goes up or down $1-3 depending on the space covered, with all discs of a color being placed contiguously.

As you take discs, you determine player order for the next round. Whichever disc hasn't been taken drops down to the bottom row; that action represents the company paying its taxes, and now that color will score points for all shareholders at the end of the game, with the value for each player being determined by the location of that share disc on their player board.

The game has a few other details, but that's mostly it. With only twelve disc choices in the game, along with the placement of those discs on the board, every choice matters. I played horribly in my one game, not looking ahead to what might be placed where and setting myself up for failure. Moaideas will have a presence at SPIEL 2017 should you not be able to travel back in time to TGM.

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3514425_t.jpg]• Crows Overkill

from EmperorS4

is a new version of Roy Nambu

's Sanzen Sekai: I'd kill all the crows in the world to be with you a little longer

, which he originally self-published in 2015. The title is less flamboyant in the new edition, but the setting remains the same: You're visiting your sweetheart and want to stay as long as possible, but your lover is very sensitive and you know that as soon as the crows start crying out that you'll have to leave, so you resolve to kill as many of them as possible in order to stay longer. I would imagine that the feathers and blood all over your hands would be a bigger turnoff than the squawking, but hey, who am I to judge?

You start the game with three bird cards in front of you and two shamisen (action) cards in hand. On a turn, you gain three more bird cards — which might show 1-3 crows, roosters, owls, warblers, or bats (and no, bats are birds, but they're here as well) — and two more action cards, then you must take actions so that you have fewer crows in front of you than the current limit. Oh, and no owls. They hoot all the time, so you must scoot any owls along to another player. The bird deck contains a few gong cards as well, and each time a gong is rung, the hour advances, which lowers the acceptable bird count. Suddenly you can't have a pair of roosters in front of you, or even one warbler, so you must shoo them along to some other lover, being content to ruin their relationship to ensure your personal happiness.

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3176536_t.jpg]• Sweet Honey, Bee Mine!

is from Katsuya Kitano

and New Board Game Party

, creators of Who Soiled the Toilet?

in 2016. This game combines bluffing, hand management, and your ability to be a jerk in one tidy package. In a round, each player starts with a hand of five cards, with the cards being similar to a Pairs

deck (one 1, two 2s, up to ten 10s), but with some of the cards from 1-5 being labeled "low" and some from 6-10 being labeled "high"; if a card isn't labeled, then it can be anything from 1-10.

Each player reveals one card simultaneously, and whoever reveals the highest card starts. On a turn, the player choose one card from hand, places it face down with 1-3 honey chips on it, then draw a new card. The next player can either place the same number of chips on it to pass the card to the next player or take the card and chips; if the card matches a number the player already has, they are out of the round and must ante a number of chips equal to the card number to the pot. If no one takes the card, then whoever first played the card must take it, scoring lots of chips but killing themselves if they played a number they already had.

The round continues until a player has cards that sum to at least 35, they have three cards valued 1-5 in front of them, or they're the only one still in the round. That player wins the pot, then everyone scores points equal to the number of honey chips they have. After a certain number of rounds, whoever has the most points wins.

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3514841_t.jpg]• Host Sato taught his new game Korocchi!

, the description of which I wrote previously:

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.

The gameplay matches precisely what I thought it would be: ye olde game of rolling, staring, and pouncing. Sato's tie-breaker rule for when two players touch the right card at the same time is hilarious: Whoever yells "Korocchi!" louder wins. "Korocchi" combines the Japanese words for rolling (as in dice) and grabbing, so the yelling makes sense.

You can also use the cards to play a memory game by turning them face down. On a turn, a player reveals two cards and if both the outer colors and the inner colors match on the cards, then the player claims the cards and takes another turn. Whoever collects the most cards wins.

New Game Round-up: The Empire Rises, Roosters Go Rushing, and Ruins Inhabits New Scavengers

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/654…es-roosters-go-rushing-an

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3555413_t.jpg]• I've been writing about Tokyo Game Market for the past week or so (and tweeting dozens of pics from that show

), but plenty of other game announcements have taken place during this time, such as Fantasy Flight Games

' announcement of Star Wars: Rebellion – Rise of the Empire

, with this prequel(?) expansion including "eight new leaders, thirty-six plastic miniatures, five target markers, two attachment rings, three new dice, and more than one-hundred new cards" to incorporate elements from the movie Rogue One

into the earlier game.

• On Facebook, Lookout Games

has posted two images of a prototype

from Michael Kiesling

titled Riverboat: entlang des Mississippi

( Riverboat: Along the Mississippi

), with the earlier, March 2017 image

referring to the game as one of their "summer novelties", but nothing has been announced definitively, so I'll leave this as a teaser for now.

• The video game Deadly Premonition

is being made into a board game, specifically Deadly Premonition: The Board Game

. The website for the game

has almost no information on the design, but that's because it served to countdown the launch of a Kickstarter funding project

that has already netted $120K. As for the gameplay, here's a short description:

Deadly Premonition: The Board Game is a detective-themed 2-4 player card-based board game inspired by cult sensation video game Deadly Premonition and set in the mysterious town of Greenvale, following the Murder of Anna Graham.

In Deadly Premonition: The Board Game, you and your fellow detectives must take on the task of protecting the innocent, incriminating the guilty, and working out who might not be who they say they are. With a hidden killer amongst the detectives, the race is on to identify a suspect as an accomplice in order track down the true killer.

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3555291_t.png]• Designers Antoine Bauza

and Corentin Lebrat

originally self-published Gaijin Dash!

for Tokyo Game Market in 2016, and now Mayday Games

has licensed the design for a U.S. release in Q4 2017 as Rooster Rush

.

I recorded an overview video

in May 2016 if you want the full details on the game, but in brief players are trying to cross a busy road and not be hit by traffic. On a turn, you spin colored tokens that represent vehicles, and you want to slap the matching-colored card that you feel won't hit you — but the safety of that lane in the highway won't be determined until the token stops spinning and lands on SAFE or UNSAFE. Collect three unsafe results, and you're out of the game; score eleven points or be the last one standing, and you win.

• On June 7, 2017, Portal Games

debuts 51st State: Scavengers

— an expansion for 51st State: Master Set

based on the older 51st State

expansion Ruins

— in Poland and Germany, with the English-language expansion coming to Europe on June 14 and North America on June 28. The expansion includes new and old cards, with players now being able search the discard pile for valuable locations in order to reuse them for your own purposes.

Links: Mensa Winners, Co-op Games for Newbies, and Black-and-White Squares Forever

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/654…p-games-newbies-and-black

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3556840_t.jpg]It's been a while since my previous link round-up, so some of these links might be less timely than is ideal. Still, onward!

• Voting for the Deutscher Spielepreis 2017

is underway, with gamers being asked to vote for their five favorite games from the second half of 2016 and the first half-ish of 2017. Votes can be placed through July 31, 2017, and the winners will be revealed at SPIEL 2017 in October.

• Speaking of awards, American Mensa announced the latest winners of their annual Mind Games competition in late April 2017:

That's a handful of traditional Eurogames right there, with Renegade Game Studios

picking up its three straight win for Clank!: A Deck-Building Adventure

, following Lanterns: The Harvest Festival

in 2015 and World's Fair 1893

in 2016. ( Gravwell: Escape from the 9th Dimension

won a Mensa Select award in 2014 when it was published by Cryptozoic Entertainment, with Renegade taking over as that game's publisher in late 2014.)

Around the World in 80 Days

is a new version of Hare & Tortoise

(the first Spiel des Jahres winner), while Amalgam

is a U.S. version of Glastonbury

, which is itself a new version of Kupferkessel Co.

(which was a Spiel des Jahres-recommended title in 2002). Imagine

and Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle

rounded out the Mensa Select awards for 2017.

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic2498158_t.jpg]• Before I started writing about games full-time, I was a freelance magazine writer, following in my wife's footsteps. She's still carrying on in this career, with 2017 marking the end of her second decade in this field, and she recently wrote about " 7 board games for kids who hate to lose

", with this essentially being an introduction to co-op games for Canadian publication Today's Parent

.

• I posted a Hasbro

-centric links round-up

in late April 2017, noting the company's 41% net earnings increase in Q1 2017 compared to Q1 2016. What I didn't note is that this quarter marks the first time in seventeen years that Hasbro has beaten Mattel in revenue, a detail highlighted in an Associated Press article

that credits Toilet Trouble

for this wondrous event. From the article:

"I never thought I would actually get to talk about this on an earnings call but, you know, Toilet Trouble is off to a very good start," CEO Brian Goldner told analysts Monday after putting up very strong first-quarter numbers.

Now Hasbro is flush with cash!

• Popular Mechanics

is a relic of the past, at least in my mind, because I associate it with my father, who had huge stacks of both that magazine and Popular Science

in his basement workshop. I loved reading "Wordless Workshop" even though most of the ideas seemed gimmicky and impractical, on par with solutions to all the Encyclopedia Brown

stories I read in my youth. I'm not even sure what Popular Mechanics

now covers or how it still exists, but I do know that it recently featured " The 50 Best New Board Games

", a pictorially jam-packed, Amazon-affiliate-laden overview of fifty new board games that you may or may not agree are "best". 'Twas ever thus...

• This video in PBS' "Infinite Series" explores concepts related to infinite chess — that is, chess played on an infinitely large chessboard — including how many moves it might take to determine when a game might end.

Crowdfunding Round-up: Combat and Miniatures Galore!

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/655…bat-and-miniatures-galore

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3498263_t.jpg]

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3507986_t.jpg]• Will you be cruel or merciful? That's the question Indie Boards & Cards

is using to pitch Path of Light and Shadow

, a design by Travis R. Chance, Jonathan Gilmour, and Nick Little in which you're rewarded for pushing toward one end or the other of that scale. Neutrality is not a plus because then you're seen as a wishy-washy hand wringer and won't maximize your points. Followers want decisiveness! ( KS link

)

• While Path

has aspects of area control on a map, it's only a "dude on a map" game since you have only one dude. Clash of Rage

from Frédéric Guérard and La Boite de Jeu

adopts the more familiar formula of placing many dudes on their map, with players both trying to overcome a failing elvish empire and other competitors for the remains of that empire. ( KS link

)

BGG shot an overview of Clash of Rage

while at the game fair in Cannes in early 2017. Components shown are not final, of course.

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3495067_t.png]• Want even more face-smashing action? Luke Seinen's Carthage

from SAS Creative

is a 2-5 player arena combat game with a deck-building element. Should you be eliminated from play in a game with more than two players, you can come back to life as a sabertooth tiger or another beast to attempt to get revenge for your former human self. ( KS link

)

• Magitics

from Norbert Kiss and A-games

is also an arena combat, but one set in a fantasy realm in which players can use spells and magic items in addition to more traditional figure-based combat. ( KS link

)

• I feel like A.E.G.I.S.: Combining Robot Strategy Game

from Zephyr Workshop has been around forever since I've included it on two Gen Con previews, yet the game won't be released until January 2018. Funny how that works. Here's a short description of the game from the Kickstarter project: "We love strategy games, and noticed there was a severe lack of combining robots and simple strategy games. We decided to change that..." ( KS link

)

• Even more combat comes your way courtesy of Phil Vestal, Eddie Zakoor, Anneke Zakoor and newcomer Shadow Squirrel Games

with the 1-7 player game Wanted Earth

, in which players must defend the Earth against several invading alien races — unless players want to play as those races, that is, in which case the game becomes 100% less cooperative and you can play as a frog whose tongue is longer than its body. ( KS link

)

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3530379_t.png]

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3415725_t.jpg]• Tradewars: Homeworld – Exterra Edition

from Kristopher R. Kycia and Outer Limit Games

presents the mirror image of the game above, with humans leaving Earth to colonize other worlds under the leadership of four megacorporations. Naturally you and the other megacorporations can't play nicely, so you'll need to build a fancy deck and manage your resources well in order to show them up. Solitaire rules are included in case you want to head spaceward on your own. ( KS link

)

• Diceborn Heroes

from Keith Donaldson and his Diceborn Games seems like an old-school RPG-style co-op dice chucker, and I can't think of much to say about the game beyond that. ( KS link

)

• Deadly Premonition: The Board Game

from newcomer Rising Star Games

is a deduction-driven card game based on the video game Deadly Premonition

. ( KS link

)

• Given the huge number of games with miniatures in this round-up, I thought I'd also mention the crowdfunding campaign for the Skirmish Box from Dog Might Games, this being a fancy wood box with a metal plate under the felt bottom so that your miniatures with magnets will not get tossed around in the box when you travel with them — and should your miniatures not have magnets on them, well, Dog Might will sell you magnets as well. Problem and solution in one step! ( KS link

)

• We'll close with Barker's Row

from Steven Aramini and Overworld Games

, which has the amusing scoretrack of "rube" meeples being placed in your grandstand. Yes, your goal is to put butts in seats. In the game, you draft and play cards to use their powers and attract those rubes, but with each attraction you play, you have to work harder to attract more rubes in the future — just like real life. ( 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

Kingdomino, Magic Maze, and Wettlauf nach El Dorado Nominated for the 2017 Spiel des Jahres

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/655…d-wettlauf-nach-el-dorado

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic2334183_t.jpg]The nominees for the 2017 Spiel des Jahres — Germany's "game of the year" award, which typically boosts sales of the winner by several hundred thousand copies — have been announced, and they are:

• Kingdomino

, by Bruno Cathala

and Pegasus Spiele

, with Blue Orange Games

being the publisher of origin

• Magic Maze

, by Kasper Lapp

and Pegasus Spiele (originally Sit Down!

)

• Wettlauf nach El Dorado

, by Reiner Knizia

and Ravensburger

Seven additional titles were recommended by the jury of journalists and game reviewers that oversees the Spiel des Jahres, an annual award meant to honor a game that would be a great choice for play by German families (and by extension families everywhere). These titles are DEJA-VU

, Dodelino

, Fabled Fruit

, KLASK

, Shiftago

, Tempel des Schreckens

, and Word Slam

.

The jury announced nominees for two additional awards as well. Titles up for the Kinderspiel des Jahres, Germany's game of the year for children, are:

• Captain Silver

, by Wolfgang Dirscherl

, Manfred Reindl

, and Queen Games

• Ice Cool

, by Brian Gomez

and AMIGO Spiele

(originally Brain Games

)

• Der Mysteriöse Wald

(a.k.a. The Mysterious Forest

), by Carlo A. Rossi

and IELLO

The games nominated for the Kennerspiel des Jahres — an award aimed at enthusiasts who already have some familiarity with modern games — are:

• EXIT: Das Spiel

, a series of three escape room games from Inka Brand

, Markus Brand

, and KOSMOS

• Räuber der Nordsee

(a.k.a. Raiders of the North Sea

), by Shem Phillip

s and Schwerkraft-Verlag

(originally Phillips' own Garphill Games

)

• Terraforming Mars

, by Jacob Fryxelius

and Schwerkraft-Verlag (originally Stronghold Games

)

Four additional Kennerspiel-level titles were recommended by the jury: The Big Book of Madness

, Captain Sonar

, Great Western Trail

, and The Grizzled

.

The winner of the 2017 Kinderspiel des Jahres will be announced Monday, June 19 in Hamburg, while the 2017 Spiel and Kennerspiel des Jahres winners will be revealed on Monday, July 17 in Berlin.

Congratulations to all the nominees!

New Game Round-up: Monks Brewing, Detectives Chasing, and Devil Pigs Teasing

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/656…ing-detectives-chasing-an

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3563904_t.jpg] • Apparently it's time to start covering titles that will debut at SPIEL 2017 in October as eggertspiele

has revealed the final cover for Heaven & Ale

, a design by Michael Kiesling

and Andreas Schmidt

that puts you in charge of monks in a brewery. In more detail:

You have been assigned to lead an ancient monastery and its brewery. Now it's your time to brew the best beer under God's blue sky!

The fine art of brewing beer demands your best timing. In order to get the best results of your production, you have to provide your cloister's garden with fertile resources and the right number of monks helping with the harvest — but keep your brewmaster in mind as he is ready and eager to refine each and every one of your barrels!

In Heaven & Ale, you have to overcome the harsh competition of your fellow players. There is a fine balance between upgrading your cloister's garden and harvesting the resources you need to fill your barrels. Only those who manage to keep a cool head are able to win the race for the best beer!

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3480543_t.jpg]• Norwegian publisher Aporta Games

will debut Destination X

from Bård Tuseth

and Kristian Amundsen Østby

, with the name calling to mind the hunt for Mr. X in Scotland Yard

, although in this game it's enough to peg the country in which the spy is located in order to rack up a victory. Here's an overview:

Destination X is a game of one-against-many: One player takes the moderator role as a spy on the run, while the remaining players are detectives who must cooperate and use their deductive skills and geographical knowledge to track down the spy and identify their secret destination.

At the beginning of each round, six destination cards are placed face up on the table. The spy secretly chooses one of the destinations, and flips to the chosen country's page in the handbook. Each detective is given three informant cards, and in turn each detective must play an informant to get information about the spy's secret destination. The spy must find the relevant information in the handbook and answer truthfully. The informants may provide information on various aspects such as population, industry, religion, history, economy, and so on. After a detective has played an informant, the detective must also eliminate one of the destinations on the table.

At any time, the detectives can decide to guess on the spy's destination. If they guess correctly, the detectives win the round; otherwise the spy wins. The spy also wins if the detectives run out of informant cards, so the detectives must manage their resources well and not spend too much time or else the spy will manage to get away. The first side to win three rounds wins the game.

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3565859_t.png]• Designer J. Alex Kevern

is becoming a regular with Renegade Game Studios

, with his Sentient

due out in Q3 2017 and the freshly announced Atlas: Enchanted Lands

coming in Q4 2017. Here's an overview of that latter game:

Atlas: Enchanted Lands is an elegant card game set in a world of fairies and magic. Play cards to reveal a certain place and time — and place your stake in one of the two. Explore a location at dawn, day, sunset, and night, or see what the whole land looks like in the dark. Each card offers two choices, and it's up to you to uncover the world that awaits.

In more detail, players are challenged to predict the time or place that will be uncovered first. Cards laid on the board will complete sets. Depending on the cards chosen by the players, sets of similar cards or numerically ascending cards will be revealed, granting points to the players that deduced the correct combination.

