BGG News

New Game Round-up: Fighting with Spells, Battling with Chibis, and Rolling Like a Hero

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/558…pells-battling-chibis-and

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3090966_t.jpg]• Cool Mini Or Not

has gone old school with the look of Steve Avery

's Ta-Da!

, which will debut at Gen Con 2016 ahead of the game's Q3 2016 release date. Here's an overview of gameplay:

This year's annual Wizard Talent Show promises to be an exciting event with skilled witches and wizards attending from far and wide. Players will attempt to prove they are the most talented and deserving spellcaster of the bunch.

Ta-Da! is played over a number of fast-paced, frantic rounds. Each player furiously rolls dice in an effort to collect the elements needed to cast their spell. With each roll, players can add one die to their spell, then must reroll the rest. As soon as they have completed their spell, they yell "Ta-da!" and they're one step closer to winning the Talent Show.

However, game-changing feats will be in play throughout the game, making players perform crazy acts as they play, such as making animal noises, keeping their heads on the table, and more!

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3090972_t.jpg]• Another CMON title making its debut at Gen Con 2016 — one of many, all of which are covered in BGG's Gen Con 2016 Preview

— is Krosmaster Arena 2.0

, which adds eight new figures to the Krosmaster

universe in a standalone game that's compatible with all of the figures previously released.

• Alderac Entertainment Group

has announced that it will release its own version of Seiji Kanai

's cooperative 1-8 player dice game Eight Epics

in October 2016.

• And here's a notice I should have seen earlier: AEG is closing out

the Doomtown: Reloaded

game line with the release of the Blood Moon Rising

expansion pack in October 2016, after which it will return Doomtown

to owner Pinnacle Entertainment Group. AEG notes that "Pinnacle does not have any immediate plans to continue with the Doomtown

ECG product at this time, but may look to do so at some point in the future."

• Heidelberger Spieleverlag

has announced two more Justice League Hero Dice

titles from Andreas Schmidt

for the line that it launched in late 2015 with Superman

and Batman

.

As with those two titles, Flash

and Green Lantern

— available in separate English and German versions, but only in Europe — are both solitaire dice games in which the player tries to take out villains that appear in random order. In addition, any of the titles can be combined with one or more other Hero Dice

sets to allow for multiplayer games.

Wonder Woman and Cyborg are depicted in the marketing images for these titles, so expect two more such games down the road.

Power Grid Gets Carded

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/55858/power-grid-gets-carded

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3091756_t.jpg]The game industry has seen a wave of [Game Title]: The Card Game

s being released in recent years, with many popular titles being transformed into more portable games with smaller footprints (except for The Castles of Burgundy: The Card Game

).

The trick to these designs is that they need to feel like the original game, yet not fall so closely to the tree that people don't see a reason for them existing. Come October 2016, we'll have yet another chance to see whether one of these transformations is successful thanks to the release of Power Grid: The Card Game

from Friedemann Friese

and 2F-Spiele

, with Rio Grande Games

handling the release of the English-language version.

What's different in this design? In Power Grid

, players compete in three arenas — the power plant marketplace, the resource pool, and the network of cities to which they're supplying power. This latter aspect has been removed in this new design, as explained below:

In Power Grid: The Card Game, the players represent CEOs of mighty power companies producing electricity.

During the game, the players bid for power plants at auctions and supply them with resources. Their income depends on the amount of electricity produced in each round. At the end of the game, the player who produces the most electricity wins the game.

Power Grid: The Card Game offers all the tension and tactics well-known of its two big brothers — Power Grid and Power Grid deluxe — without using the different maps. You get the full Power Grid emotions in an intensive playing time of sixty minutes!

To give two players an exciting experience, they will play with the Trust acting as a third player. While challenging the opponent, they must incorporate the schemes of the competing Trust in their plans and use these schemes against their opponent.

This game includes a small variant for the Demolition Contractor. This variant is playable with Power Grid: The Card Game, and all maps of Power Grid deluxe and Power Grid!