• Fully Baked Ideas

, the adults-only imprint of Looney Labs, will release Adult Mad Libs: The Game

on June 22, 2017, with this design featuring the same gameplay as Andy Looney

's Mad Libs: The Game

but with racier or more suggestive words. Adult party games are a thing, yo!

• On Facebook, Yann and Clem

from Devil Pig Games

have posted

the following image with no comment other than "GRUIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIK!", which is precisely the sound made by a devil pig and not at all helpful in terms of enlightening others as to precisely what deal has been made between DPG and Games Workshop

. Questions have been asked; I'll let you know if responses come, but in all likelihood something will be announced during Warhammer Fest 2017

, which takes place May 27-28.

New Game Round-up: Monks Brewing, Detectives Chasing, and Devil Pigs Teasing

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/656…ing-detectives-chasing-an

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3563904_t.jpg] • Apparently it's time to start covering titles that will debut at SPIEL 2017 in October as eggertspiele

has revealed the final cover for Heaven & Ale

, a design by Michael Kiesling

and Andreas Schmidt

that puts you in charge of monks in a brewery. In more detail:

You have been assigned to lead an ancient monastery and its brewery. Now it's your time to brew the best beer under God's blue sky!

The fine art of brewing beer demands your best timing. In order to get the best results of your production, you have to provide your cloister's garden with fertile resources and the right number of monks helping with the harvest — but keep your brewmaster in mind as he is ready and eager to refine each and every one of your barrels!

In Heaven & Ale, you have to overcome the harsh competition of your fellow players. There is a fine balance between upgrading your cloister's garden and harvesting the resources you need to fill your barrels. Only those who manage to keep a cool head are able to win the race for the best beer!

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3480543_t.jpg]• Norwegian publisher Aporta Games

will debut Destination X

from Bård Tuseth

and Kristian Amundsen Østby

, with the name calling to mind the hunt for Mr. X in Scotland Yard

, although in this game it's enough to peg the country in which the spy is located in order to rack up a victory. Here's an overview:

Destination X is a game of one-against-many: One player takes the moderator role as a spy on the run, while the remaining players are detectives who must cooperate and use their deductive skills and geographical knowledge to track down the spy and identify their secret destination.

At the beginning of each round, six destination cards are placed face up on the table. The spy secretly chooses one of the destinations, and flips to the chosen country's page in the handbook. Each detective is given three informant cards, and in turn each detective must play an informant to get information about the spy's secret destination. The spy must find the relevant information in the handbook and answer truthfully. The informants may provide information on various aspects such as population, industry, religion, history, economy, and so on. After a detective has played an informant, the detective must also eliminate one of the destinations on the table.

At any time, the detectives can decide to guess on the spy's destination. If they guess correctly, the detectives win the round; otherwise the spy wins. The spy also wins if the detectives run out of informant cards, so the detectives must manage their resources well and not spend too much time or else the spy will manage to get away. The first side to win three rounds wins the game.

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3565859_t.png]• Designer J. Alex Kevern

is becoming a regular with Renegade Game Studios

, with his Sentient

due out in Q3 2017 and the freshly announced Atlas: Enchanted Lands

coming in Q4 2017. Here's an overview of that latter game:

Atlas: Enchanted Lands is an elegant card game set in a world of fairies and magic. Play cards to reveal a certain place and time — and place your stake in one of the two. Explore a location at dawn, day, sunset, and night, or see what the whole land looks like in the dark. Each card offers two choices, and it's up to you to uncover the world that awaits.

In more detail, players are challenged to predict the time or place that will be uncovered first. Cards laid on the board will complete sets. Depending on the cards chosen by the players, sets of similar cards or numerically ascending cards will be revealed, granting points to the players that deduced the correct combination.

• Fully Baked Ideas

, the adults-only imprint of Looney Labs, will release Adult Mad Libs: The Game

on June 22, 2017, with this design featuring the same gameplay as Andy Looney

's Mad Libs: The Game

but with racier or more suggestive words. Adult party games are a thing, yo!

• On Facebook, Yann and Clem

from Devil Pig Games

have posted

the following image with no comment other than "GRUIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIK!", which is precisely the sound made by a devil pig and not at all helpful in terms of enlightening others as to precisely what deal has been made between DPG and Games Workshop

. Questions have been asked; I'll let you know if responses come, but in all likelihood something will be announced during Warhammer Fest 2017

, which takes place May 27-28.

Game Overview: Wettlauf nach El Dorado, or Racing for the Golden Poppel

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/657…ch-el-dorado-or-racing-go

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3497408_t.jpg]When I started recording this overview of Reiner Knizia

's Wettlauf nach El Dorado

, a Ravensburger

title recently nominated for the 2017 Spiel des Jahres

, I did not expect to go on for more than twenty minutes. Apparently I had a lot to say about this deck-building racing game that feels surprisingly old-school, that feels like it could have come from a parallel Earth in which deck-building was never a thing and this design instead represents an evolution from older racing games of the Ave Caesar

and TurfMaster

variety.

At heart, Wettlauf nach El Dorado

is a racing game in which deck-building is just a fancy way for you to adjust how you make your way through the forests, over the waterways, and across the villages that separate you from the fabled land of El Dorado — although anyone who knows their Donald Duck

will recall that El Dorado actually refers to a golden man, not a golden land.

Many modern games take longer than the listed playing time the first time you attempt them because you're trying to fit together all the rules in your mind and are stumbling around unsure of what to do. If you charted the playing times over multiple sessions, you'd have a decreasing graph that flatlines at a certain point once everyone is familiar with the rules.

For me, Knizia games follow a different pattern, with the initial gameplay going quickly because it feels like not much is going on, but as you go through the game again and again, you find the possibilities of gameplay opening up to you, realizing that more opportunities exist for clever plays than you initially realized. If you charted out those playing times, you'd have a bell curve representing the simplicity of the rule set in the early stages, the rising middle of "a-ha" moments as you discover how to think ahead more and play better, then the decreasing section when the game is familiar and comforting, one more classic that you anticipate playing for years.

Wettlauf nach El Dorado

falls into that category of Knizia classics for me. As much as I enjoy Kingdomino

, which I've played a fair amount with my son and others and which gives a quick burst of thinky puzzling and playing the odds, and Magic Maze

, which is a heady group experience but not one I anticipate playing with the same people over and over again in the years ahead, Wettlauf nach El Dorado

is what I'd choose for Spiel des Jahres, for a game to introduce to others to challenge them and give them something that they'll want to return to over and over again.

By chance, I sat with representatives from Ravensburger at a dinner during the Spielwarenmesse game fair in February 2017, and one of the many topics we discussed was the shortening of shelf times in the German and U.S. game markets. Hundreds of new games are introduced each year, and most of those games will vanish from publisher catalogs in a few seasons, replaced by other designs that aren't necessarily better than what came before but are only different and new. One of the developers explained how many hours they had put into Wettlauf nach El Dorado

, hoping that it would become one of the few evergreen titles that survive in the catalog for a handful of years, but content to do the work anyway because this was a game that they were publishing for themselves as much as anyone else. We're all gamers here, he said, so sometimes you do the work and hope for the best.

Here's hoping...

IELLO Adopts Minimum Advertised Pricing Policy, While CMON Limited Updates Theirs

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/657…rtised-pricing-policy-whi

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3126414_t.jpg]On Wednesday, May 24, 2017, CMON Limited

announced

a new unilateral Minimum Advertised Pricing Policy (MAPP), and here's the announcement in full:

Today, May 24, CMON, Inc. announced it has adopted a unilateral Minimum Advertised Pricing Policy (MAPP) that will go into effect on June 1, 2017. Along with the new policy, CMON has restructured its existing hobby distribution network in the U.S. effective immediately. By unilaterally imposing restrictions on minimum prices advertised by CMON's new distribution network and retail partners, CMON products' perceived value in the customers' eyes will be enhanced, which is in the best interest of consumers and CMON's partners.

With the adoption of the unilateral MAPP, CMON has restructured their U.S. hobby distribution network to ensure efficient and effective distribution of their products to consumers in accordance with the new policy. As of May 24, 2017, the current hobby distributors CMON is working with include Alliance Game Distributors, ACD Distribution, and Peachstate Hobby Distribution (PHD).

The CMON MAPP will only apply to CMON branded products within the U.S., and products with a Minimum Advertised Price will appear on the current MAPP price list hosted on CMON.com. Adherence to the MAPP is non-negotiable for CMON product resellers, and will be strictly enforced by CMON to ensure the CMON brand maintains a high value in the consumer mindshare.

A copy of the CMON MAPP will be available at CMON.com/mapp and the CMON MAPP price list will be available at CMON.com/mapp-prices.

Those latter two URLs don't lead anywhere at this time.

Note that this isn't the first MAPP from CMON, which in mid-2014 introduced an agreement that retailers had to sign in which they agreed that their minimum advertised price "for all CMON Box Games shall be no less than 80% of the MSRP provided by CMON", with that policy applying to "all CMON Box Games released during the preceding 12 months", which at that time included Zombicide: Prison Outbreak

, Zombicide: Toxic City Mall

, Rivet Wars

, Kaosball

, Dogs of War

, Xenoshyft

and Arcadia Quest

.

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic1376840_t.jpg] IELLO

— or at least the U.S. branch of IELLO — introduced its own MAPP

in May 2017, with that policy going into effect on May 15, 2017. An excerpt from that policy:

IELLO acknowledges and understands that its current and continued success is directly related to the success of its network of authorized dealers (including without limitation all IELLO distributor, wholesale, and retail customers that resell IELLO products to consumers, known herein as "Vendors"). IELLO also recognizes and understands that its Vendors take great pains to deliver a first class experience to their customers, and IELLO desires to support its Vendors in furtherance of achieving their goals by protecting its image and reputation, promoting its brand and providing excellent resources that are key to maintaining the hobby culture for game enthusiasts. Therefore, it is in the interest of both IELLO and its Vendors to protect the Vendors’ ability to continue to provide an outstanding experience and exemplary service to their customers. In furtherance of the aforementioned dual interest, IELLO believes that it is also in the best interest of both IELLO and its Vendors to discourage advertising practices that would be detrimental to the service and support efforts of our Vendors. As a result, IELLO has developed and put into force this Minimum Advertised Price Policy ("MAPP") on a UNILATERAL BASIS. This MAPP shall in no way be considered or construed to be an agreement (or to create any contract) with or between any Vendor or other person or entity, and shall only apply to advertised pricing. It is in no way meant to regulate actual sales prices whatsoever.

Both IELLO and CMON Limited adopted "unilateral" policies, which means that the companies introduced their policies without prior and explicit agreement with those who retail their products, and while retailers are free to ignore these policies, they do so at the risk of not being able to carry these titles in their retail outlets in the future. From the IELLO policy:

The decision to comply with this MAPP is left up to each individual Vendor, and if they choose to comply, all such Vendors are solely responsible for maintaining compliance with IELLO's MAPP. IELLO reserves the right, in its sole and absolute discretion, to suspend or discontinue selling Products (and otherwise discontinue doing business with) any Vendor that: (i) advertises any Products covered by this MAPP at a price in contravention of this MAPP; or (ii) takes any other action whatsoever in contravention of this MAPP.

The MAP for IELLO titles, by the way, is 80% of the title's MSRP, which matches CMON's earlier stated MAP and which is the same as Mayfair Games' MAP when it was introduced in 2007. (That MAP was later changed to 90% of a game's MSRP. I've written a lot about MAPs

, both in 2007 when the policy was introduced and in 2016 when Asmodee changed its distribution structure to charge higher prices to online retailers.)

Crowdfunding Round-up: Delve and Loot Manhattan, Untold Minutes to Halloween

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/657…and-loot-manhattan-untold

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3542028_t.jpg]

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3517093_t.jpg]• After an intense dose of combat-driven games in the c.f. round-up last week

, let's see whether we can find games featuring other

subject material this time around, starting with Hand of Fate: Ordeals

from Barantas and Australian publisher Rule & Make

, with this being a tabletop version of the digital deck-building game of the same name from Defiant Development. In this game for 1-4 players that can be played either competitively or cooperatively, players roam the land to gather new equipment and increase their abilities while fighting minions and overcoming ambushes before going after the bosses. ( KS link

)

• Okay, that was a failure. How about Dark Dealings: Dwarven Delve

from Peter Gousis, Michael D. Kelley, and Nevermore Games

, with this being an expansion to Dark Dealings

, a game in which you're an evil overlord under siege by heroes. The expansion moves the action underground, with you now trying to ward off eviction by dwarves through the use of "goblin- and troll-powered defenses". ( KS link

)

• War of the Nine Realms

from Robbie Munn and Wotan Games

is unlikely to be combat free unless someone has grossly miscalculated what to title their game, and indeed this tile-based game pits players against one another in tactical skirmishes, with players using the powers of different realms, each with their own characters and abilities, with each realm also having a choice of heroic (raw power) and epic (tactical advantages) play styles. ( KS link

)

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3272543_t.jpg]• Hey, here's a combat-free crowdfunding project! Hang 12

from Tim Roediger and Grail Games

is a press-your-luck party game in which during each round you're presented with a question about one of your fellow players. You answer this question with "true/false" or "A/B" depending on the type of question; if you guess correctly, you start a scoring wave of 1 point or increase the value of your current scoring wave, while if you guess incorrectly, your wave crashes and you'll have to start surfing anew. Instead of answering, you can score your current surf, and whoever scores 24 points first wins. ( KS link

)

• Another party game looking for funding comes from Andrea Meyer

of BeWitched Spiele

, who has a new expansion for her singing-based game Hossa!

titled Hossa! Lobgesang

(translated as "Hossa! Canticle"), with this consisting of cards that depict 64 items and categories from the world of religious songs. Meyer notes that in response to requests from choir leaders, she's printing the material on postcard-sized cards and laminating them so that they can be used outside by large groups. ( Startnext link

)

• Loot & Recruit

from Derek, Justin, and Stephanie Lynch and Vile Genius Games

is a deck-building design in which players acquire action cards and goblins, then attempt to stack goblins and defend said goblin stacks while knocking down the stacks of others. ( KS link

)

• Kokoro: Avenue of the Kodama

marries the look of Daniel Solis' Kodama: The Tree Spirits

with the gameplay of Eilif Svensson and Kristian Amundsen Østby's Avenue

, which was released by Aporta Games

at SPIEL 2016. This design features the same gameplay as Avenue

on the A-side of its game board — with path cards being revealed turn by turn so that players can attempt to connect buildings on the board, with each path needing to be more valuable than the previous one so that you can continue scoring — while the B-side has a variable set-up that gives you new starting configurations. Additional scoring tweaks come through decree cards that have been added to the game. ( KS link

)

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3519889_t.jpg]• Brandon Tibbetts' The Manhattan Project

from Minion Games

has been well-received, and now the design team has moved the action forward two decades with The Manhattan Project 2: Minutes to Midnight

, with players representing superpowers that need to develop deployment systems for their nuclear weapons. Scoring takes place four times during the game, with players needing to manage strategic bombers, ballistic submarines, ICBMs, and short-range missiles deployed to third world nations. ( KS link

)

• Rory O'Connor

of The Creativity Hub

has been publishing Rory's Story Cubes

for more than a decade, with the dice meant to encourage and develop storytelling skills in whoever picks them up (assuming that picking them up is followed by rolling them, then telling a story). Now O'Connor has teamed with John Fiore on Untold: Adventures Await

, a larger storytelling game in which you can use any and all Story Cubes

to tell a grand story that goes through the highs and lows of classic stories. ( KS link

)

• In the more traditional dice-based game Project Nos

from Peter Newland of Mind the Gap Studios

, players draft modification dice and cards, then compete in a real-time drag race — on their table, mind you. ( KS link

)

• Dutch publisher Quined Games

is crowdfunding the SPIEL 2017 release of Angelo de Maio's Halloween

, a game that challenges you to be the best demon lord that you can be, with that task requiring you to make use of ghosts in the best ways possible. ( 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

Games Played and Seen at BGG.CON Spring 2017: Wettlauf nach El Dorado, Ethnos, Kreus, Mini Rails, Pulsar 2849, Tokyo Highway, Downforce, and Terraforming Mars

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/658…gcon-spring-2017-wettlauf

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3573802_t.jpg]The 2017 BGG.CON Spring convention took place this past weekend, and I attended for 1.5 of the four days given that I only recently returned from one trip and will be heading to the 2017 Origins Game Fair in a couple of weeks. Trying not to burn out on travel, while still doing a fair amount of traveling!

As was the case at BGG.CON Spring in 2016, I played a small number of games multiple times while sampling a few other titles, most of which I had brought with me. We once again had all of the Spiel, Kennerspiel, and Kinderspiel des Jahres nominees

set up for sampling in a special part of the main room, and as soon as I walked in and saw folks looking over the SdJ-nominated Wettlauf nach El Dorado

, I knew that I had to jump in and teach them — and play in the third seat, of course — having already played a half-dozen times and recorded an overview video about the game

.

Immediately after this game, I played with others on a medium-difficulty set-up, and I inserted myself in multiple other game sessions over the next thirty hours to correct rules that folks were getting wrong. No, you don't keep the barriers between tiles face down. Yes, you can remove a barrier during your turn and continue moving. No, you don't put two explorers on the board unless you're playing with only two players. Yes, you can use a card with a higher number to move across multiple spaces. I'd say that playing games at a convention invites such rules confusion and the potential to have poor outings due to confusion, but plenty of people mess up rules at home as well. I know that I have more than once, but at least in this case I could catch mistakes on the fly and (ideally) allow players to absorb the game as intended.

I played twice more on Saturday night with Lincoln and Nikki from Game Night

(since they intend to play all the S/Ke/Ki nominees on camera and wanted to get experience with the games ahead of time) and with one of the members of the Kinderspiel des Jahres jury. Fun times, and in one game I even managed to strip my deck down to almost nothing, snagging two "Wissenschaftlerin" and managing to strip nearly all the gold from my hand by the time I was a tile-and-a-half away from the goal.

Seikatsu

from Matt Loomis, Isaac Shalev, and IDW Games is a tile-laying game that plays in a few minutes, with players laying down one of their two tiles in hand each turn to score points immediately by matching nearby birds and to score points at the end of the game by placing matching flowers in the rows that a player sees from their perspective. Belying the prettiness of the design, you need to embrace your inner jerk to block others from nailing down high-valued flower rows, ideally scoring something for yourself in the process.

BGG owner Scott Alden was interested in playing Paolo Mori's Ethnos

, and despite the sour taste left after my initial playing in April 2017 (or perhaps because of it), I wanted to play again to see what would happen.

The gameplay is straightforward: On a turn, either pick up a card from the draft pool or top of the deck, or play a band of cards that feature the same race or color, discarding all other cards in hand. I asked not to have both centaurs and elves in the game since in that initial playing, the powers of those races — centaurs: play another band after the first, and elves: hold onto X cards with X = size of the band played — led to few cards being discarded into the draft pool, which led to us top-decking for three-quarters of the game.

Thus, we ditched the elves and played with centaurs, giants, trolls, wizards, halflings, and skeletons _ and wouldn't you know it, the exact same thing happened again. Perhaps not nearly as often, mind you, but we were top-decking roughly half the time, which led me to wonder how this game is getting as much love as it is. The owner of the game, who didn't play with us, said that he thought it was a fine design while admitting that they top-deck a decent percentage of the time as well. As before, I like the idea of Ethnos

more than the finished product, but I'm game for more playings to see whether my opinion changes.

Following that, Scott was eager to teach Julien Prothière's Kreus

from Sweet Games and CMON Limited, a cooperative game with Hanabi

-like elements that Scott has fallen in love with, playing it ten times in one night.

Your path to victory is relatively clear: Form a planet, and supply it with one of each of the four elements. To do this, though, you first need to play a comet and atmosphere and supply them with elements, after which you can play a rainbow, mountain, river, or wind, with those also needing elements to exist. Complete three of those and ideally you can move down to the next level — fish, bird, flower, tree — with those allowing you to complete the planet.

All the cards are in players' hands at the start of the game, including aggression cards that can sack elements on incomplete nature cards or prevent elements from being played, and on each turn, each player must choose a card and put it before them face down, after which cards are played in clockwise order. Scott describes this as a "smoke signal" game in that you need to read the players before you and after you in turn order to determine what they might be playing because — and this is the important thing — you are not supposed to communicate at all! The game does include a number of tokens, which varies as you play from 3-6 players, and you can use these tokens to reveal a card or swap a card (blindly) with another player, but you must use them sparingly and you recover them solely when a nature card is played.

Despite the restriction, we communicated all over the place, something essential in your first games as you often have no clue over what a legal or smart play might be, why player A is revealing to player B, why someone wants to swap cards, etc. You need that first game under your belt to start having a clue how to play, and even then we were still giving hints and conducting meta-talk about why you might have done such-and-such. We played twice on Friday, then four times more on Saturday with player counts of four, five, and six. As I tweeted at the time, this game is delightful and frustrating magic, and I hope to record an overview video soon as I think you need to see the game in action to fully understand it. I know that I didn't grok it following an explanation at the 2016 Origins Game Fair...

I should have gone to bed at that point — or perhaps three hours earlier — but instead we had five people for Mark Gerritts' Mini Rails

from Moaideas Game Design, which turned into an epic exercise in hate-drafting.

In each of the six rounds of the game, each player takes one share in a company (starting that share at $0) and places one track (adding that colored disc to the network of the same color, with everyone who owns that share either raising or lowering the value by the amount indicated on the cover space. You can take those two actions in either order, with you choosing a disc from those laid out in a path and with the player choices determining the player order for the subsequent round.

The one disc not chosen each round is placed on a separate track, which represents that company paying its taxes. Yay, now it won't be confiscated by the government and its shares (if positive) will have value at the end of the game! If a company doesn't pay taxes, then positive shares are worthless and only negative shares will be counted in your final score.

We tore each other apart and possibly made many bad choices in the short time that we played, with the final scores being 5, 4, 0, 0, and 0. I was tanking similarly in a three-player game played during Tokyo Game Market, so perhaps the margin for victory is slim in all games.

After breakfast and sleep, I headed to the exhibit hall to see whether I should take pics of anything, despite this being a fun trip and not a work trip, and I had to snap a shot of Pulsar 2849

, coming from Vladimír Suchý

and Czech Games Edition

at SPIEL 2017. Here's a high-level description of the game:

Draft dice to explore the universe in Pulsar 2849. Each round, roll dice based on the number of players, sort them based on their values, then draft dice to take actions, such as adding another spaceship to your fleet or visiting (or flying through) an unexplored star system or tagging a pulsar with one of your identity rings or advancing on your personal tech track, which differs from those of other players. At the end of the round, the turn marker advances based on the dice rolled that turn, and when the market reaches the end of the track, the game ends.

Players score points each round based on what they've discovered and explored, and everyone has hidden goals that they want to achieve, while also trying to claim the right to public goals that supply additional endgame scoring.

We'll have a more detailed presentation of Pulsar 2849

during the livestream from Origins 2017 in mid-June, but in general (1) this game is still being developed and CGE won't stop developing until it goes to print roughly one week prior to SPIEL 2017 and (2) after two years of Codenames

fever, this design is a more typical CGE release, with a million things to consider all at once.

(Note that Codenames

fever will continue through at least Gen Con 2017 with the release of Codenames Duet

, a game that we previewed in March 2017

at the GAMA Trade Show and a game that now differs greatly from that preview. The design had already changed from PAX East and GAMA, with barely a week between those cons, and now it's changed even more, with a campaign system of some sort being introduced. Again, more details at Origins 2017 when the design might finally be solidified.)

Catan Studio has a nice playmat for Klaus Teuber's Rivals for Catan

that it uses at conventions and that might make its way to retail shops at some point.

Nearly a year after the game's debut, I finally tried Terraforming Mars

, the Kennerspiel des Jahres nominee from Jacob Fryxelius and Stronghold Games. I used to play more games at this level of complexity, but I'm a fan of lighter games these days, mostly because I'm unable to get games like these to the table consistently, and if I can't play something multiple times, then I prefer to skip it entirely and focus on games that I will

play multiple times. In any case, Lincoln and Nikki wanted to play as part of their Game Night preparation, so we joined another newb and one experienced player and dove in — and yes, I realize that starting a heavy game with a full boat and four new sleep-deprived players at 11:00 p.m. might not be the best idea, but we did it anyway!

I can understand why people like the game — revel in tons of choices! find those combos! — but I feel like the design and production are only 80% complete. When you pick up those initial ten cards, your head is spinning at the possibilities with no clue as to what's good and bad; sometimes you can eliminate cards from consideration since the conditions aren't right to play them — not warm enough, too little oxygen, no cities yet, etc. — but that's a mixed blessing when you stare at a hand of seven of those cards(!) as one player did. That player felt like they started with one hand tied behind their back as nearly everything was expensive or literally unplayable. I'm baffled as to why the game lacks starting hands a là Race for the Galaxy

, groups of ten cards that give a helping hard to new players in the first few turns, that give some direction instead of allowing new players to flounder. As is, you feel like you're walking into a firehose, making no progress and finding it hard even to consider what you might want to do. Not the experience I think the SdJ jury would want folks to have when buying a Kennerspiel winner...

The styling of the card art is all over the place (and not in a good way), the font is too small on the cards, the graphic design does nothing to assist gameplay, and the player mats actively hinder you from having a good experience since it's critical to track your production level in six areas and you will undoubtedly hit that mat several times during the game, knocking your cubes higgledy-piggledy and cursing whoever decided not to make these mats out of thick die-cut cardboard. Maybe I'll wait to pick up the deluxe fifth anniversary edition of Terraforming Mars

in 2021 when all these issues will have been taken care of.

BGG admin Chad Roberts had asked me to bring Tokyo Highway

, a game from Naotaka Shimamoto, Yoshiaki Tomioka, and itten that I had bought at Tokyo Game Market, so I did and we played in the early hours on Sunday.

In this game, you're trying to place all ten of your cars on your highway, and the only way to place a car is to build part of your highway either above or below a section of the opponent's highway that currently has nothing higher or lower than it — but for the most part (1) you're building your highway solely as an extension of what already exists, which means you have to snake in and out of the loops with all highway sections being the same length and (2) when you build a new column to support that highway piece, the column must be one token taller or shorter than the column from which you're building.

Three times during the game, you can create a column topped with a yellow piece, which allows you to both violate the "one higher/lower" policy and fork your highway either immediately or on a later turn. You continue play until someone places all ten cars (winning immediately) or someone runs out of pieces, in which case the other player wins.

We built tight, spiraling loops, which might have been a mistake as we were burning through column pieces quickly without placing many cars. Then Chad Godzillaed some of my highway, for which the penalty is handing over column pieces to the opponent and soon he ran dry. The game includes tweezers for both players, but I don't know whether using them would make the game easier or harder!

My final game of BGG.CON Spring 2017 was Downforce

, the latest take on Wolfgang Kramer's card-based racing system, which was present in his very first release Tempo

, which is more than four decades old!

In the game, players receive a hand of cards, with those cards having one or more colored lines on them; those colored lines represent potential movement for the race car of the matching color. The game starts with players bidding to control one or more cars, using the cards in their hand to bid for cars. This system cleverly eliminates the need for money in the game as you're not going to bid for a color if you have none of that color in hand; at the same time, you reveal a bit of information about your hand to others. Each car comes with a driver who has a special ability, and that ability applies to all cars that you acquire.

Each player must acquire at least one car during the first phase of the game, after which you race, with players playing one card from hand and moving the cars in order from top to bottom of the card they played. You try to choke off movement of cars don't own while ensuring that your cars always have free lances ahead. It doesn't always work out, of course, and the game board is double-sided with a chokier set of lanes on the side not shown below. Good to see this game returning to print!

The Hyatt Regency had a giant version of Jenga

in the lobby, along with the beanbag-tossing game Cornhole

, which served to cue hotel visitors in to the goings-on in the basement.

Someone had created a giant-sized version of Jun Sasaki's Deep Sea Adventure

from Oink Games and set it up in the common area of the basement. The psychedelic ocean might be the result of nitrogen narcosis, so take care when diving.

On Friday evening after dinner, we drove to Madness Games & Comics

in Plano, Texas. This is a phenomenally good shop, with a huge selection of titles new and old — sometimes really old due to the purchase of another store's stock! — along with multiple employees who are circling the floor, asking whether they can help, and actually providing help because they know what they're talking about. Highly recommended should you be in the area!

New Game Round-up: Claim Crystals, Crush Kaiju, and Compete to Be a Superpower

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/658…tals-crush-kaiju-and-comp

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3572562_t.jpg]• Crystal Clans

from newcomer Andrea Mezzotero

seems to tick some of the same boxes as Plaid Hat Games

' Summoner Wars

— with each player take charge of one of six clans to summon units on a landscape, move them around, and attack one another — but in this game players are racing to claim four crystals first.

To claim a crystal, you must occupy two of the three crystal zones without the opponent being there, which means you need to coordinate your actions so that you can score on your turn before the moment is lost. The action system is somewhat open, with one player taking actions as they wish — with each action having its own cost — until the initiative marker is moved into the opponent's half of the initiative track, after which the opponent starts fighting back. English rules are already posted ( PDF

) should you want more details.

• Vital Lacerda

's Kanban: Automotive Revolution

will be available in a new edition in October 2017 from Stronghold Games

with no changes other than differently-shaped cars for each color and a double-sided game board "to help newcomers to understand the board in an easier way", according to

Lacerda.

• Martin Wallace

's The Arrival

, a reimplementation of Mordred released by newcomer Game's Up at SPIEL 2016, has been picked up by Cryptozoic Entertainment

for release in English in Q4 2017. The publisher's Dekan Wheeler mentions that this edition will feature "new art, slight rules adjustments, and an advanced mode of play".

• Iron Curtain

is a two-player microgame from Asger Harding Granerud

, Daniel Skjold Pedersen

, and Ultra PRO

that challenges players to dominate battlegrounds — majorities, area control and domino effects — to assert their influence in the world. Iron Curtain

is due out in August 2017.

• In November 2017, Fireside Games

will release Kaiju Crush

from Justin De Witt

and Tim Armstrong

, with players crushing city tiles and marking those spaces with territory markers to complete secret objectives and satisfy their lizard brains. You can fight each other, of course, with each kaiju having special abilities layered on top of a five-fold RPS-style combat system.

Asmodee North America to Go Exclusive with Alliance Game Distributors

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/658…exclusive-alliance-game-d

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3578217_t.jpg]In December 2015, Asmodee North America

announced a plan

to reduce the number of distributors that it deals with for the hobby game market to five: ACD Distribution, Alliance Game Distributors, GTS Distribution, PHD Games, and Southern Hobby Supply. As of August 1, 2017, that number will be reduced to one, with Alliance Game Distributors signing a multi-year agreement with ANA that's "aimed at broadly increasing support for U.S. hobby games retailers", to quote from the press release. Here's the rest of it:

This includes the creation of a large, dedicated Asmodee Specialist Team at Alliance, significant updates to Asmodee's sales policies, and a number of upcoming retailer initiatives designed to support and grow the market.

More information on updated Asmodee sales policies and details about upcoming retailer initiatives will be made available in late June.

"This is an amazing and transformational deal," said Christian T. Petersen, CEO of Asmodee North America. "We at Asmodee have long enjoyed a terrific and productive relationship with the great people at Alliance. This deal joins the combined experience of both organizations to craft a communications and distribution infrastructure that we believe will positively affect both retailers and consumers in the hobby games market."

"We are truly honored to be part of this historic agreement," said Daniel Hirsch, president of Alliance Game Distributors. "Alliance has enjoyed a very close relationship with the companies that make up Asmodee North America for over 20 years. We are both proud and grateful that Asmodee has placed its trust in us for the stewardship of its brands."

Asmodee has declined to participate in interviews about this deal until late June 2017 when it announces the new sales policies. It has noted that new releases and restocks will be available from the five currently authorized distributors until August 1, 2017, after which Alliance will be the only source for such items in the hobby game market.

In some ways this is a return to old habits for parts of ANA as design studio Days of Wonder

was exclusive with Alliance for many years and remained exclusive for a period after being purchased by Asmodee in mid-2014

. Z-Man Games

was exclusive with Alliance until January 2016 when it opened distribution to four other companies

, namely the four non-Alliance companies listed above. (Asmodee subsequently announced negotiations

to purchase Z-Man owner F2Z Entertainment in July 2016, completing the deal

in October 2016.)

So what now? The four non-Alliance distributors will lose some percentage of their business, and whether they survive or not will depend on what that percentage is and what they do in response to this loss of revenue. Hobby retailers who previously dealt with a non-Alliance distributor for titles that originate or are distributed by Asmodee North America must now deal with Alliance — unless they purchase directly from ANA, of course, which might be where this path leads to in the end. After all, ANA has gone from a dozen distributors to five to one in a couple of years. Why stop there?

At the same time as the December 2015 announcement about its distribution, ANA made changes to how it interacted with online retailers, both prohibiting general retailers from selling ANA titles online and lowering the discount at which online retailers could purchase games, thereby effectively raising prices of games sold through those outlets. This change to a single distributor will give ANA still tighter control over its inventory, better allowing them to know who sells what and for what price.

As for what happens with other publishers in response to this, specifically CMON Limited

, which is positioning itself as the Avis of the hobby game industry, we'll have to wait and see...

New Game Round-up: Tile Your Way to Dragon Island, Expand Magic Maze, and Prepare to Say F*That!

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/659…-way-dragon-island-expand

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3580379_t.png]• BGG's Gen Con 2017 Preview, which will go live on Monday, June 19, now has more than one hundred listings on it, with the latest being Dragon Island

, an explorations game from Mike Fitzgerald

and R&R Games

. Here's an overview of the setting and gameplay:

In Dragon Island, you and up to three other players take on the role of wizards cast away onto a seemingly deserted island. Players compete throughout their journey to gain as much treasure as possible, building up the island tile by double-sided tile. Discover exotic terrains, build special structures, manage your magical energy, and tame dragons!

Once the entire island has been discovered, your quest is over, and whoever has accumulated the most treasure wins!

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3580500_t.jpg]• U.S. publisher Mattel

is joining the R-rated party game bandwagon with the Q3 2017 release of F*That!

, which means "Forget that!" or possibly "Forgo that!" or something friendly along those lines. As for the gameplay, it goes like this:

In F*That!, the active player each round is presented with an uncomfortable or unusual situation (e.g., You've just gone to the bathroom only to discover afterward that no toilet paper is available. What's an acceptable substitute?) along with five possible solutions for this situation (e.g., fashion magazine, pile of leaves, etc.). The active player tells everyone how many of the solutions they find acceptable, then everyone else simultaneously guesses which solutions that player might pick.

• The Colonists

designer Tim Puls

is playtesting a cooperative two-player scenario

in which you defend against zombie intruders. Do you want to see zombies in this world? Puls is polling BGG users

on what they want to fight in their newly created villages. Leeches is not an option.

• In more definite happenings from Lookout Spiele

, for SPIEL 2017 the publisher will release Riverboat

by Michael Kiesling and an expansion for Isle of Skye

from Alexander Pfister and Andreas Pelikan that currently bears the working title The Wanderer

; Pfister notes

that the expansion has both more of what's already in the game thanks to new landscape tiles and new scoring tiles, as well as a new game board element that provides a new way to score. He says, "With four people, it increases playing time by about ten minutes."

• To continue with the teasers for SPIEL 2017, Sit Down!

has posted the following for Spiel des Jahres-nominated Magic Maze

:

Dungeons & Dragons + House on the Hill = Betrayal at Baldur's Gate

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/659…ill-betrayal-baldurs-gate

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3581400_t.png]On June 3, 2017, during its "Stream of Annihilation" — a special event to announce its new Dungeons & Dragons

storyline "Tomb of Annihilation" — Wizards of the Coast

revealed a separate D&D

-related item that will be of interest to board game fans as well: Betrayal at Baldur's Gate

, a 3-6 player game based on Betrayal at House on the Hill

that's due out November 15, 2017. Here's a game overview from the publisher:

The shadow of Bhaal has come over Baldur's Gate, summoning monsters and other horrors from the darkness!