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3091682_t.jpg]

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3091681_t.jpg] Power Grid: The Card Game

will debut at Spiel 2016, and one other Power Grid

item that people will be able to find there is Power Grid: High-Voltage DC Transmission Passage C

, which was originally released as part of the 2015 Brettspiel Adventskalender

. This mini-expansion is playable solely with the Power Grid

map of Germany, and like most of the promos that 2F-Spiele produces, it will be available for a small donation that will be forwarded to an organization to be revealed later. Here's what this item does:

In future years, Germany plans a new high-voltage transmission line from North Germany to South Germany to deliver the electricity produced by wind power to the regions in South Germany with demand for that power. You are collectively building this transmission line, so step by step your power companies will not need to pay connection costs anymore between Cuxhaven and Stuttgart. Sadly, the construction of this transmission line is paid with tax money, so you must pay taxes to supply these cities with electricity.

Henning Kröpke from 2F-Spiele notes that other ways to get this promo will be revealed following Spiel 2016.

When passing along this information, Kröpke also added a footnote to the other 2F-Spiele game announcements for 2016

. In that earlier post, which mentioned that 2F-Spiele's new Strategic Partnership with Stronghold Games would not include existing 2F-Spiele game lines currently published with other partners, I speculated that this referred only to Power Grid

. Kröpke clarified that all games currently under license by Rio Grande Games will remain with that publisher, including upcoming reprints of Power Grid: The First Sparks

, Power Grid: Factory Manager

, Unexpected Treasures

, Friday

, and Fearsome Floors

.

Crowdfunding Round-up: Treasures from Taiwan, and Pages from Pierô

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/558…res-taiwan-and-pages-pier

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic2966356_t.jpg]• Let's lead off this crowdfunding round-up with a project that will probably expire before most people see it: Far East War 1592

, from Imjin Creative

, in which 2-4 players "are divided into Japan and China/Korea factions, with each side trying to conquer the target provinces of their rivals. Players alternate moving around the action rondel to perform different actions such as recruit forces, assign generals, march armies, initiate battles, etc. With careful planning on the action rondel, tactical movement and assignment of troops and generals, and a bit luck in dice roll during battles, players should revive the vivid history in the Far East War."

If nothing else, you now know about one more of the hundreds of new titles that will be available at Spiel 2016 — assuming that the game funds, that is. ( KS link

)

• If time has run out on the project above, perhaps you'd instead prefer another game from the same part of the world, such as Taiwan Monsters

, which is on Chinese-language funding site Zeczec.com and which is a complete mystery to me, although it looks purty and is already funded. ( Zeczec link

)

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3092988_t.png]

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3068023_t.jpg]• No? Then how about Bubble Tea

from Li-He Studio

's Aza Chen

, designer of Cat Tower

, Doggy GO!

, and other adorable games. In this real-time game, each player has nine bubble tea ingredient cards, someone rolls the ingredient dice from the bubble tea container, then everyone races to put the right ingredients in the right cup card. ( Zeczec link

)

• How about yet another Taiwanese project, this one being the more-accessible-outside-of-Taiwan Guns & Steel: Renaissance

, a standalone expansion to Jesse Li's Guns & Steel

from Grail Games

and Moaideas Game Design

. This game plays like the original, with players laying cards face down as resources or face up to use their developmental power, with the long-term goal of acquiring wonders, taking all of the space age cards, or stockpiling VPs. ( KS link

)

• Joost Das' Hylaria

from FableSmith

is a party game in which players divide into teams, then each receive two image tiles face down in front of them while three tiles are placed face up on the table to start a storyline. On a turn, you try to communicate what's on your tiles to your teammates — perhaps through a code you've created earlier — then you take a tile from in front of any other player and add it to the storyline. If the storyline now has three identical tiles in it, your team scores every tile up to the one just played. Collect enough tiles, and your team wins! ( KS link

)

• Designer Mitsuo Yamamoto

and publisher Logy Games

were on Kickstarter in 2015 with the stacking game Moon-Sun-Angel

, and now they're back with a different stacking challenge under the name ACTOP: Ancient Construct Tower of Philosopher

. In this 2-6 player game, players take turns adding a polycube and a balance stone on a 3x3 space (that must be kept clear in the center to create a chimney-like structure), with players scoring points based on the size of the piece they place and using the balance stone to mess with the next to place. When the polycubes have all been placed or someone knocks over the tower, the game ends. ( KS link

)

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3051177_t.jpg]• The letters in the game title ABXY

will likely trigger thoughts of video games past, and that's the intent of this design from Jack Rosetree and Broken Games

, which pits two players against one another in creature combat with two of the A, B, X, and Y actions being secretly chosen by each player each round. ( KS link

)

• Designer Chris James of Stratus Games has used Kickstarter to fund the first four years of Casual Game Insider

, a mainstream-friendly quarterly magazine about tabletop games sold in game stores and newsstands, and he's back to fund year five, with the focus once again being casual games that can be taught in ten minutes and played in under an hour. ( KS link

)

• Bad People

carries the tagline "The Party Game You Probably Shouldn't Play", yet here designer Mike Lancanster is, trying to get you to fund a party game in which you vote on which of the players involved would be a terrible phone sex operator or would have the fewest people at their funeral. I suggest that you probably shouldn't play it. ( KS link

)

• We'll close with a game-related item that might be of interest to a few folks on this site: Pierô's Artbook 10th

, this being a tenth anniversary retrospective of the artwork of Pierô, who debuted with Une Ombre sur Whitechapel

— which most people will know under its reprint name of Mr. Jack

— then became a hot commodity in 2008 thanks to his eye-catching work on Ghost Stories

.

Pierô's Artbook 10th

from ilinx édition will include 80-120 pages depending on the final funding total, with text in both French and English and a foreword by Ghost Stories

designer Antoine Bauza. ( KS link

)

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

Origins Game Fair 2016 — Part 1

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/556…ins-game-fair-2016-part-1

by Mary Prasad

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3082639_t.png]The Origins Game Fair was held June 15-19, 2016, in the Greater Columbus Convention Center, Columbus, Ohio. (They finally moved it to a more appealing date! Yay!) The next convention will be held June 14-18, 2017. The Origins Game Fair began in 1975 and is run by the Game Manufacturers Association (GAMA).

This year the registration line was extremely long — longer than I have ever seen it in previous years. Part of this was due to a Microsoft security update that was pushed through Tuesday night, causing some time to be lost Wednesday morning. The other reason was due to increased numbers. In 2016, 9,514 people had registered on Wednesday by noon (compared to 7,634 in the same time period the previous year). Origins had added 20% more people to the registration stations this year, so the delay wasn't as bad as it could have been. John Ward, Executive Director of GAMA, noted that the average wait time was about an hour.

Attendance was up from 2015 (the numbers they gave me from last year were revised):

• 2014: 11,424 unique badges

• 2015: 12,912 unique badges (43,791 turnstile)

• 2016: 15,480 unique badges (52,561 turnstile) or 19.8% above last year's attendance

This year’s prices:

• Full Show Badge: Pre Reg $55, Onsite $65

• One-Day Badge: Pre Reg $20, Onsite $25 (up $5 from last year)

• Family Day passes were available only for Sunday, June 19, for a family of up to two adults and four children (under 18) with limited access: $20 (up $5 from last year)

Origins and Families

Origins is a family-friendly event. Children 9 and under get in free but must be accompanied by an adult. A child's badge allows entry to Origins for all five days of the show. The back of the child's badge includes a place for parents to include their badge ID number and contact phone number at the show.

There were two new options for kids this year: the Origins Family Room and CritterCare. The Origins Family Room is for parents who want to spend time gaming with their children. Free games were provided by Pokemon, Breaking Games, and Origins. Video games, provided by Final Boss Gaming, cost two generic tickets per hour (generics cost $2 each) unless you had purchased an Electronic Game Room ribbon, which allowed unlimited play.