As you build and explore the iconic city's dark alleys and deadly catacombs, you must work with your fellow adventurers to survive the terrors ahead. That is, until some horrific evil turns one — or possibly more — of you against each other. Was it a mind flayer's psionic blast or the whisperings of a deranged ghost that caused your allies to turn traitor? You have no choice but to keep your enemies close!

In Betrayal at Baldur's Gate, you'll return to Baldur's Gate again and again only to discover it's never the same game twice. Can you and your party survive the madness, or will you succumb to the mayhem and split (or slaughter!) the party?

We have an appointment with Avalon Hill

on Thursday, June 15, 2017 at 1:00 p.m. EDT (GMT-4) during our Origins Game Fair livestream to show off the game in some detail.

New Game Round-up: Fantastic Four Head Back to Print, Andor Keeps Expanding, and Prepare to Wander the Tomb of Annihilation

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/659…four-head-back-print-ando

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic1743645_t.jpg]

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[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3545170_t.jpg]• A reprint of Legendary: Fantastic Four

— which quickly went out of print after its initial release in 2013 and which has sold for up to $200-250 on the BGG Marketplace and eBay — is coming from Upper Deck Entertainment

, with this $20 MSRP expansion likely to hit the market once again in August 2017. As UDE's Jason Brenner notes on ICv2

, this item's previous non-availability on the market was due to a "licensor-controlled issue", namely Marvel Entertainment or its parent company not authorizing a reprint.

• How the years fly by... To celebrate the fifth anniversary of Michael Menzel

's Legends of Andor

, in Q4 2017 German publisher KOSMOS

plans to release Die Legende von Andor: Die Bonus-Box

, which contains additional legends, bonus material of an undefined nature, and a soundtrack CD for use with the base game (and possibly the expansions as well).

• Speaking of KOSMOS, whether the publisher takes home the Kennerspiel des Jahres for 2017 for the first three EXIT: The Game

titles from Inka

and Markus Brand

, the line is clearly a success, with three new titles — Die Station im ewigen Eis

, Die verbotene Burg

, and Die vergessene Insel

— hitting retail stores in Germany in early June 2017 and four additional titles — Das Haus der Rätsel

, Die unheimliche Villa

, Der versunkene Schatz

, and Der Tote im Orient-Express

— following in Q4 2017.

• Yesterday I posted

about the announcement of Betrayal at Baldur's Gate

, a Dungeons & Dragons

-themed take on Betrayal at House on the Hill

, but a couple of other game announcements took place during Wizards of the Coast's "Stream of Annihilation", a special event to announce its new D&D

storyline "Tomb of Annihilation".

On Saturday, June 2, WizKids

announced Dungeons and Dragons Dice Masters: Tomb of Annihilation

, with this being another entry in the sprawling Dice Masters

line. One new element for this expansion is the release of draft packs; you need at least one D&D Dice Masters

starter box and one draft pack per player, with players drafting one card and two matching dice from each pack until they both have twelve cards, after which they must choose eight for their team.

In addition to that, in August 2017 WizKids will release Tomb of Annihilation Board Game

, a 1-5 player cooperative game by Kevin Wilson

that's part of the publisher's Adventure System Board Games

line. As with WizKids' Assault of the Giants

, released in early 2017, Tomb of Annihilation Board Game

will be released in two versions, with the premium version having pre-painted miniatures.

You can watch the announcements during day 1 of the "Stream of Annihilation"

, starting at 4:29.

Links: Diana Jones Award Announces Nominees, Go Machine Goes, and HABA Asks for Submissions

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/660…nnounces-nominees-go-mach

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3585630_t.png]• The nominees for the 2017 Diana Jones Award for Excellence in Gaming

have been announced, and as usual they cover an interesting cross-segment of the gaming community. The nominees are:

— Gloomhaven

, with which users of this site are probably familiar

— Terraforming Mars

, ditto

— Gen Con

, the largest game convention in the U.S., which celebrates its fiftieth anniversary in 2017

— End of the Line

, a LARP by Bjarke Pedersen, Juhana Pettersson and Martin Elricsson that DJA describes as "the most interesting thing to happen in Vampire

for a long while [combining] two decades long traditions of LARP, American Masquerade and Nordic style LARPing."

— The Romance Trilogy

, a set of role-playing games from Emily Care Boss

and Black and Green Games

— The Beast

, a card game from Aleksandra Sontowska and Kamil Węgrzynowicz published by Naked Female Giant

(and available at DriveThruCards

); here's an overview of this creation from DJA, which falls far outside BGG's definition of a game, but which sounds enticing all the same:

The Beast is an unsettling, erotic journaling game for one player. Each day for twenty-one days you turn up a card with a prompt on it and write a response in your journal. The game takes you deep into imagining a disturbing, secret sexual relationship you have with a beast. If there's one thing you don't see much of in hobby games, it's meaningful interior narratives, but The Beast's weird, unique brew of dark transgressions, playing as a fictional version of yourself and journaling the results, somehow surfaces real untold truths in us about how the world works, and how relationships work, and what's important in life. The Beast is memorable, transgressive, and procedurally and thematically unlike anything else you may have played.

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3585700_t.png]• AlphaGo, an AI developed by DeepMind (a company purchased by Google in 2014), defeated the world's top-ranked Go

player, Ke Jie, in a series of matches in China in late May 2017, and now having bested the best the program will play Go

no more. In a blog following the 3-0 victory by AlphaGo, DeepMind CEO and co-founder Demis Hassabis wrote

:

The research team behind AlphaGo will now throw their energy into the next set of grand challenges, developing advanced general algorithms that could one day help scientists as they tackle some of our most complex problems, such as finding new cures for diseases, dramatically reducing energy consumption, or inventing revolutionary new materials. If AI systems prove they are able to unearth significant new knowledge and strategies in these domains too, the breakthroughs could be truly remarkable. We can’t wait to see what comes next.

As a parting gift for Go

players, DeepMind offered the following

:

Since our match with Lee Sedol, [a world champion that AlphaGo defeated 4-1 in 2016], AlphaGo has become its own teacher, playing millions of high level training games against itself to continually improve. We're now publishing a special set of 50 AlphaGo vs AlphaGo games, played at full length time controls, which we believe contain many new and interesting ideas and strategies.

We took the opportunity at the Summit to show some of these games to a handful of top professionals. Shi Yue, 9 Dan Professional and World Champion said the games were "Like nothing I've ever seen before — they're how I imagine games from far in the future." Gu Li, 9 Dan Professional and World Champion, said that "AlphaGo's self play games are incredible — we can learn many things from them." We hope that all Go players will now enjoy trying out some of the moves in the set.

Those quotes will resonate with anyone familiar with Hikaru no Go

and the main character's quest for the "divine move"...

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic203608_t.jpg]• The U.S. division of HABA

is running a game design contest

that's open until July 31, 2017. To participate, you need to purchase a $3 design kit

from HABA that includes random bits from various HABA titles, then create something for 2-5 players that plays in 15-45 minutes using at least three of the elements in the kit. If HABA doesn't sell its two hundred design kits prior to mid-June, it will bring copies of the kit to the 2017 Origins Game Fair. Sounds like a late-night challenge for fairgoers!

• The city of Nürnberg, Germany contains seven municipal museums as well as various historic sights and collections, including the German Games Archive

, which contains more than 30,000 parlor games. How did I not know about this before?! Apparently I need to stay in Nürnberg a day or two after Spielwarenmesse ends in 2018 so that I can check this out.

Aside from that archive, games show up in other places as well, with Ken Fisher's card game Wizard

being featured as the "showpiece of the month" for June 2017

. BGG admin Emile de Maat was visiting the city in late May 2017, and at the Stadtmuseum im Fembo-Haus

he ran across a "games with antiquity" exhibit (depicted below) that features modern games about olden times. On June 13, 2017, the Stadtmuseum im Fembo-Haus will feature a presentation by Reiner Knizia

titled " The World of Games

". Lots to check out in that city!

Designer Diary: Pinball Showdown, or Quarter Up!

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/658…nball-showdown-or-quarter

by Diane Sauer

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3193330_t.png] Pinball Showdown

is a game that had a long and varied road before it reached its final destination. This is due in large part to my love of pinball and the fact that I've run a business restoring vintage pinball machines for almost fifteen years. As I mentioned in my designer diary

for Conspiracy!

, integrating theme into gameplay is extremely important to me

. This being a pinball game made that truer than ever — but I'm getting ahead of myself here and should back up to talk about my history with pinball.

When I was a teenager in the 1970s and early 1980s, there were basically two places that kids would hang out year round: malls and arcades. Pretty much every mall had at least one arcade in it, so that was really convenient. Additionally, having grown up in New Jersey, I spent many a summer visiting the boardwalks of Asbury Park, Seaside Heights, and Wildwood — all of which were loaded to the gills with arcades. Spending all this time in arcades, I played a lot of video games, but even more pinball machines. There was and still is something about pinball that, for me at least, transcends arcade video games.

No matter how great or how much fun a video game was, it would inevitably become repetitive and predictable. That never happens with pinball. You can play a pinball machine a thousand times, and something new will happen on the thousand-and-first play that you have never encountered before.

Ball One

When Shoot Again Games

started, a pinball game was (perhaps not surprisingly) always on the idea list as something that I had to do. I'd been thinking about it for a long time, well before I started the company. When I seriously started working on an idea for a pinball-themed game, the most obvious thought I had was that players would be playing pinball machines and attempting to get the highest score. I did not feel that basing the game on a particular pinball machine was a good way to go since that would have required licensing, so I thought that instead it would be neat if the players "built" the pinball playfield before they played a game on it. This meant breaking play down into two games with the first being a mini-pregame. This was a concept I had seen before, namely in the Avalon Hill Dune

expansion Spice Harvest

, which I thought was clever.

I kicked this idea around for quite a while, but could never get it to make the leap to full prototype. The reason, I think, is that many pinball machines have similar basic layouts — e.g., shooter lane on the right, "in lanes" of some sort at the top, slings down near the flippers, etc. — which made the idea very limiting since I wanted any playfield players might come up with to make sense. Thus, this idea faded away, although I did ultimately kind of use the idea of having playfield devices separate rather than part of a complete pinball playfield.

Ball Two

For the second attempt, I went in an entirely different direction by having the players each run their own arcade in a town with the goal of running the most successful and popular arcade. Being familiar with the workings of arcades in addition to running a vending route, I already had a good idea of what needed to be in the game. Also, I was lucky in that the guys who did the electronic board repair for my pinball business had worked for an arcade distributor that also did arcade board repair since the late 1970s. Whenever I had a question about the details of how something was done back then, I could just ask them.

This second game, which I named "Arcade Wars!", made it the prototype stage. The play mechanisms that I settled on involved each player starting with a hole-in-the-wall-sized arcade that could hold up to five pinball machines or video games. In addition, each player received a legacy or "classic" game of some type, be it a Skeeball machine or an old electromechanical gun game. These games never went away and always made a small set amount of money. The first player would get the lowest paying of these with the last getting the best to help mitigate the advantage of going first.

The game was broken into nine — yes, nine!

— phases. Players would have to pay salaries and rent, visit the distributor to purchase new machines, bribe the hotshots (players so good they had a following) to come to your arcade, and do other things like upgrade to a bigger and better location. The meat of the game, though, was the various pinball machines that each turn you could assign players to from the limited patron pool. The more players you had on a machine, the faster players would lose interest in the game, which would cause its income to drop as players moved on to newer games. Eventually, the profit a game could make would drop so low that you would want to replace it. The player interest mechanism worked by rolling a die and adding the number of players to the result. If the sum exceeded the number printed on that particular game, the machine would drop in interest and be rotated one turn to the left to show the reduced income number.

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic2670908_t.jpg]"Arcade Wars!" was an engine-building game, and to that end it worked quite well, even garnering a few fans in my gaming group. For me, though, there were several issues with it. First and foremost, it did not "feel" like pinball.

Second, it was too much of a simulation for my liking and, finally, it would be very costly to make: tiles for the pinball machines, dice for the interest checks, money, a board, tokens for players, cards — well, you get the picture. Another big issue was that the game took way too long, in my opinion. When all of these problems were considered, it spelled doom for this game. Some of my game group still mention "Arcade Wars!" and I think that being where I am now as a designer I could drastically streamline it and that there might just be a decent game in there.

Ball Three

The third game, which used large parts of "Arcade Wars!", had you running a pinball palace starting in the 1970s and ending in the 1980s with the arcade video game boom. The game was to last twelve turns, with each turn being a year in time. The biggest change was rather than having nine phases, I made it a worker placement type of game

in which you would position your employees where you wanted them. Want to buy new games? Place a meeple at the distributor. Want to keep the bullies out of your arcade? Place one as security at your location's security room, and so on. This sped the game up quite a bit and upped the fun factor while reducing the simulation feeling I had with "Arcade Wars!" Still, at the end of the day, it just did not have that pinball feeling that was so very important to me, so I scrapped it.

Jackpot!

A couple of years went by with no movement on a pinball game, though it was always rolling around in the back of my mind. I was getting hung up on wanting players to have a more intimate interaction with a pinball machine, but of course one big issue is that people play pinball one player at a time.

Then a few weeks before UNPUB 6 I woke up with one of those rare, seemingly out of the blue strikes of inspiration: You are the pinball.

Paired with that inspiration came a good idea of how the game would work, solving the one-player-at-a-time issue because I envisioned the game taking place during multi-ball

(a mode in a pinball machine when two or more balls are in play at one time). I was so inspired that I spent the day hammering out the rules and making the prototype so that by the time my husband Nick got home I had it ready for us to play. After playing a few times, it was clear that I was on to something. Being this close to the UNPUB convention, it was too late to add what I was then calling "Pinball Wizard" to the convention book; still, I was excited to finally have a path forward, so I moved ahead anyways.

To make the game playable by others in a few weeks, I felt I needed something better than the crappy black-and-white, no art text cards I had cobbled together. I'm sure that none of you have ever looked for clip art of pinball machine parts, which is a good thing because you would not find much. A pop bumper or flipper sketch, sure, there are some of those, but there was no way I was going to find playfield devices like ramps, scoop holes, or drop targets. The obvious solution was to go through my photo archives of pinball machines that I had restored and use pictures from there.

After all, not only did I take before-and-after photos of the pinball machines I worked on, but I also took reference pictures in order to make game reassembly easy. (This cuts down on having "extra" parts when I'm done assembling a pinball machine.)

I rushed the new prototype cards through Gamecrafter so that they arrived in time for the convention. Nick and I were invited to a pre-Unpub event run by Doug Levandowski (designer of Gothic Doctor

and You're Fired!

) where I was able to get in a couple of plays with other game designers. This was invaluable as by then I had added two more things to the game: first, combination cards that reward you for completing two specific playfield devices, and second, a special advantage for each player's pinball. We dropped special player pinball powers almost immediately, but the combo cards were well received. These also solved the problem with there being clearly better playfield devices than others due to their scores. The lower scoring playfield devices were more frequently represented on the combo cards, and the combos that these lower scoring devices were part of awarded more bonus points.

At Unpub 6, I simply hung a flyer on the table promoting "Pinball Wizard" and we had groups wanting to play it right away. After the first day, those groups must have spread the word because we had people coming up repeatedly asking whether ours was the table with the pinball game and whether they could try it out. We got a ton of great feedback, which lead to further tweaks but no major changes. Not too long after this convention, I wrote this overview of how Pinball Showdown

plays:

During Pinball Showdown, players compete to score playfield devices by using their limited supply of control to direct their pinball, but players also have to consider their pinball's speed as each device has a minimum speed requirement needed to score it. Players have only twenty tokens that represent both control and speed, flipping back and forth between the two. On top of all that, players try to outmaneuver each other in order to score sweet combination bonuses and time things so that when "Wizard Mode" kicks in, they are poised to score the most valuable playfield devices.

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3131842_t.png]A couple of things to note about this overview. First, it originally said something like this: "both speed and reserve are used to help steer your pinball...". This is one of those things that points out how a minor change in wording can make everything fall into place. I replaced the word "reserve" with "control" after rolling it around in my head for a month, and once I did, BAM!, it was perfect on every level and made the game so much easier to explain. Speed is a requirement to complete a playfield device, while control is spent to steer towards it. Put another way, the faster you go, the less control you have over where you are heading

.

Second, Wizard Mode worked much differently at that stage than in the final version. It always allowed for double scoring when it was active, but originally Wizard Mode would activate only after a certain number of combos were completed and it would last only for one turn. Some playtesters felt it was not dynamic enough and I agreed. The solution was to make Wizard Mode turn on after every completed combination and allow it to remain on if another combo was completed or if any one pinball was moving twelve or faster. (Basically it was bouncing around enough to keep the mode going.) This added another level to the game as players would work to trigger Wizard Mode when their pinball was set up to complete a high scoring card during the next round since it would score double.

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3284933_t.jpg]With so much of my focus on pinball theme and feel, you might wonder how much of that ended up in the finished Pinball Showdown

. A ton. I made sure that each playfield device reflected its real world counterpart.

Pop bumpers increased your pinball's speed, hitting a stand-up target deceased it a little, and scoop holes set your pinball's speed to a certain number. Completing certain devices gave additional bonuses like, for example, having four drop targets in your score pile counting as sinking an entire target bank and awarding 5,000 bonus points. The prototype game used an actual vintage pop bumper cap as the first player marker and I had that exact one illustrated for the final game. I even ended up using my photography of the games that I had restored as the "art" for the game cards and for the front of the box. I'd always intended to hire an artist to do art, but the photos were universally praised. Overall, I feel I achieved my goal of making a game that is not only good on its own, but also is infused with my love for pinball.

Pinball Showdown

is already in Kickstarter backers' hands and will be officially released at the 2017 Origins Game Fair.

Extra Ball

From the get-go, people assumed that Pinball Showdown

would be called "Pinball Wizard" and for obvious reasons the name was perfect. People associate the name with the song from the movie Tommy

, but the term existed before that and was popularized on a classic T-shirt that featured a wizard zapping a pinball machine. I really like that art and thought it would be perfect for the box cover and inclusion in the game.