CritterCare is a place where parents could register their children for kid-friendly fun. Brought to you by KiddieCorp, CritterCare is Origins' new and improved childcare room. Children ages 5-12 could participate in tabletop games, card games, and crafts. Books and toys were also available. Origins offsets the cost of CritterCare at a reduced rate of two generics per hour, per child. Parents' contact information as well as their intended location at the convention is required for check-in. Children are required to stay in CritterCare until their parent or guardian comes to sign them out.

Check out the Family page

on the Origins website for hours and information.

By the way, if you have children (or even if you don't!), be sure to check out HABA games (see below, in the Exhibit Hall section). Their games are as much fun for adults as they are for children – and the components are usually super high quality.

Fun Fact: At The Gathering of Friends, I caught Phil Walker-Harding, designer of Imhotep

, wearing the same sweater (in Australia they say "jumper") as he did for his designer photo in the rules for Imhotep

. He claims he really does change his sweaters/clothes! See Thames & Kosmos

later in the article for more information on his game.

CABS Board Room

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3083725_t.jpg]Board Room Ribbons were again $20. This year they sold out — 1,600 ribbons! The library received 118+ new games, making the library about one thousand games. (The entire CABS library is brought to the convention, minus some kids games.) There were 592 unique games checked out from the library. Here are the top 20 checkouts (number of checkouts listed after name of game):

• Lanterns: The Harvest Festival

37

• Splendor

36

• New York 1901

35

• Codenames

35

• Imhotep

32

• Dead of Winter: A Crossroads Game

30

• 7 Wonders: Duel

29

• Royals

28

• The Networks

25

• Quadropolis

24

• World's Fair 1893

23

• Valeria: Card Kingdoms

20

• Animals On Board

19

• 51st State: Master Set

19

• The Game: Are you ready to play The Game?

18

• Odin's Ravens

18

• Automobiles

18

• Kitty Paw

18

• Roll for the Galaxy

17

Fun Fact: Likely the only reason Tichu

isn't right there at the top of the list is because real Tichu

players bring their own decks!

Thanks to CABS member Ken Hill for providing the above information.

Origins Award Winners 2016

The Origins awards were held Saturday, June 18. The board gaming related category winners are below.

Game of the Year

Codenames

(Czech Games Edition) Designed by Vlaada Chvátil

Best Board Game
Star Wars: Imperial Assault

(Fantasy Flight Games) Designed by Justin Kemppainen, Corey Konieczka, Jonathan Ying

Fan Favorite: Star Wars: Imperial Assault

Best Card Game
7 Wonders: Duel

(Repos Productions) Designed by Antoine Bauza , Bruno Cathala

Fan Favorite: 7 Wonders: Duel

Best Family Game
Codenames

(Czech Games Edition) Designed by Vlaada Chvatil

Fan Favorite: Codenames

Best Collectible Game
DC Comics Dice Masters: War of Light

(WizKids) Designed by Mike Elliott, Eric M. Lang

Fan Favorite: DC Comics Dice Masters: War of Light

Exhibit Hall and Gaming Hall Publishers Part 1

Exhibit Hall hours for attendees were: Thursday – Saturday from 10 a.m. – 6:00 p.m., Sunday 10 a.m. – 4 p.m. Here is your list for Gen Con shopping!!

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3082627_t.jpg] Rio Grande Games

Tiffin

was released at Origins. This game is about the Indian lunch delivery service, most commonly found in Mumbai. As a service, bicyclists, called dabbawallas, pick up and deliver hot lunches to workers, usually with help from the train system. Typically the pick up is from the worker’s own residence, although some use a meal supplier. There is a really nice movie titled The Lunchbox

(available on Netflix) whose story revolves around this very thing. Tiffin

is a somewhat light, area majority game that has a bit of luck and strategy. Players use cards to place cubes on tiffin tiles: first as lunch tin(s) — up to 3 — then to fill up the "route" (a block of squares, varying in size for shorter or longer routes). Each player starts with one card for a short cut (makes a route 2 squares shorter) and a flat tire (makes a route 2 squares longer), which may be played during their turn in addition to their action (then it's discarded). Actions are basically taking cards or placing cubes.

Dominion: Empires

was just released. It adds a lot of new mechanisms, including split piles for kingdom cards of two different cards; debt tokens that allow players to buy cards with debt, which must be paid off before they can buy another card; more events (first introduced in Adventures

); and landmarks, which work similarly to events but generally give players ways to score points during the game or at the end. One or two landmark cards come out at the beginning of the game and apply to everyone.

Fun Fact: Rael Dornfest, one of the designers of Tiffin

, went to Mumbai to hang out with the dabbawallas — the people who deliver lunch boxes (called tiffins). The name of the prototype was "Dabbawalla" but it was later changed to Tiffin

.

R&R Games

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic2859670_t.jpg] Swipe Out

was pre-released at Origins and will be available in July. Each player has a 5x5 grid board with 25 chips on it. A pattern card will be flipped showing a similar 5x5 grid with dots in some of the squares. Players must match the pattern by quickly removing chips on their boards. There is squeaky duck in middle of the table. The first player to finish will grab the duck to stop play, then the player’s grid board is checked for accuracy. If it is wrong, the other players keep going. The winner gets the card. Play is up to five cards (there are variants for three cards and with teams). Designed by Oswald Greene Jr. – from Grand Theft Auto

. Wiki

: "Oswald Greene, Jr. is a voice actor, associate producer and a game tester who voiced a pedestrian in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City

, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas

and Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories

. He also worked as a game tester for Grand Theft Auto III

and as an associate producer for Grand Theft Auto Advance

."

Shiro

is being tested for a future release (likely 2017). Designed by Ben Parmentier. The shogun is dying. Warlords are trying to gain control of the provinces of Japan to cement their claim to become shogun. This is an area majority, worker placement game using cards. Everyone has same deck of cards and a hand, from which a few cards will be selected each turn to put on display. Cards have 2 or 3 slots on which samurai may be played. Players may play their colored samurai on their own cards for free or on another player’s at a cost – with the limit of one samurai per color per card. Players may hire ronin, which are temporary workers for one turn, although they may become permanent workers if they pay a higher cost.

Fun Fact: Many of R&R games have treasure hunts hidden inside them. A couple weeks ago, someone solved the Face Chase

hidden hunt and won $150 (grand prize). Other prizes may still be won.

I couldn't resist including this: Time's Up Title Recall

is my favorite party game (although I love all Time's Up

games). Earlier this year R&R released a Time's Up Limited Edition Expansion Set

to celebrate the 20th anniversary of R&R Games! At Origins, four full expansion packs were released for Time's Up: Title Recall

. Every Time's Up

release has about 30% new cards from the previous edition (currently on the fifth release of Title Recall

and 7th release of the original). On a related note: Smarty Party

, the newest edition will have 100% new content, Gen Con release.

Thames & Kosmos

Legends of Andor: Journey to the North

is an expansion for Legends of Andor

that will be available Q4 2016. This cooperative game includes a new story that picks up from the base game, but moves on to another land (it includes a new map region of the north of Andor) with new challenges (legends), and new powers. This time the theme is water-based; for example, it includes storms, ships, and sea monsters.

Imhotep

was on sale for the first time at Origins. Imhotep was an Egyptian, considered by some to be the earliest known architect. In the game, players are Egyptian builders trying to emulate Imhotep by loading boats with stones (wooden pieces) and moving them to five monuments (board locations). Each area allows players to either take cards or participate in building (placing wooden pieces on the board). On a player's turn, they may do one of four actions: take new stones, load their stones on a boat, move a boat to a monument, or play an action card. Timing is key since other players are vying for their own interests. Nominated for the 2016 Spiel des Jahres award.

Fun Fact: Lili DeSisto, Marketing Coordinator: "The crew at Thames & Kosmos regularly has game nights at their offices so that everyone knows the ins and outs of all of our games (also, it's just fun!). Oftentimes these games nights happen after office hours, but one memorable day this spring, we lost power on the same day that we were undergoing some office renovations. With all the noise, we were happy to be forced to unplug, open the windows to let the light in, and have an impromptu game day. Things got pretty heated, though...one thing we've learned is that we've got some competitive gamers on staff!"