After some digging around, I located the person who owned the rights to the art and he had his lawyer call me to discuss terms. They had previously licensed it for things like retro T-shirt reprints and wall hangings for game rooms. He described the terms, which were something like $2,000 up front, plus 10% of gross sales. This struck me as a little crazy for the usage I had in mind and I said so, though in a nice way. He countered by noting that the T-shirt and wall-hanging people paid that amount. I pointed out that if you remove the art from a T-shirt you end up with a blank T-shirt and that the same is true for the wall hanging, but removing one piece of art from my game left a fully functioning game about pinball. What he said next blew me away: "Well, people license Spiderman for games and that sells a lot of games."

At this point, my mind is trying to process his comparison of a piece of art that appeared on a T-shirt in the early 1970s to a character who has had a comic book running since 1963 that has spawned additional comic titles, animated series, and many movies. Spiderman has been on everything from toys to Underoos. This was not going to work out. I thanked him for his time, then went off to come up with a new name to avoid any possible legal entanglements.

I brainstormed several names with my husband Nick, and we really liked the name "Silverball Showdown". Being fans of the game Vegas Showdown

, we liked this being a bit of shout-out to that game. "Silverball" is a common pinball phrase (again think of "The Who" song), but after talking to a bunch of people we found that most people under 35 had no clue what silverball referred to. Sigh. Thus, I settled on Pinball Showdown

.

New Game Round-up: New Editions, Expansions and Spinoffs for Wildcatters, The Climbers, Sellswords, Quartermaster General, and Legends of Andor

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/660…ns-expansions-and-spinoff

by W. Eric Martin

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[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic2786349_t.jpg]• U.S. publisher Capstone Games

has announced the Q4 2017 release of two titles, the first being a new edition of Wildcatters

from designers Rolf Sagel

and André Spil

, which first appeared in 2013 from Dutch publisher RASS Games

. In the game, players represent oil barons in the 19th century who are operating around the globe to develop oil fields; bid for oil rights; and build rigs, oil tankers, trains, and refineries — all in an effort to deliver more oil than anyone else.

• The second title from Capstone Games is Holger Lanz

' The Climbers

, with this being the first release from Simply Complex

, a new brand from Capstone that focuses on "board games with a beautiful 3D table presence, relatively low rules overhead, and deep gameplay, accomplished in under one hour of play".

In The Climbers

, players take turns moving colored blocks — which initially form one giant block — in order to create towers that they then climb with their figure. Sometimes you can jump to the next level; at other times you must spend one of your precious ladders. You can climb only onto the neutral color or sides of the blocks that match your own color, so ideally each move of yours serves to both advance yourself and hinder others as you try to ascend higher than anyone else.

• Nuno Bizarro Sentieiro

and Paulo Soledade

's Brasil

was added to the BGG database in 2012, and the game at one time bore a SPIEL 2016 release date, then that date was moved to 2017, and now the designers and publisher What's Your Game?

have announced

that they'll take the game to Kickstarter sometime in 2017, which will push the release date to (at least) 2018. Says Soledade, "The main reason for this to happen is related to production values. As the development progressed during these past couple of years, the once called Vila Rica

transformed itself into a bigger game named Brasil

. In order to pay justice to it, all of the components and some of its now 'epic characteristics' were calling for a general improvement of the normal production elements."

• Ian Brody

of Griggling Games

will be playtesting two games at both the 2017 Origins Game Fair and Gen Con 2017, one of those being a three-player expansion for Quartermaster General

titled The Cold War

and the other being SHAEF

, a two-player WW2 card-driven wargame covering the ten months following D-Day in Western Europe that will be released by PSC Games

.

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3106627_t.jpg]

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3371515_t.jpg]• Thames & Kosmos, the U.S. branch of German publisher KOSMOS

, has let me know that Legends of Andor: The Last Hope

— the third boxed set in the fantasy cooperative game from Michael Menzel — is due out in the U.S. on November 1, 2017, with the Dark Heroes

expansion to follow later that month.

An English-language version of the two-player game Die Legenden von Andor: Chada & Thorn

is not currently on Thames & Kosmos' release calendar.

• Stronghold Games

' Stephen Buonocore has let slip

that Terraforming Mars

now has six planned expansions for it instead of the four previously announced. The first expansion — the double-sided game board Hellas & Elysium

— will debut at the 2017 Origins Game Fair in mid-June, with a U.S. street date of July 12, 2017.

• Level 99 Games

will release a standalone sequel to Cliff Kamarga

's drafting, tile-placement game Sellswords

, with Sellswords: Olympus

being first available in July 2017 to those who preorder

, then in August to those attending Gen Con 2017, then finally to retail stores later in August. Here's an overview of the game:

The gods of Olympus have gone to war! Who will heed the call? Skilled warriors from all across the land rally to fight, met on the opposite side by magical beasts and monsters from myth. Lead your heroes to victory and become the champion of Olympus!

Sellswords: Olympus is a fast-paced strategy game of drafting soldiers and deploying them to the field of battle. It takes only a few minutes to learn, but with fifty different heroes and monsters, each with their own unique ability to use and master, the possibilities for forming your army are limitless! Capture enemy units to turn them to your side in the battle. It's not enough to simply control the most of the field, though; you have to choose your targets carefully to outflank your opponent! Four different terrain tiles provide alternate play methods, giving you new strategies to explore!

Crowdfunding Round-up: Rush, Rise and Tumble Through a Radiant Kitchen Dawn

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/661…ise-and-tumble-through-ra

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3140050_t.jpg]• Let's start this week's c.f. round-up with what's simultaneously the quietest-looking and the most graphically striking game on the line-up: Todd Sanders

' IUNU

. Sanders first released this game as a print-and-play in 2013 through his own Air and Nothingness Press, and now LudiCreations

is releasing the game to distribution following their 2016 release of Sanders' They Who Were 8

.

In IUNU

, 2-4 players attempt to build a society in ancient Egypt, getting a (mostly) new hand of cards each round, playing one or more cards of the same type from that hand to either collect taxes, gain influence, create art, feed your population, and control access to the afterlife. ( KS link

)

We shot an overview of the game on a mock-up during SPIEL 2016, which shows more of the game than that short description above:

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3559531_t.jpg]• Kickstarter used to be a U.S.-only phenomenon, but with publishers from around the world now having access to it, it's common to see preorders for games that will debut at the SPIEL convention in October, as with Dávid Turczi

's Kitchen Rush

from Artipia Games

. In a manner similar to Tobias Stapelfeldt's Space Dealer

, Kitchen Rush

has you using sand timers as workers in your kitchen, with you assigning these workers to tasks like food preparation, order taking, and cooking and them needing to stay in place until those tasks are finished. The sand timers make a lot more sense in this setting, perhaps only because I can imagine the needs of a kitchen far more than I can a dealer of goods in space. ( KS link

)

• Tim Heerema's Archmage

from Game Salute

is described by the publisher as "a hybrid of euro-style and thematic board games, featuring exploration, resource gathering and management, area/map control, and a spell system where players shape a tableau of player powers over the course of the game." Lots going on in the familiar setting of players aiming to become the new archmage to replace the still revereded, but now-retired Joe Merlin. ( KS link

)

• Vesuvius Media

's description of Luís Brüeh's Covil: The Dark Overlords

mentions that the game is "a tribute to awesome 80s cartoons, filled with references to our favorite and unforgettable characters", but I don't recognize anyone depicted, despite spending far too many hours in the 1980s watching cartoons. In any case, in the game you're a dark overlord who is commanding minions and using special powers to dominate the lands — all for the benefit of those who live there, of course. ( KS link

)

• Coincidentally, Savage Planet: The Fate of Fantos

from Darth Rimmer, Travis Watkins, and Imp House

bills itself as a "beautifully illustrated, dark fantasy card game inspired by comics and cartoons from the 80s". Are they talking about Heavy Metal

here? I could see that influence, but that's hardly the first thing that comes to mind when I hear the phrase "comics and cartoons from the 80s". As for gameplay, 3-6 players use Shards build up Personal Tableaus to shield themselves from the Whims of Zodraz and its Excessive Capitalization. ( KS link

)

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3446308_t.png]• Is there room on the game market for more than one cooperative game about finding a cure to prevent a pandemic? Jay Little

and Split Second Games

think so, with Zero Hour

telling a three-act story of the heroes searching for clues about the mastermind in various cities (pressing their luck to find out more info at the risk of being chased out of town by Afflicted), then hunting down that shady character to stop him and prevent more mutations. ( KS link

)

• Another cooperative challenge comes courtesy of Stephen Avery, Christopher Batarlis, and Everything Epic Games

, with Metal Dawn

presenting players with a Skynet-style revolution that threatens the extinction of humanity unless they can corner the rogue electronic intelligence and keep it from mutating to freedom. ( KS link

)

• Pocket Ops

from Brandon Beran and Grand Gamers Guild

plays like tic-tac-toe with bluffing as rival spymasters try to claim a row of squares for themselves, while using specialist agents that bring unique powers to the game. ( KS link

)

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3464116_t.png]• Hisashi Hayashi

first released his city-building game Minerva

through his own OKAZU Brand label in 2015, after which it appeared via Japon Brand at SPIEL 2015. As happens with many such titles from JB, Minerva

has now been licensed for distribution on a wider scale, with Pandasaurus Games

overhauling the artwork and graphic design courtesy of Franz Vohwinkel. In the game, players build their own city tile by tile, activating all the tiles in the same row and column as the tile just placed, allowing you to build fresh combos each game — assuming an opponent doesn't snatch a tile away from you first. ( KS link

)

• Rise of Tribes

from Brad Brooks is Breaking Games

' first go on Kickstarter, and the campaign seems to be a breakout success, with the game having a simple gameplay hook: Roll two dice, slide them into the leftmost space of two of the four actions (bumping out the rightmost die in each case), then take those two actions at a strength determined by the three dice now visible there. What are you trying to do with these actions? Get your tribes to rise, natch. ( KS link

)

• Radiant

from Randal Marsh and Tin Shoe Games

is only the second trick-taking area-control game with which I am familiar (with 2015's Joraku

being the other). In each of the three ages, players start with some cards in hand, draft additional cards, then move around the game board, competing to control areas with the location of a battle determining which suit will carry the day. ( KS link

)

• The final title this week isn't a game, but rather a logic-puzzle-style code-teaching device called Turing Tumble

( KS link

) that is easier to see in action that describe, so here's an overview video from the creator:

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

Designer Diary: Stroop, or Coaxing a Game out of an Established Phenomenon

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/662…coaxing-game-out-establis

by Jonathan Chaffer

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3567222_t.jpg]Some things are far more obvious in retrospect. Such is the design of Stroop

, a speedy perception card game with simple rules.

Psychological Origins

I can't remember exactly when I first saw a Stroop test. I feel like it was the kind of thing I would have encountered in a GAMES Magazine

issue pilfered from my mom's bedside stand. I do recall being delighted by the idea and making flashcards with markers and note cards to test myself and my friends. Throughout the following years I saw it referenced time and again, most notably in the briefly-popular Brain Age

game for the Nintendo DS.

The Stroop test is simple. A subject is presented with a series of words, each printed in a different color. The subject is then asked to quickly speak aloud the names of the colors in which the words are printed, and they are timed during this task.

Next, the subject repeats this task, but this time the words are the names of colors, instead of being random words.

This causes the subject to stumble and take longer to complete the task. The experiment demonstrates the Stroop effect, named after psychologist John Ridley Stroop, and shows that the interference between different systems in the brain — in this case, language and color recognition — can slow down both systems.

From Experiment to Game

Flash forward to 2013 when I was in the midst of brainstorming ideas for new tabletop games to develop, and I randomly stumbled across the Wikipedia page

for the Stroop effect. This led to the immediate question: Could this be a game?

Now Brain Age

had used the Stroop effect in its simplest and most obvious form. It was not really a game, but rather an activity at which you could improve; you were timed on how quickly you responded to the colors and given a score that you tried to improve upon the next time.

The clear way to transform this into a card game was to do exactly the same, but with multiple players. I would print the names of colors onto cards, with ink colors that didn't match. Then players would run through the deck like flashcards, saying the colors out loud and being timed on their effort.

Even before physically prototyping this, it was instantly an unsatisfying implementation. For one thing, a speed contest such as this is usually uninteresting. It is a solo experience that people happen to compare their efforts on, which is something I can enjoy at times but rarely gravitate toward.

But the bigger problem is that the Stroop test can be defeated. Once a subject knows what they are being asked to do, they can use techniques, like squinting, that make the words harder to read, which makes saying the names of the colors much easier. I certainly didn't want players to be able to circumvent the challenge in this way, or worse, to have to make rules against squinting!

Chain, Chain, Chain

The key to cracking this problem was, as is usually the case in design, to come up with the correct incentives for the behaviors I wanted. Need players to read the text and not just squint at blurry colors? Don't make a rule telling them to do read it. Instead, force them to use the text for something.

What purpose could reading the color name serve, then? The clear choice was to link the name of this color up to the color of another word. This forms a nice chain of words, each of which describes the next one.

Exploring Attributes

For the first Stroop

prototype, I lifted wholesale the rules of 7 Ate 9

, a speed game involving simple arithmetic. Players would race to get rid of their cards by playing onto a central pile, and legal plays consisted of any card that was described by the center one.

In broad strokes, this worked as a game, but it had some issues. The biggest one was the number of potential legal plays on a given card; with eight colors, as in my first prototype, one in eight cards are legal to play. This turned out to be far too small. Iteration revealed that anything smaller than about one in five cards being legal made the game grind to a halt. Shrinking the color space this much, though, made the deck homogeneous and uninteresting.

The solution to this was to introduce additional axes for card descriptors. Aside from color, what else could be used to describe these words? The original Stroop psychology experiments included some other ideas, such as the position of words, but these did not tend to lend themselves to card designs. Instead, I experimented with typography and decided I could easily distinguish the case of a word and could outline it or not.

This was an improvement, but one more axis was needed to flesh out the deck. Some brainstorming surfaced the idea of counting the letters in the words themselves. To make this work, I needed to finesse my color choices, and settled on the following word list:

The final list had the very nice property that each word has 3, 4, 5, or 6 letters, and there are three words of each of those lengths. This meant that, at minimum, one in four cards were legal plays on a given center card.

The Round 2 Head Trip

The 2013 prototype was workable, but the game came into its own in the run-up to Protospiel

Michigan in 2014. As my testers began getting very fast with the existing rules, I began looking for ways to provide variants and new challenges. The winner was to reverse the legal play rule: Instead of playing a card that is described by the card in the middle, players now had to read the words on the cards in their hands, and play one that describes the middle card.

The fun of the game is in players getting confused, and how better to confuse people than to switch up the rules midstream? The variant became codified as round two: After the first round is over, scores are recorded and players began anew, with the altered rule for legal plays.

The rules were then simplified to reduce the need for a scoring mechanism. Instead of keeping score, I realized that performance in round one could be used to handicap round two. After round one, players keep their unplayed cards, and the played cards are redistributed evenly, so the better a player performs in round one, the fewer cards they have to get rid of in round two. This neatly determines an overall winner without the need for scorekeeping.

Deck Composition

The possible combinations of attributes could yield a total of 192 cards: 12 words x 4 colors x 2 sizes x 2 patterns. This deck was clearly overkill, so for my working prototype I used half of these combinations, chosen so that exactly half of the cards were big, exactly half solid, exactly one-fourth red, and so on.

I went to some lengths to retain this balance throughout development. When green letters turned out to be difficult to distinguish from blue and yellow in some lighting (and as I endeavored to serve colorblind players as well as possible), I moved to black letters mostly because "black" and "green" both have five letters.

My insistence on a balanced subset of cards turned out to be a bit superstitious; once the card distribution was defined, it could be altered a bit from perfect symmetry without anyone noticing. The final deck has 65 cards, enough for a four-player game, and is slightly uneven without an effect on gameplay.

One improvement in the composition was removing as many "self-describers" as possible. It turned out that players had a reduced challenge in dealing with cards that happened to describe themselves, e.g., a blue card that reads "blue". The final deck has no cards of this type, with the notable exception of the word "four" which inherently describes itself. Now the "run of fours" that can happen in a game just gives a bit of fun texture to the proceedings.

Experiments Along Further Axes

The twelve-word list is enough for most players for quite some time, but I also put some effort into ideas for further expansion to keep the game fresh for as long as possible. Heather Newton gets credit for the seed of the idea for the expansion included in the game box, which features cards with backwards text:

Some other experiments have proved less successful, but fun nonetheless. Never will a typographer squirm so much as if you show them the following card:

Gone Cardboard

And now Stroop

is in print! The journey isn't over for me, though, as I'm actively working on variant rules for less stressful games

and figuring out what it means to translate this game into a foreign language when word lengths are such an integral aspect of play.

I hope you'll enjoy this tiny brain-twister of a game!

New Game Round-up: Raiders in North America, Antiquity Anew, and Doomtown: ReReloaded

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/662…rth-america-antiquity-ane

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3578224_t.png]

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic138460_t.jpg]I'm in Columbus, Ohio to cover the 2017 Origins Game Fair, with five days of live game demos and interviews

starting Wednesday, June 14, but before we get to that, let's round up a few announcements that I've possibly tweeted in passing but not posted here.

• To start with, Renegade Game Studios

has signed a deal with Shem Phillips

of Garphill Games

to make his 2017 Kennerspiel des Jahres-nominated title Raiders of the North Sea

and its expansions available in English on a more widespread basis. Renegade expects to have the base game available in Q3 2017 with the expansions to follow in Q4.

• In other Renegade news, the publisher is creating a "Play Renegade" kit for Clank! A Deck-Building Adventure

to encourage game store owners to run events to demo the game, with participants taking home an as-yet-undisclosed promo card and the winner of the event getting a special version of this card. These promos will also be available at conventions in mid-2017, with "a unique, handcrafted dragon trophy" for the overall player with the highest score.

• Dutch publisher Splotter Spellen

is reprinting its 2004 title Antiquity

that has gone in and out of print multiple times over the years, and it's taking preorders on its website

with this new edition due out for SPIEL 2017 in October. This new edition has a few small changes to it — deeper box, shaped wooden tokens that aren't only cubes — but gameplay remains the same.

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3584566_t.jpg]

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic1963882_t.jpg]• Designer Joseph Fatula

has started taking preorders for the Sept. 1, 2017 release of Leaving Earth: Stations

, an expansion for his Leaving Earth

game from The Lumenaris Group, Inc.

that adds the Space Shuttle, various space station modules, and new missions to this game.

• The expandable card game Doomtown: Reloaded

, which was born from the collectible card game Deadlands: Doomtown

in 2014 and which publisher Alderac Entertainment Group cancelled in 2016, is being born again courtesy of Pine Box Entertainment, which is partnering with Pinnacle Entertainment Group

to release the "Epitaph Series", a series of tournaments that will coincide with the release of Tales from the Epitaph

, a new expansion for the game.

• At SPIEL 2017, Cranio Creations

will release Houses of Renaissance

, an expansion for Lorenzo il Magnifico

in which each player becomes the head of a house, with each of the ten houses having a unique power. Components for a fifth player are included, as well as new development and leader cards.

Gen Con 2017 Preview Now Live

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/664…con-2017-preview-now-live

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3599595_t.jpg]The 2017 Origins Game Fair is over, so it's time to look ahead to Gen Con 2017

, which takes place August 17-20 in Indianapolis, Indiana.

I'd say more about one or both of these shows, or the rate at which titles will be added to the Gen Con 2017 Preview

over the next two months (which starts at 146 titles while the previous two years had about 550 on them), but I got sick at the end of Origins — bad sandwich, I think — and can barely think straight, so just have at it!

Gen Con 2017 Preview Now Live

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/664…con-2017-preview-now-live

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3599595_t.jpg]The 2017 Origins Game Fair is over, so it's time to look ahead to Gen Con 2017

, which takes place August 17-20 in Indianapolis, Indiana.

I'd say more about one or both of these shows, or the rate at which titles will be added to the Gen Con 2017 Preview

over the next two months (which starts at 146 titles while the previous two years had about 550 on them), but I got sick at the end of Origins — bad sandwich, I think — and can barely think straight, so just have at it!

Gen Con 2017 Preview Now Live

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/664…con-2017-preview-now-live

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3599595_t.jpg]The 2017 Origins Game Fair is over, so it's time to look ahead to Gen Con 2017

, which takes place August 17-20 in Indianapolis, Indiana.

I'd say more about one or both of these shows, or the rate at which titles will be added to the Gen Con 2017 Preview

over the next two months (which starts at 146 titles while the previous two years had about 550 on them), but I got sick at the end of Origins — bad sandwich, I think — and can barely think straight, so just have at it!

Word Slamming My Way Through Origins 2017

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/665…-way-through-origins-2017

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic984281_t.jpg]My apologies for the quietness in this space since the end of the 2017 Origins Game Fair, which corresponded with the launching of the Gen Con 2017 Preview

, but in the past three days I've eaten only a banana, a piece of toast, a handful of cereal, a can of soup (over two days), a handful of chips, and two bowls of blueberries — this after ending my Origins with the eating, followed by the rapid uneating, of a turkey BLT (botulism-laden-terrorwich).

I had hoped to jump immediately into Gen Con preview updates once Origins ended as I knew that my inbox would be flooded with messages from publishers who having now cleared the hurdles in Columbus could set their sights on the next obstacle ahead in Indianapolis, and lo, that flood did miraculously appear to test the gates of my Gmail dam, but I couldn't manage to do more than sit upright every so often and admire the light reflecting on the surface on my unusually untouched laptop. Now that I'm finally up again, I'll start draining the backlog, but let's start with something simpler: a recap of my Origins 2017 experience:

There you go. Word Slam

. Origins recapped!

BGG's Scott Alden and Lincoln Damerst had raved about Inka and Markus Brand's Word Slam

after seeing it demonstrated on camera in the BGG booth at SPIEL 2016

, and when Thames & Kosmos

donated an English-language copy to the BGG library for BGG.CON 2017 Spring in late May, Scott started playing it obsessively — yet somehow I caught only his simultaneously active Kreus

obsession during that show. (More on that game another day.)

At Origins 2017, Scott asked, "You haven't played Word Slam

yet? Oh, man, you have to." So we played the game on air once we finished the scheduled game demonstrations on Wednesday. Then he brought it to the Nerd Nighters fundraising event on Thursday, and I joined in after it had already been on the table an hour to play for three more hours

, with people coming and going constantly as they often do with Codenames

and Concept

. We played again on camera on Friday; we talked about the game on Lone Shark Live: Origins by Night

, a three-night podcast from Origins hosted by Mike Selinker, Paul Peterson, and James Ernest; we played on dinky tables on Saturday night with people once again coming and going; and we played yet again on Sunday night, with me leaving the table only because my sandwich has different plans for its future than I had intended.

For those who don't know the game, Word Slam

is played in teams, with the members of each team trying to guess the same hidden noun phrase. One member on each team knows this noun phrase — which can be anything from butterfly to mountain to the Golden Gate Bridge to Forrest Gump — and to get their teammates to guess it, they can use only a set of one hundred words that is provided to each team. Words are color-coded as nouns, adjectives, verbs, and other, and you can place words on your rack, point at words on your rack, move words around on your rack, take words off the rack, and otherwise do some combination of "word" VERB "rack" as long as you don't animate the cards to give clues. Those guessing must yell out answers so that their guesses can be heard by the other team, which is a secondary form of clue and something that your cluegiver might be able to take advantage of.

I think the rules specify that you keep the words in piles, but we often played otherwise, spreading them out in order to view everything at once, with word combinations popping out at me like strands of the Matrix being read by Neo. (New players can find this approach overwhelming and should be presented with stacks of cards as recommended so that they're not hit in the eyes with one hundred words at once. Even experienced players might prefer this approach if they don't like scanning the way that most of us did.)

As with the previously mentioned Concept

, the beauty of Word Slam

is the (restricted) openness available to players when trying to convey some idea to others. You don't have the freedom to do anything, but you have the freedom to do hundreds of different things. You have tools spread out on the table, and you try to make them work as well as you can. Sometimes you find a magic tool that unlocks understanding in a second — as when someone put up the single word "run" and someone else answered "Forrest Gump" — sometimes you create a word poem that does the trick (with "big" "up" "place" being correctly interpreted as "mountain"), and sometimes you labor at something forever, the clarity of the concept in your mind somehow not transmitting itself across the aether into theirs. I tend to tell stories with my clues, and my concept for "lawyer" took a while, with me moving around cards constantly, but finally getting across the notion of an event happening, then someone speaking the opposite of what happened.

Yes, that's a stereotype, but Word Slam

invites you to take advantage of those stereotypes while also frustrating you with them at the same time. The game doesn't include a card for "person", for example — only cards for "man", "woman", and "child" — so any time you use "man" or "woman" in a clue, you risk misleading the guessers who might think that gender plays a role in the answer when it doesn't.

The frustration comes in many flavors: Sometimes you remove words from the rack because it turns out they were misleading, but sometimes you want to remove words from the rack because you needed them only to get guessers thinking along a certain line. Scott, for example, struggled with a word for a while until he finally had us guess Italy by clueing "country" "red" "food", after which he removed those words to work on the actual answer, which was something that originated in Italy. Will guessers understand why you removed those words? Maybe! Play with someone for a few hours, though, and you get a real sense of their clue-giving style.

Cheating comes into play because it's hard to fight human nature. You're not supposed to point to guessers when they say something close or dismiss a guess by waving your hand, but sometimes you can't help yourself. I was clueing "Golden Gate Bridge" with something like "vehicle on long red object" and circling "long red object" with my fingers to indicate that was the vital part of the clue when someone on my team shouted out "San Francisco". I jerked in response because those two things are so closely associated (and I lived in SF years ago, so something triggered there, too, I think), and while that answer wasn't correct, my response indicated that the person was close and they got "Golden Gate Bridge" almost immediately. Whoops. Thankfully we were not in the world finals of the Word Slam

competition and were content to just move on to the next game.

Where Word Slam

differs from Concept

is that you compete against another team, so instead of simply being a fun activity that continues for hours, you do have a sense of winning and losing — even if you don't keep score, which we never did. One team wins, yay!, then the cluegivers give up their spots to someone else (or they don't), and you go again. The game includes easy, medium, hard, and ridiculously hard noun phrases to guess, with six noun phrases on each card. Over time you will run into repeats; Scott had already cycled through the cards enough that he encountered repeats, and if he was guessing, he could sometimes jump to the answer because he had heard it before. If he was giving the clues, he might reject one noun phrase and suggest that the other cluegiver choose another number from 1 to 6 since he would have an advantage on how to clue it. (If you know the one hundred words well, you'll still have an advantage on newcomers, but no sense compounding those advantages!)

I played one or two other games during the 2017 Origins Game Fair, but given that I played Word Slam

for 7-8 hours and would have played it even more if possible, it's easy to see what my game of the show is!

Oh, and I also saw this lady

at Origins: Best costume ev-AR!

New Game Round-up: Get Buffed for Summer, Fold to Attack Others, and Assemble Your Feline Forces

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/665…-summer-fold-attack-other

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3602877_t.jpg]• After a week of the 2017 Origins Game Fair plus a few extra sick days, I have a lot to catch up on, starting with the revelation that Legendary: Buffy the Vampire Slayer

, a deck-building game from Travis R. Chance

and Nick Little

that will debut from Upper Deck Entertainment

at Gen Con 2017, will use photographic images from the television show and not original artwork — at least that's what I think is happening as the solicitation for the game from UDE features the cards depicted below, despite touting that the game features "All Original Art". Checking on this...

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3143202_t.png]

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3599600_t.jpg]• At SPIEL 2016, Korean publisher Happy Baobab

released Fold-it

by Yohan Goh

, a real-time, pattern-creation game in which each player has a double-sided cloth and races to fold that cloth in a particular way to reveal only the dishes shown on that round's menu card. The game is a tricky take on the Spot it

genre because spotting the images that you need to feature isn't enough; you need to also figure out how to make all the other images disappear within the folds of the cloth.

Two things have happened since that release: First, publisher ThinkFun

has licensed the game for release in the U.S., with a listed street date of July 21, 2017. (Hong Kong-based Broadway Toys

has also licensed the game for a Chinese-language edition.)

Second, at SPIEL 2017 Happy Baobab will release Battlefold

, a new take on the system with co-designer Dave Choi

and art by Vincent Dutrait. Says publisher representative Kevin Kim, "Originally, we had planned to make a Fold-it

series of games with different artwork and puzzles, but the same game rules. However, after the successful launch in Essen, we changed the main direction of the project. We found the potential of the 'folding handkerchief' system and decided to make very different games while keeping only the folding handkerchief to show certain icons." Here's an overview of this new game:

In Battlefold, each player takes on the role of a warrior, assassin, magician, or archer. The player takes the handkerchief matching their character, with each handkerchief providing different fighting powers. The warrior, for example, has a cross-shaped attack range and is more powerful when staying in the same position, while the archer has a long-distance attack and more movement.

As in the earlier game Fold-it, once a mission card is revealed, players must fold their handkerchief to leave visible only the right combination of symbols. After successfully making a combination, the player takes the lowest remaining turn order token. Starting with the first player, each player controls their character on the arena board, moving and fighting with the goal of being the last one standing. If a player defeats all other opponents, they win!

Battlefold is a player-elimination game, but eliminated players can still participate via the "ghost" rule. When a player's character dies, the character becomes a ghost. Flip the character board to the ghost side and keep playing. A ghost player can gain spiritual energy by successfully attacking living characters, and if a ghost collects full spiritual energy before only one living character remains in the arena, then the ghost wins the game.

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3605794_t.png]• IELLO

has released an overview of Sentai Cats

, the details of which sound as ridiculous as the name. The design, which hits brick-and-mortar stores on September 28, 2017, is credited to "Tokyo Boys", probably because they didn't want to fit all the designer names (Antoine Bauza, Corentin Lebrat, Ludovic Maublanc, Nicolas Oury, Théo Rivière) on their miniature box. Here's the setting:

You were living the easy life as a kitten, enjoying the best food in the town. Out of the blue, Meka Dog arrived and threatened to destroy the catnip factory — but no one messes with a kitty's food bowl! Train your cats and be the fastest one to transform them into Sentai Cats. Only the best team of Sentai Cats will have the honor of facing Meka Dog in the ultimate combat.

Sentai Cats is a fast-paced and quirky game in which you train your cute little kitties into world-saving heroes...wearing latex suits!

New Game Round-up: Imhotep Welcomes the Gods, Agra Prepares for a Birthday, and Canada Awaits Exploitation in Okanagan: Valley of the Lakes

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/665…lcomes-gods-agra-prepares

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3606258_t.png]• Admittedly with Gen Con 2017 being the next major convention in the offing, much of the gaming news popping up relates to that show, but SPIEL 2017 looms even larger ahead of its October 26 opening, and publishers are popping out announcements for that show as well, such as Matagot

's opening teaser for Okanagan: Valley of the Lakes

, a 2-4 player game from Emanuele Ornella

that bears this short description:

Canada's wealth is waiting for you!

The Okanagan Valley, with its huge lakes and fertile meadows, awaits anyone willing to exploit it. Shape the land and store your wealth in the gathering and territory-building game Okanagan: Valley of the Lakes. In the game, players arrange tiles to design the landscape along with its natural resources — and it's your job to place one of the three buildings to obtain and secure these resources so that you can complete your objectives.

• A second title coming from Matagot at SPIEL 2017 is Cédric Millet

's Meeple Circus

, which was first announced in early 2016

. The description gives you enough details to start imagining how it might play:

You have only one goal in Meeple Circus: Entertain the audience. The competition is tough, but you can create the most amazing circus by proposing incredible acts! Acrobats, horses, and many accessories are at your disposal. Be sure to undertake a good rehearsal, then with your remarkable dexterity, you can give them the show of their lifetime. Once the circus music starts, all eyes will be upon you!

In short, Meeple Circus is a dexterity game in which you do what all gamers do when setting up a game: Pile up your meeples!

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic2229736_t.jpg]• Dutch publisher Quined Games

has a new title coming in Q4 2017 from Michael Keller

of La Granja

fame with Agra

being a 90-120-minute game for 2-4 players. Quined has included a decent amount of background in its description to put the game in context:

Agra, India: The year is 1572; this year marks the 30th birthday of Abu'l-Fath Jalal-ud-din Muhammad, popularly known as Akbar the Great. Akbar is the third ruler of India's Mughal dynasty, having succeeded his father, Humayun. With the guidance of his regent, Bairam Khan, Akbar has expanded and consolidated India's Mughal domains. Using his strong personality and skill as a general, Akbar has enlarged his Empire to include nearly all of the Indian subcontinent north of the Godavari River; his presence is felt across the entire country due to the Mughals' military, political, cultural, and economic dominance.

To unify the vast Mughal state, Akbar has established a centralized system of administration; conquered rulers are conciliated through marriage and diplomacy. Akbar has preserved peace and Order throughout his empire by passing laws that have won him the support of his non-Muslim subjects. Eschewing tribal bonds and Islamic state-identity, Akbar has striven to unite his lands. The Mughals' Persian-ized culture has afforded Akbar near-divine status.

Notables and emissaries from all over the country are on their way for Akbar's birthday celebration. As an ambitious landowner, you cannot let this pass; the festivities are a golden opportunity for you to rise in stature and wealth.

On your land in Agra, you cultivate and harvest cotton and turmeric. You possess a forest from which you produce wood, as well as a small, but very profitable sandstone quarry. By trading and processing your wares, you can obtain more luxurious goods, which you will then use to woo notables as they make their way into the capital. Of course, your rivals have the same plan; you must use your wits to outsmart them as Akbar's birthday draws near...

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3606169_t.jpg]• Designer Phil Walker-Harding

and German publisher KOSMOS

have an expansion shipping in October for their Spiel des Jahres-nominated Imhotep

with Imhotep: Eine neue Dynastie

consisting of five new places, fourteen market cards, seven god cards, four chariots, and 56 tiles. One detail about what's new in this expansion: "God cards let players predict the progress of different buildings, with them being rewarded at the end of the game if they're correct and otherwise being punished."

• Adellos

is a self-published game from newcomer Till Engel that he's currently funding

on German crowdfunding site Startnext for an anticipated debut at SPIEL 2017. Here's a description from the designer:

Adellos is a turn-based tactical strategy board game for 2-4 players. Each player controls a medieval nobleman, who hires various units (soldiers, riders, thugs, etc.) and tries to overcome the other players. The players have twelve different units with unique skills to choose and control. They also have to manage their gold income and the flow of action cards that each player can use on their turn for effects that influence the game. Everything takes place on a symmetric battle map. Every nobleman has a specific and unique skill that can influence the game from the start.

Turns are played in two phases. During the first phase, players gain the resources their units provide. In the second phase, players hire units, move, attack, or play action cards. Every action costs a specific number of action points. The players start with three action points and an amount of gold, depending on their position. Players can increase their action points throughout the game to build up huge turns.

Origins Game Fair 2017 I: Czech Games Edition — Codenames Duet, That's a Question!, and Pulsar 2849

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/666…czech-games-edition-coden

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3419587_t.png]Thanks to the efficient editing efforts of Nikki Pontius of BGG's own GameNight!

, I can start posting game demonstrations and overviews recorded in the BGG booth during the 2017 Origins Game Fair less than week after that show ended. Kudos, Nikki!

• We'll start with a trio of titles coming from Czech Games Edition

, with the first two of those titles — Codenames Duet

and That's a Question!

— scheduled to debut at Gen Con 2017 in August.

Codenames Duet

is, as far as I can tell, the second title that lists Vlaada Chvátil

as a co-designer (with Star Trek: Frontiers

being the first). My understanding is that Scot Eaton

approached CGE with the basic design for this two-player take on the Spiel des Jahres-winning Codenames

, and CGE has been developing it non-stop ever since. The version of the game that I played at PAX East in mid-March 2017 differed from the original submission, and that version differed from what I saw one week later at the GAMA Trade Show, and that

differed from what I saw at the Gathering in April, and so on. CGE has a great reputation for its designs, and seeing that development work in action helps you understand why they have the reputation that they do.