CGE - Czech Games Edition

CGE was showing the final prototype of Codenames Pictures

at Origins. It will pre-release at Gen Con 2016, with a full release in September. This is a picture version of the award-winning game Codenames

. If you haven’t tried it yet, I highly recommend you do. Fun fact: The original Codenames

has been published in 17 languages!

CGE was also showing a prototype of Adrenaline

, which is being planned for a Spiel 2016 release. This is a Euro-style first-person shooter. Yeah, you heard me right. Euro-style. First-person. Shooter. I played the prototype last year and, I must say, I'm impressed. Somehow they pulled it off. Each player has an area control health bar that tracks damage from other players. When your character dies, whoever did damage will get points accordingly (i.e. most point for first, second most for second, etc.). A marker is put on the highest point value every time your character is killed so the next kill will not be worth as much. There is another area majority for the player who makes the most kills. There is also a resource management component: you need the right type of ammo for the types of weapons you have. Whenever you die, you immediately re-spawn, without losing anything (weapons, ammo). In a nice twist, there is a slight advantage for having damage.

Mayday Games

Quotes by Ryan Bruns, President Mayday Games

Garbage Day

released at Origins. "Players take turns stacking garbage cards one at a time onto the overflowing garbage can, or stashing garbage cards in their rooms. But once a player's room gets too full, they must clean it by stacking all the cards from that room on top of the garbage can, very carefully, one by one. If garbage cards fall off the garbage can during your turn, place them in your overflow pile. If your overflow pile gets too big, you're eliminated from the game. If all other players have been eliminated, you win!"

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3082045_t.jpg] Dungeon Busters

was shown at Origins. " Dungeon Busters

release is Gen Con 2016: In Dungeon Busters

, the players take the role of heroes exploring dungeons and defeating monsters in search of treasures. In order to defeat a monster, every player simultaneously plays a power card face-down then reveals the values. If two or more players play the same value, they are all ignored. If players are defeated the player who played the lowest value should return some treasures as a penalty. If players succeed to defeat the monster, players can divide rewards but the player who played the lowest value will go first."

Fun Fact: Ryan Bruns: "Gen Con 2014, I was late returning from dinner and I had missed most of the designer speed-dating event (where game designers give a six-minute pitch to publishers). I was just going to skip the event since I was very late and I was walking towards the gaming hall. I ran into Seth Jaffee and Andy Van Zandt of Tasty Minstrel Games. They mentioned they were looking for me and said there was a game at the speed-dating event that Mayday Games is going to publish. They proceeded to tell me about Garbage Day

and how much I needed to look at it. I went to the room where the event was being held and was introduced to Shane Willis, designer of Garbage Day

. After a playthrough and discussion, we signed the game the next day. I love this industry that we all belong to — where publishers see games that would fit with other publishers and recommend them. I love it. Special thanks to TMG."

AEG (Alderac Entertainment Group)

Quotes by Dan Dineen, Major Events Manager, Alderac Entertainment Group

Mystic Vale

: "In Mystic Vale, 2-4 players use the innovative Card Crafting System to create and personalize their own cards/decks to create a game experience unlike anything they’ve ever played before. Concise rules offer a deep gaming experience with meaningful decisions, along with tremendous replay value with each game being different from beginning to end." Mystic Vale

will be released July 14th for brick-and-mortar stores or August 8th for all other retail outlets.

Guildhall Fantasy

: (released June 20th): "In Guildhall: Fantasy

, 2-4 players compete to create the perfect party by recruiting adventurers into their guildhall chapters. Collect sets of cards with unique abilities to control the table, and complete a full chapter to claim victory cards. Players do this by drawing cards, making their opponents discard cards, switching cards between their collections and others, or a myriad of other card effects." [Note: There are three listings for Guildhall: Fantasy - Fellowship

, Alliance

, and Coalition

.]

Fun Fact: " Mystic Vale

was actually created by its designer, John D. Clair, to teach the Card Crafting System for his game Edge of Darkness

. Edge of Darkness

will be released by AEG in 2017!"