• That's a Question!

is another party game from Chvátil, his take on the well-known "guess how someone will answer a question" genre. In this design players get to create their own questions using the hexagonal topic cards in hand, with the goal of trying to split the party in their answers.

I had asked someone at CGE about Chvátil's most recent designs all being party games, and they mentioned that he has children now, so he's been leaning toward shorter games that allow for quicker iteration and development. That isn't to say that Chvátil is done with larger and longer games, but given the strength of Codenames

and how much fun this game has been to observe (as all I've done is observe it so far), this change of focus isn't necessarily a loss.

• The final title previewed by CGE is Pulsar 2849

, a dice-drafting, space exploration game from designer Vladimír Suchý

( Last Will

) that will debut at SPIEL 2017 in October. The design is still in development right now, but Josh Githens demonstrates the basics of game, the basics of the tech trees (plural, with each player having an individual tree and all players sharing a different tree), how you explore the stars, and more.

New Game Round-up: Meet Roland Wright, Welcome the Carnies, and Explore the World of Pandemic Legacy: Season 2

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/666…nd-wright-welcome-carnies

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3605069_t.jpg]• We will know that "roll and write" games — designs in which players roll dice, then write something in response — have made it big when a character emerges from the mists to don the name and claim it as their own, and that day has come with the announcement of a "new line of premium roll and write games" from Chris Handy

of Perplext

. This line of games is based on Roland Wright, "a fictional game designer who is obsessed with making great roll and write games in his 'old time' workshop", says Handy. "He's like a Willy Wonka meets Reiner Knizia."

The series will launch with 3-4 games in 2018, with the first title being Roland Wright: A Pursuit of the Perfect Dice Game

. In the game, players select dice each turn to complete game design modules and earn equipment in order to create the "perfect dice game".

• Z-Man Games

has finally officially announced

Pandemic Legacy: Season 2

, a standalone game from Matt Leacock

and Rob Daviau

that throws you seventy years into the future past the events of Season 1

. Here's a summary of the game's setting:

Humanity has been brought to its knees. A network of the last known cities persists, supplied by the "havens", isolated stations floating in the ocean far from the plague. Three generations of survivors have called the havens home. Most of them have never set foot on the mainland. But now supplies are running low and the people have turned to you to lead. It is up to you to save what remaining cities you can and stop the world from ending for good.

The main twist in the game is that instead of removing disease cubes from the board, you're now delivering supplies to the few cities that you can reach, trying to expand that network of locations over time, but limited in your travel to movement by ships or what you can reach over land as air travel is no longer possible. Check the post for more details, with the game due out in Q4 2017 and available for a sneak peek at Gen Con 2017 in August.

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3338929_t.jpg]• Uli Blennemann of Spielworxx

has opened preorders

for Stefan Risthaus' Gentes

, with the game shipping in July 2017. Gentes

is a civilization game in which you can't get everything you need as the more that you focus on one type of worker, the fewer you can have of another. Full rules can be downloaded

in English and German from the Spielworxx website, or you watch an overview video

that BGG recorded at the Spielwarenmesse toy fair in early 2017. As is usual with Spielworxx titles, only one thousand copies are being produced.

• French publisher Bombyx

has renamed their SPIEL 2017 release from Bruno Cathala and Florian Sirieix yet again, with the one-time Curiosity

and later named Steamers

now bearing the name of Imaginarium

. We recorded an overview of this game

in early 2017, and the gameplay remains the same, as far as I know.)

Here's a shot of prototype copies made for the Paris Est Ludique game fair in mid-June 2017:

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3610411_t.jpg]• Belgian publisher Pearl Games

has posted a teaser video on Facebook

for The Carnies

, an expansion for Nicolas Robert's The Bloody Inn

that will be released at SPIEL 2017 in October.

In addition to this expansion, at SPIEL 2017 Pearl Games will release Claude Lucchini's Otys

(a co-publication with Libellud for which we shot an overview video

while at the Cannes game fair in February 2017) and the space game Black Angel

, for which there's an overview video of the prototype

in French and this image of the prototype.

Origins Game Fair 2017 II: Edge of Darkness, Alien Artifacts, Star Realms: Frontiers, Hero Realms: The Ruin of Thandar, and Rob Daviau Randomness

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/666…-edge-darkness-alien-arti

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3287905_t.png]• As many people know, Mystic Vale

introduced John D. Clair's "card-crafting system" — in which plastic cards with bits of information on them are overlaid in card sleeves to craft unique new cards — but that game was not what Clair first showed publisher Alderac Entertainment Group

when he approached them. Instead he first showed them Edge of Darkness

, a sprawling design in which the card-crafting was just one part of a larger whole.

At the 2017 Origins Game Fair, AEG's CEO John Zinser showed up with a copy of Edge of Darkness

in public for the first time, noting that he's bringing the game to multiple conventions over the next several months to both test the design among new players and show off something different from what AEG normally releases. For those waiting for more info about the game, I think this is finally giving you what you want to know.

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3611033_t.jpg]• Rod Dougherty of White Wizard Games

dropped info on Star Realms: Frontiers

, a standalone game in the publisher's wildly successful Star Realms

line with eighty new cards that accommodates up to four players. This title hits Kickstarter on July 11, 2017.

• Dougherty also went into detail about Hero Realms: The Ruin of Thandar Campaign Deck

, which takes the tiny Hero Realms

game and spins it into something far larger.

• I played the 4X card game Alien Artifacts

from Marcin Senior Ropka and Viola Kijowska at BGG.CON 2016 and wrote up the experience

on BGG News — or did I? The game as it exists today is not the game that I played six months ago, and it's likely not exactly what will appear in print from Portal Games

before the end of 2017, but this overview can still give you the basics of the gameplay and we'll worry about the details once the final rulebook is released.

• One of the odd things about the 2017 Origins Game Fair is how much time we have to fill. I can schedule game demos with more cushion time around them so that we don't have to hustle people on and off camera so quickly — but that means that when someone doesn't show, we have a lot of time to fill. Thankfully Origins has lots of designers walking around, so we grabbed Rob Daviau

from the aisle (for the second time as we had him on camera on Wednesday as well) to talk with him. JR Honeycutt

, who develops some of Daviau's designs, snuck onto camera as well. Maybe this will be interesting for you...

WizKids Offers New Gaming Fronts in Cannibalism, Dungeon Acquisition, Time Management and Time Management

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/667…-fronts-cannibalism-dunge

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3612446_t.jpg]• You can tell that Zev Shlasinger is indeed now Director of Board Games at U.S. publisher WizKids

because the company feels like the Z-Man Games of old, releasing a ridiculous number of games in a short period of time with many more still to come before the year ends and with those titles ranging all over the map in terms of setting, style, and gameplay.

Who Should We Eat?

by newcomers Mike Harrison-Wood

and Chris MacLennan

is a 4-10 player semi-cooperative game due out in 2017 in which you're all trying to survive on a desert island while also being fully aware that you might have to resort to cannibalism at some point in order to both survive and keep yourself off the table. From the game description: "You know that not all of you will make it off the island, which means that only the strong will survive, but deep down you also feel something supernatural about this place — that the veil between the spirit world and this mortal existence is pa­per thin. If you succumb to the hunger and are forced to eat another survivor, you will be driven deeper into madness and awake to find a new, vengeful, ghostly presence intent on ensuring that you never, ever leave the island."

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic1922096_t.jpg]• Another future WizKids release, this one for October 2017, is Time Barons

, which designers Jon Perry

and Derek Yu

first self-published in 2014 via the Game Crafter under the brand Quibble Games

. I played the game once or twice that year on a demo copy sent to me by the designers and loved it, meaning to play more so that I could do a proper overview video, then it was buried under a bunch of other games. Bad Eric. Here's a game summary:

You are one of the time barons, shadowy figures who have shaped mankind's destiny since the dawn of time. People are simply pawns in your quest to defeat the other barons and become the ruler of a unified human race. War, religion, technology - all will be used in this ultimate battle.

Time Barons is a fast-paced card game that pits two players in a struggle across the ages. "Freedom" is the operating word here! Each turn you can spend your actions however you see fit: to draw and play cards, gain followers, and advance your civilization through four distinct time periods: medieval, industrial, modern, and futuristic. Do you want to rush through the ages, hoping to obtain that technological edge, or punish such a folly with primitive weapons and fanatical attacks? Will you be relentless in your aggression or build an economic advantage? A variety of strategies are available to you at every turn.

The unique blend of actions, followers, and cards offers quick games where turns can be simple, like drawing three cards, or complex, involving every option available to you. And in the process, you'll find yourself doing things like putting a Plague on your opponent's Robotics Lab to slowly kill off the workers there, or attaching a Computer Network to a Church to automate the conversion of new followers. Or what about Martyring a follower you just sacrificed on your Temple so that you can draw a Doomsday Laser and fire it on the same turn? Whew!

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3613289_t.jpg]• While passing along info about titles that WizKids would have at Gen Con 2017, Shlasinger included a brand new one, the 2-4 player game Dungeon Hustle

from Tim

and Ben Eisner. Here's an overview:

Players are archetypal fantasy characters running through a dungeon picking up swords, keys, shields, scrolls and potions. Each item comes in different colors, and to pick them up, you must hustle through a path of dungeon tiles of matching color; once you step on a new color (or a corner space), you pick up the tiles that you had stepped on. If, for example, you start on a red key and move on a path that consists of a red sword, another red key, a red shield, and finally a white sword, you stop on the white sword, then pick up all of the red items, including the one where you started movement. You use these items to fight monsters, fulfill quests, and purchase other items.

Dungeon Hustle includes a few semi-cooperative elements. A character can help give a power to another character, for example, and is then rewarded for doing so. More importantly, you must all work together to stop monsters from escaping the dungeon. After a certain number of monsters escapes, the game ends, and whoever has the most victory points at that time wins.

• Still another title forthcoming from WizKids, also debuting at Gen Con 2017, is WarTime: The Battle of Valyance Vale

by Brad Lackey

and Joshua Tempkin

, a ten-minute, two-player game in which sand timers determine the limits of what you can do when. In more detail:

When a unit moves, attacks, cast spells, or uses a special ability in Wartime, a sand timer is flipped. The unit cannot be used again until the sand timer is drained, then that sand timer (or another one) can be used to activate the unit again. Manage your sand timers, as well as your unit actions, wisely. Sand timers come in different times: 30 seconds, 60 seconds, 90 seconds. Scenarios use other timers in time-sensitive missions.

Wartime features scenario-based play, with branching missions depending on the outcome of the previous mission. Configure your own units to fight in player-designed missions or mix up the unit configurations when playing the game's missions.

Origins Game Fair 2017 III: Lisboa and Immortals

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/667…-iii-lisboa-and-immortals

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic984281_t.jpg]Two of the longest game demonstration videos recorded in the BGG booth during the 2017 Origins Game Fair involved passionate designers who had a lot to say about their giant creations.

• Designer Vital Lacerda

went into great detail about Lisboa

, both the game itself and the city from which the game was inspired. It was great to have him on camera, especially since we initially thought he might not make it due to travel delays and lost luggage. The hazards of convention life...

• Mike Elliott

is co-designer of Immortals

with Dirk Henn, with Queen Games

planning to debut the game at Gen Con 2017. The design was inspired by Henn's Wallenstein

and Shogun

, but with players controlling two races of creatures that battle in two lands, with killed creatures returning to battle in the other world.

New Game Round-up: Preparing More Escape Rooms, Revisiting Ground Floor, and Reading a Column of Fire

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/668…more-escape-rooms-revisit

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3617945_t.jpg]

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3617946_t.jpg]• English rules are now available ( PDF

) from Thames & Kosmos for Michael Rieneck's A Column of Fire

, the third game in the Ken Follett series that started with The Pillars of the Earth

. Thames & Kosmos has confirmed that A Column of Fire

is due out in Q4 2017, with a reprint of The Pillars of the Earth

due in mid-November 2017.

Thames & Kosmos has also confirmed a Q4 2017 release date for Legends of Andor: The Last Hope

while noting that an English-language version of Legends of Andor: Dark Heroes

will not appear until 2018.

The next three titles in the EXIT: The Game

series of escape room games from Inka and Markus Brand — The Forgotten Island

, The Polar Station

, and The Forbidden Castle

— will be released in the U.S. in mid-October 2017.

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3588255_t.jpg]

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3616771_t.png]• Speaking of escape room games, Space Cowboys

will release its second series of them — Unlock! Mystery Adventures

— in France in July 2017, with distributor Asmodee stating that they'll be available in the U.S. in Q4 2017, with each scenario being sold separately (as was the case with the first three Unlock!

scenarios).

• Italian publisher dV Giochi

has already released its first escape room game — Deckscape: Test Time

from Martino Chiacchiera

and Silvano Sorrentino

— and it will have both this title and the newer Deckscape: The Fate of London

for sale at Gen Con 2017 in August.

• Developer Ulli Blennemann with Spielworxx

is working on a new edition of David Short

's Ground Floor

, first released in 2012 by Tasty Minstrel Games, for release in 2018.

• New Zealand publisher SchilMil Games

has posted

the following teaser image on Facebook, noting that this game "does involve Martin Wallace

and has links to A Study in Emerald

".

More generally, SchilMil announced

in May 2017 that it had "entered into a two-year contracting agreement with internationally renowned board game designer Martin Wallace". In more detail:

Martin's expertise and experience will be invaluable to us and we are really pleased to have him on board. Initially he will be helping us refine a prototype we have under development and we're planning to publish and re-launch some of Martin's older designs under the SchilMil Games brand.

We've brain-stormed a number of other concepts together in the last few months, so we are both excited that more new games will appear as a result of this collaboration.

New Game Round-up: Superheroes Battle Debt, Pirates Battle Poor Memory, and A.R.K. Agents Battle Raxxon

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/668…s-battle-debt-pirates-bat

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3583992_t.png]• Debtzilla

from designer Xeo Lye

and Singapore-based publisher Capital Gains

seems like an inspired mash-up of familiar game tropes, with superheroes fighting villains while also needing to manage their finances. Here's an overview of this design, which hits Kickstarter on September 19, 2017:

In the fictional nation of Banana Republic, the incompetent government has caused a wave of financial crime. Players take on the role of heroes fighting the villains that scam ordinary citizens. However, the heroes are human beings just like anyone else, with jobs to perform, daily expenses to pay and crime-fighting gadgets to buy. Little do they know that their credit card bills are only feeding the ultimate monster of mass destruction: Debtzilla!

Debtzilla is a cooperative deck-building game with escalation mechanisms based on financial related concepts such as compounding interest and inflation. If the players are too stingy with their finances, they will find their heroes too weak to be any good in a fight. On the other hand, purchasing too many expensive gadgets will rack up debt, causing the final boss to become too powerful to possibly defeat. The players must work together to make smart financial decisions in order to save the citizens of Banana Republic.

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3621676_t.jpg]• Designer Emerson Matsuuchi

made a splash at the Origins Game Fair with the release of Century: Spice Road

, and now he has another title debuting at Gen Con 2017 in August: Crossfire

, a game for 5-10 players that plays in 5-10 minutes. How is that possible? Here's an overview of the setting:

The Intel is solid. Raxxon will be transporting a VIP through a sector heavy with civilian traffic. This makes the mission a tricky one. You'll be working alone as they try to throw you off their tail. Don't be fooled. You need to get in and get the job done before the chance passes by. Just be sure to not get caught in the crossfire. Deception and negotiation are your greatest tools. Complete your mission, no matter the costs.

Introducing Crossfire, a game in the world of Specter Ops that takes players back into the dystopian struggle between Raxxon and A.R.K. This time, players compete in two teams to either protect or assassinate a Raxxon VIP, while trying to determine whether other players at the table are who they really claim to be. The clock is ticking...

• Chris Leder

's City of Gears

first appeared in a self-published edition in 2012 via The Game Crafter, then in 2015 Arcane Wonders announced that the game would be part of its "Dice Tower Essentials" — only to part ways

in 2016. Now Leder has announced that Grey Fox Games

has picked up the game for release in 2018, with designer Daryl Andrews

collaborating on the final design.

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3621662_t.jpg]• Memoarrr!

is a very different game from Edition Spielwiese

's first release ( Cottage Garden

in 2016), with this quick-playing game from newcomer Carlo Bortolini

debuting at the Berlin Brettspiel Con in July 2017. What do you get when you combine pirates with a memory game? This:

To play the match-and-memory game Memoarrr!, 2 to 4 players need the power of recollection and the luck of pirates. Only then can they make their escape from the island of Captain Goldfish, their pockets lined with rubies, before the lava swallows them up.

In turn order, players reveal locations that are connected via the animal or the landscape to the most recently revealed location. If someone reveals a location without any connection, that player is out of the round. The last remaining pirate grabs one of the valuable treasures. Then, all revealed locations are turned face down before the search can start afresh.

As the cards do not change position during a game, players collect more and more information each round, enabling them to reveal new connections — but sometimes a little bit of luck is all it takes to get that treasure.

For advanced players, each animal comes with an additional special action that is triggered when a connected location is revealed — and they make Memoarrr! even more exciting and fun to play.

Publisher Michael Schmitt notes that artist Pablo Fontagnier

is "a very famous German graffiti artist", and his Instagram account

has more than eighty thousand followers, which indeed qualifies as "very famous" in my ranking of all the German graffiti artists that I know.

Westeros Meets Catan in A Game of Thrones Catan: Brotherhood of the Watch

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/669…-thrones-catan-brotherhoo

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3622480_t.png] Fantasy Flight Games

has a long history with author George R. R. Martin, having launched A Game of Thrones: Collectible Card Game

in 2002 and published the A Game of Thrones

board game in 2003.

In the fifteen years since that first title, FFG has released numerous games that represent various parts of Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire

series, and now they're leveraging the power of their Asmodee parent company to do so once again, this time merging the tales of Westeros with the development of Catan, a fictional land that debuted in Klaus Teuber

's Die Siedler von Catan

in 1995, one year before the release of A Game of Thrones

, the first novel in the A Song of Ice and Fire

series.