Q Workshop

This one is a showstopper for me. I just had to get some photos of their beautiful dice! These ladies are super sweet, too. This company is out of Poland, but the website is really well done so there is no problem for English speakers; in fact three of the four choices – selected by currency on the left side of the home page – take you to websites in English but with the specified currency and adjusted shipping prices. Only the last one is in Polish.

They make incredibly beautiful and intricate dice in a variety of themes and games: Steampunk, Celtic, Tech, Elven, Deadlands, Call of Cthulhu, Kingsburg, Pathfinder, Arkham Horror, Shadowrun, Warmachine, and many more. There are really cool metal dice available in several choices, as well as dice towers, dice bags, and dice cups (e.g. Black Elven Leather Cup with stitched lid and bottom and debossed writing). They even have glow-in-the-dark dice!!

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3082040_t.jpg]

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3082041_t.jpg]

Fun Fact: This one is too good to be true: edible dice! OMG! I want the elven dark chocolate dice! Although, they look so yummy I might eat them before ever playing a game with them (probably just as well since they will likely make a mess on my hands/games). The description says: "Elven dark chocolate dice set: This set of dice is made of dark chocolate with a touch of almond and marzipan. Meticulously finished, the edible dice are D4, D6, D8, D10, D12, D20 and D100." YUM!

They also have white chocolate (with a touch of lemon), milk chocolate, red jelly, and blue candy! Check Candylize

for more pics and info.

Plaid Hat Games

Dead of Winter: The Long Night

was pre-released at Origins, with a planned July/August release. This is a standalone expansion for Dead of Winter

, with all new characters, crossroad cards, and three new modules that may be played together or players may pick and choose among them. It's of course compatible with the base game.

SeaFall

will pre-release at Gen Con with a general release later in 2016. This is designer Rob Daviau's new "legacy" game. It's a seafaring game of exploration and intrigue, with new things to unlock as you play.

Fun Fact: Artist Fernanda Suarez put several Easter eggs in the new Dead of Winter: The Long Night

art. Examples include: the Ashes logo on Elijah's hat, and Emma's backpack has a Charm Die keychain on it.

Catan Studio

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3083053_t.jpg] Catan Geographies: Tenn-Tucky

is planned to be released July/August. This is another scenario for the base game, for 3-6 players. This version has horses as a commodity, producing on 7s in the pastures.

Catan: The Big Game

is an infinitely expandable game of Catan

. They plan to release this at the beginning of 2017. Bob Carty, Catan Studios: " Catan: The Big Game

is a special product designed to allow scalable events to be economically executed by people who want to play Catan

. These kits form the core of the materials used in 2013 and 2015 to set world records for the most people playing in the same game at the same time: 922 in 2013 at Gen Con, with that record being broken in 2015 with 1,040 people participating in the event at Essen. A kit contains materials for six players. Three maps accommodate two players each, micro-perfed cards form the resource decks, and development decks. Die-cut cardstock player pieces are provided as opposed to wood. A micro-perfed deck of dice is provided to take the place of dice. Every thing you need for six players and all for $20.00. The rules are nearly the same as regular Catan, with the addition of ships providing players the opportunity to create trade routes up to 30 segments long, and slightly different rules for robbers and knights. No monopoly card. Have more people? Just acquire more kits. Support materials for organizers are available, including a document for organizers, a video for rules instruction, and a timer/turn and Number software exists to assist in running larger events. A new way to play Catan

, maybe with one thousand of your closest pals."

Fun Fact: Morgan Dontanville, CCO: "We are building a life-size sheep for photo opportunities at conventions. We are playing around with the color; currently we are debating whether we want it to have blue, green, red wool. Right now it is being carved out of Styrofoam and will end up being a fully-painted fiberglass sheep with a secret hatch in her belly for fun costumes."