A Game of Thrones Catan: Brotherhood of the Watch

, co-designed by Teuber's son Benjamin

and co-published by KOSMOS

in Germany, takes the familiar elements of Catan and transports them to Westeros, with players doing the things that one would expect players to do in Catan — but now they face additional challenges in the game as well.

Here's an overview of A Game of Thrones Catan: Brotherhood of the Watch

, which is scheduled for release in Q4 2017, with demos due to take place during Gen Con 2017 in August:

The Brothers of the Night's Watch seek a new leader from among their ranks. Jeor Mormont wishes to promote one who can improve the infrastructure of the Gift, the bountiful and undeveloped area south of the Wall bestowed to the Watch by the Starks thousands of years ago. Drawing sustenance from the unforgiving landscape of the north offers enough challenges, but whomever takes up this task must also man and defend the Wall against the onslaught of Wildlings fighting their way into Westeros. Many brothers now compete to build, defend, and do what they can to protect Westeros, but only one shall rise above their brothers to become the new Lord Commander. But be wary — the north holds many dangers, and winter is coming.

In A Game of Thrones Catan: Brotherhood of the Watch, each area in the Gift supplies one of five resources: lumber, brick, wool, grain, and ore. The barren Ice Fields, however, produce nothing. Players take on the role of Brothers of the Night's Watch and use these resources to strengthen their hold on the north by building roads, settlements, and keeps; recruiting guards for their patrol; or buying development cards. Each of these acts bring players increased power and recognition through the awarding of victory points. The objective will be familiar to players of the original Catan; the first player to achieve ten victory points wins the game and becomes the new Lord Commander of the Night's Watch.

But this is not as easy as it sounds as the area surrounding the Gift can be treacherous. Wildings from north of the Wall have crossed over and follow their own rules of honor, which often conflict with the laws of Westeros. One of their ranks, Tormund Giantsbane, does not respect the Watch's claim to the land as he moves throughout the Gift, robbing resources from the Brothers sent to provide for their Order. While Tormund runs amok south of the Wall, Wildling forces gather in the Frostfangs, awaiting an opportune moment of weakness to breach the Watch's defenses and spread throughout the fruitful lands of Westeros. In addition to building within the Gift, players must strategically balance their resources to defend the Realm from Wildling raiders.

Each player may recruit up to seven brothers from the prisons of Westeros to don their specific color and man their section of the Wall. When the Wildings attack, each player must use their guards to fend off the onslaught. If there are more guards than Wildings, the Wall stands. If there are not, the Wildings invade the Gift and pillage the settlements and keeps therein. Yet loyalty only goes so far — guards are useless defending the Wall from Climbers who slip past them, and if they encounter a Giant, at least one guard is bound to desert his post.

Each player also has a hero to aide in their toil, based on the order of play. The first player will utilize the talents of the Lord Commander himself, Jeor Mormont, while the second player will enjoy the company of Samwell Tarly, the third will work with Bowen Marsh, and the fourth will employ the services of Master Builder Othell Yarwyck. Each hero offers a unique ability to each player which they can use up to twice during the game. Once a hero's ability has been used, players have a choice to keep that hero or choose another of the eleven heroes to aide them. Players should factor the heroes' abilities into their strategy to quickly earn victory points and gain renown within the Watch.

The Wildling invasion marks the truest test of the Brothers of the Watch and your own competency as a commander. A failure at the Wall has a devastating impact on the Gift, even if it does not destroy the players. A Game of Throne Catan: Brotherhood of the Watch has two forms of victory, though one may feel hollower than the other. Victory occurs when a player has both improved the infrastructure of the Gift and successfully kept it safe from invaders. This is shown when a player has achieved ten victory points by any combination of building keeps, roads, and settlements; hiring three or more guards to keep the Wall safe; and buying development cards to increase their prestige, all while safeguarding the Gift.

However, if the Wildlings breach the wall three times throughout the game, an alternate victory takes place. If this occurs, the game ends immediately as the Brotherhood of the Night's Watch can no longer delay their decision. The player commanding the most guards holding their posts on the Wall gains the title of Lord Commander and wins the game.

Plan B Games Purchases Eggertspiele; Licensing Situation Currently Unclear

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/669…gertspiele-licensing-situ

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3624363_t.jpg]In February 2017, while previewing upcoming games at Spielwarenmesse in Nürnberg, Germany, I played a sample game of Century: Spice Road

with Plan B Games

owner Sophie Gravel. Gravel used to own F2Z Entertainment, which consisted of the publishing brands Z-Man Games, Filosofia, Plaid Hat Games, and Pretzel Games along with various distribution contracts, but in the second half of 2016 she sold F2Z to Asmodee

, keeping only Pretzel Games and one title then under contract with Z-Man Games — the aforementioned Century: Spice Road

, with which she launched Plan B Games at the Origins Game Fair in June 2017.

Aside from demoing the game, I talked with Gravel about her general plans for Plan B Games, and she mentioned that it was a relief to start over and be in charge of a small company once again. Thus, it was something of a surprise to hear ( via Spielbox

) that Plan B Games has acquired German publisher eggertspiele

. I asked Gravel about the change of course for Plan B, and she said, "When an opportunity appears, it is almost impossible for me not to grab it."

To be precise, Plan B Games Europe GmbH has been founded in Germany, and this is what acquired eggertspiele. Spielbox notes that "Eggertspiele founder Peter Eggert intends to actively contribute to the development and distribution of new games for three more years", and Gravel confirms this. "The whole eggertspiele team is staying on board. We need them to continue developing great games!" The next releases from eggertspiele, which are scheduled to debut at SPIEL 2017 in October, are Heaven & Ale

from Michael Kiesling and Andreas Schmidt and Reworld

from Wolfgang Kramer and Michael Kiesling. Gravel notes that the design and development of these titles was completed by the eggertspiele team, but now "sales and marketing of these two titles will be entirely assumed by the Plan B team".

What does this new arrangement mean for eggertspiele's current licensing partners: Stronghold Games

, which releases English-only titles in the U.S. and elsewhere; Gigamic

, which releases eggertspiele titles in French; and Pegasus Spiele

, which has served as a co-publisher and distribution partner to eggertspiele for many years? After all, Plan B Games is a Canadian company that serves the English and French markets. Regarding the first two publishers, Gravel says, "At this point, I am not entitled to answer these questions as these issues concern eggertspiele and must be dealt with by them." Mathilde Spriet, who heads the communication and editorial departments for Gigamic told me, "Discussion with eggertspiele, Plan B and Gigamic are happening right now, thus I do not have any official answer to give you. I hope we we will know more in the next days." (I've received no responses so far to questions sent to eggertspiele. Stephen Buonocore at Stronghold Games has declined to answer questions for now.)

As for sales in Germany, Gravel says, "Eggertspiele is looking into a few options for the German language market. A decision should be made shortly." Historically eggertspiele and Pegasus have released games with rules in both German and English, but it's unclear whether this practice will continue in the future. "As for the English version, Esdevium has chosen to pass on this opportunity, so they [i.e. eggertspiele] are evaluating other options for a localized European EN version," says Gravel.

Circling back to Century: Spice Road

, that title is licensed to ABACUSSPIELE in Germany, and Gravel says there are no plans to change that arrangement at the moment.

New Game Round-up: Feld Summons Merlin, Atlas Holds Court, and Carcassonne Gets Big Boxed...Again

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/669…ns-merlin-atlas-holds-cou

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic2870783_t.jpg]• In mid-June 2017, Queen Games

posted an announcement

on French gaming site Tric Trac that it was returning to the French market, with Atalia and Oya serving as distributors of their games for that market. Kingdom Builder

and Alhambra

would be the first titles available, given that they're both Spiel des Jahres winners and well-known, to be followed by French versions of the newer titles Treasure Hunter

, Captain Silver

, Glüx

, and two new big games: Immortals

and Merlin

.

We've already covered Immortals

somewhat — for example, posting a game overview

recorded at the 2017 Origins Game Fair with co-designer Mike Elliott — but Merlin

wasn't on my radar previously, which is a shame since this will be a large game from Stefan Feld

. Beyond largeness, however, nothing else was noted about the game — until Friday, June 7, that is, when Queen's Ulrich Fonrobert tweeted the following:

Okay, still not much to go on for now, but could this game look any Feldier?! People will be able to find out more at Gen Con 2017 in August, where this game will be demoed ahead of its release at SPIEL 2017.

In a separate tweet

, Fonrobert mentions that Queen Games will also have an Emanuele Ornella

design at SPIEL 2017, which is funny since this will be the second new Ornella title on the market this year — Okanagan: Valley of the Lakes

from Matagot being the other — after an absence of five years. The Tric Trac article mentions another upcoming title — Pioneers

, a "strategy game about the conquest of the Far West" — but Ornella's name isn't attached to it.

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3623396_t.png]• In October 2017, Atlas Games

will release Cursed Court

from Andrew Hanson

, a 2-6 player game in which you need to watch others to determine what you should do. In more detail:

The intrigues and scandals of the realm's greater nobility are a subject of fixation, and even obsession, for the entire kingdom. Most especially for the minor nobility, whose fortunes can be elevated — or shattered — by what happens at court.

In Cursed Court, you must consider both public and hidden information, some of the latter shared among different pairs of players, when wagering your limited influence in each season of the year. As the machinations of the nine key nobles are progressively revealed, your fortunes rise and fall. After three years, a winner is crowned.

• MAGE Company

has picked up the 2-6 player dice-roller Goblin Dice

from Russian publisher GaGa Games

for re-release in English in Q2 2018. Your goal in the game is to reach the finish line first or avoid the giant rolling stone that will crush slow players, ideally leaving you as the lone player still fit to move.

• The sixth edition of Carcassonne Big Box

hits stores in September 2017 — at least in Germany and the Czech Republic as the game has been announced in those locations so far — and this version of the game includes the Carcassonne

base game, the Inns & Cathedrals

and Traders & Builders

expansions, the mini-expansions The River

and The Abbot

now included with the base game, and the six mini-expansions from 2012: The Flying Machines

, The Messengers

, The Ferries

, The Gold Mines

, Mage & Witch

, and The Robbers

(which collectively include the tiles for the Corn Circles II

mini-expansion).

• Hans im Glück

also plans to release Carcassonne für 2

in September 2017, this being a small-sized version of the famed tile-laying game with only 48 tiles and 12 tokens in a travel tin.

Crowdfunding Round-up: Casually Trash Lucidity in a Green Box with Short Love

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/670…ly-trash-lucidity-green-b

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3149683_t.jpg]As often happens during convention time, I've neglected to post crowdfunding round-ups for a couple of weeks, so the number of current c.f. projects not previously mentioned in this space is staggering. Perhaps I should stop being amazed by the amount of dollars being handed over to designers and publishers this way, but as long as I keep being amazed, I'll know that I'm still alive. In any case, let's look at some of these current projects:

• Designer Corné van Moorsel

used to release one new title each year at SPIEL from his Cwali

brand, and that was that, but over the past couple of years van Moorsel has migrated to using Kickstarter to sell games in advance to those who won't make it to the game fair in Essen, Germany (or to sell a title that otherwise might not make it to market, e.g., Factory Funner

), and now he's using KS to make an out-of-print title available once again, with a second edition of his SPIEL 2016 Habitats

on its way to funding right now. (KS link)

In Habitats

, each player lays down tiles to build up their own animal park, ideally giving each animal the environment it prefers to make them happy and receive points in return.

• For a title coming at SPIEL in 2017, we can turn to Wendake

from Danilo Sabia, Placentia Games

, and Post Scriptum

, with players representing the Wyandot People who lived in the Great Lakes region in the U.S. and Canada. The game is set in the mid-18th century, and players must manage all aspects of tribal life by choosing rows of action tiles in a grid, just as the Wyandot did at that time. ( KS link

)

• Till Engel's self-publisher Adellos

is another potential SPIEL 2017 release, with players needing to manage their gold to hire twelve types of units to attack opponents and gain influence. ( Startnext link

)

• Wibbell++

is a game system that originated with the title Wibbell

from designer Behrooz Shahriari

and was then expanded upon by others creating their own games from this deck with cards that each depict two letters on them along with one of six border designs. Shahriari is funding a new edition of Wibbell++

through his Stuff By Bez

brand, and one of the rewards is for him to create a game with you. ( KS link

) For a sampling of the games playable with the deck, here's an overview video I recorded with Shahriari at SPIEL 2016:

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3140171_t.png]

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3599087_t.jpg]• Similar to Wibbell++

, Green Box of Games

is a game system, with designer Jørgen Brunborg-Næss

including 16 designs that make use of a boxed set of components that are designed to be "as versatile and flexible as a standard deck of cards", according to the designer. ( KS link

)

• To continue with a section devoted to solitaire-friendly games, Pepper & Carrot: The Potion Contest

from Guillermo H. Nuñez amd Loyalist Games

challenges 1-4 players — or more if you have additional sets — to use orders to manipulate the 18 ingredients in their 3x6 grid to complete recipes quickly. ( KS link

)

• Shannon Kelly's Lucidity: Six-Sided Nightmares

from Fox Tale Games

is a press-your-luck game in which dice drawn represent your entry point into a world of nightmares. You can discard two dice to guide yourself down a dream path, but then you're at the mercy of the whatever awaits on the die faces — ideally the power symbols that you need to collect before you transform into a nightmare. ( KS link

)

• While this next project isn't a game, I would be remiss not to highlight Geoff Engelstein

's GameTek: The Math and Science of Gaming

, this being a written collection of more than seventy GameTek

podcast segments from the past ten years, with the book totaling more than three hundred pages. You'll just have to imagine Geoff reading them to you. ( KS link

)

• Year six of Casual Game Insider

magazine, which is meant to promote casual gaming in mainstream outlets, is also looking for funding. ( KS link

)

• Also not a game is designer Kenechukwu Ogbuagu

's efforts to fund a second African Boardgame Convention "to introduce people to boardgaming and break the stereotypes about general tabletop gaming in Nigeria and other parts of Africa". A 12-hour game convention that's free to the public is what's at stake in this project. ( Indiegogo link

)

• Triplock

from Adam and Josh J. Carlson and their Chip Theory Games

sounds like an escape room game at first, but instead the players represent characters who are trying to manipulate tokens that collectively represent a lock box. The steampunk artwork is out of this world, and I wouldn't be surprised to find someone dressing as these characters at a future Gen Con. ( KS link

)

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3584896_t.png]

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3613252_t.jpg]• Designer Yukinori Ohashi originally self-published Night Clan

in Japan in 2014 through his Domina Games

, and now new publisher Gamephilia

aims to bring the game to market in a multilingual edition. In this bluffing game, players each have the same deck of thirteen cards, with which they try to use their trolls to capture the daughters and riches of the other players. ( KS link

)

• Similar sabotage efforts are required for Love Formula

from Gwin Games

and Japanime Games

, with players in the role of matchmakers who want to couple up their customers to perfection while ruining the potential dates arranged by their competitors. ( KS link

)

• Yet more sabotage is the order of the day in Philip Loyer's Short Order Hero

from Wyvern Gaming

as you're working at a greasy diner with other hash-slingers and are determined to look better than them, whether through actually providing dishes that customers want or befouling the offerings of others. ( KS link

)

• Damn the Man, Save the Music!

by Hannah Shaffer is described as a "tabletop roleplaying game", but I think that's simply because you'll be playing it on a horizontal surface. No matter — this project struck a chord with me, so I'm including it anyway. The short description: " Damn the Man

is a single-session game inspired by movies like Empire Records

and Clerks

, and by a love for bygone '90s music" in which you make "a last-ditch effort to save something you love. Play a ragtag group of underachievers, overachievers, street philosophers, and lovestruck artists united by one cause: to rescue your record store from the oppressive hand of The Man… and to keep the music playing." ( KS link

)

• In Rival Realms

, Alf Seegert

and Eagle-Gryphon Games

return to the land of Fantastiqa

for a head-to-head match of magicians who must summon lands, creatures, artifacts and more in order to complete quests and explore regions of the world. ( KS link

)

• Kwanchai Moriya has presented us with his spin on how raccoons like to party in Trash Pandas

, coming from Michael and Lisa Eskue through their Red Rook Games

studio. In the game, you need to tip over trash cans to try to acquire food and other things that raccoons adore, then stash them in a safe place so that no one else finds them. ( 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: Skyward, or Reaching for the Heavens One Card at a Time

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/670…reaching-heavens-one-card

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3196357_t.jpg] Gen Con 2017 is only five weeks off, so I plan to start posting several individual game previews in this space for titles that will debut at that show or otherwise be more widely available than they are now. Some will be written, some on video — depends on whether we already recorded videos at recent cons and whether I have more to say or show!

I will still be posting game round-ups and updating BGG's Gen Con 2017 Preview during this time, so if you know of upcoming games that aren't listed on the preview — or are publishing games that aren't listed — please contact me with that info via the email address in the header above. I plan to start contacting designers and publishers the week of July 17 to arrange demo time in the BGG booth during Gen Con 2017. Lots to do before that show opens, including more preparations for the Hot Games Room!

•••

Everyone is familiar with the concept of "I cut, you choose" in the real world, but few games have made use of this concept. Alan R. Moon and Aaron Weissblum's San Marco

might be the best known example, with players splitting cards into piles as they fight for control of districts within Venice; the related Canal Grande

card game ditches the game board, but retains the "I cut, you choose" mechanism. Jeffrey D. Allers' …aber bitte mit Sahne

places the mechanism in its anticipated habitat as players split cakes and tarts onto different plates; as with San Marco

, that game has similarly been reborn, with New York Slice

now challenging you to slice pies of a different sort: pizza pies.

Brendan Evans

' Skyward

from Australian publisher Rule & Make

, which will be distributed in North America by Passport Game Studios

, takes "I cut, you choose" and makes that cutting and choosing the heart of the game. Each round, one player takes the role of the warden, then splits cards into as many piles as players (with the warden being added to one of the piles), then players choose cards and launch buildings into the stratosphere, trying to put together strong scoring combinations from whatever they manage to scrounge together during the game.

I've played thrice thanks to a review copy from Passport at Origins 2017, and in this video I show off several of the cards and share some of the challenges of the game.