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3083099_t.jpg] Mayfair Games

Costa Rica

pre-released at Origins and will be released in July. This is an exploration, set collection, and push-your-luck game. Players explore the rainforest of Costa Rica

, looking for animals. There are six explorations starting around a hex tile board with five tiles per side (61 tiles of the 72 available are used per game). Each player has one explorer in each group (pawns in their own color). On a player’s turn they take on the role of expedition leader and may determine which tile to explore next, flipping it. Tiles may have one or two animals on it, and possibly a threat. The leader is first to decide if s/he wants to keep the tile s/he just flipped; if not, the choice moves clockwise to the next explorer. If a player takes tiles, that player also removes their pawn from the exploration. If no one takes the tile, the expedition leader flips another tile, adjacent to the last flipped tile, and can now choose to keep or pass all flipped tiles so far. If one threat is revealed, play continues as normal; if a second threat is revealed, the player’s turn ends and that player must take back their pawn and discard the threat tiles, but may keep any remaining tiles. The more animals collected in one type, the more points the group is worth. Players also gain points for collecting a full set of the six animal types.

Fight for Olympus

will be released in July. This is a two-player game co-published with Lookout Games

as part of the Lookout two-player line. It's a head-to-head card battle game with six areas of conflict in three different areas of play. One area is a tug-of-war battle with a 7-point swing, i.e. the player who gets to 7 points wins. The second area allows players to win tokens to help pay for cards. The last area allows players to pick up another card at the end of their turn (normally two cards, this bumps it to three). Players play cards on their side of the board, paying costs by discarding cards or tokens, and taking any actions as indicated on the cards, then the cards are evaluated in order. If a card is played across from an opponent's card, it starts a battle. The alternative way to win is to have six cards slots filled at the start of a turn.

Fun Fact: Even though the rights to Catan

were sold to Asmodee

earlier in 2016, Mayfair continues to manufacture the game and its expansions/extensions for Asmodee. At full speed, more than 1,500 games an hour come off the assembly line in Skokie, Illinois!

Eagle-Gryphon Games

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3082625_t.png] SiXeS

pre-released at Origins and is set to release in July. It is a party game for 4 to 40 players. There are six rounds; the game lasts about 20 minutes. There are three types of rounds. For two of the rounds there is a card with a category; players write down one or more words and, depending on the round, they may want to match or not match their opponents' answers. The last type of round is a lightning round. The card has six categories, and players write down one item for each category that must match an opponent's answer.

Vinhos Deluxe

is a reprint of Vinhos

, with a new box, art, and components.

Fun Fact: Ralph Anderson, who currently works for Eagle-Gryphon and is the designer of Chimera

(a Tichu

-like three-player game) lost the Tichu

game against me and my awesome partner Zev Shlasinger (formerly "Z-Man", now working for WizKids

). To be fair, his partner Ken Hill ( Rio Grande Games

) had to leave partway through the game, so Stephan Brissaud ( Iello

) took over; he wasn't quite as exprienced at Tichu

...

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3014888_t.jpg] IELLO

Schotten Totten

: This reprint/reboot is due to be released at Gen Con. There will be new art and will be fit into the mini games series (small white box). The rules will actually be the Battle Line

rules.

Oceanos

is slotted for a Gen Con release. This is a new Antoine Bauza ( 7 Wonders

) set-collection game with an original drafting mechanism that may be played in 30 minutes. It is set in the ocean. Players build their environments during three rounds of play: one at the ocean surface, one in the middle, and one at the bottom. Submarine customizations may be purchased each round, providing different strategies, e.g. more periscopes allow the player to draft more cards (increase hand size).

Fun Fact: IELLO licensed King of Tokyo

to a mask company called Trick or Treat Studios. They already made Kong (the albino monkey in King of NY

) and Pumpkin Jack (from the Halloween expansion, pumpkin face with witch hat).

Mr. B Games

Quotes are from Sean Brown, (a.k.a. Mr. B), President of Mr. B Games

.

Spurs: Legends

pre-released at Origins, with a full release July 5th. "The final expansion to the Spurs: A Tale in the Old West

system. Spurs: Legends

adds two female characters and a bunch of new challenge tokens as well as the introduction of the new Bandit Canyon Mini Game and the Train Heist! Fans of Spurs

will find these challenges to be much tougher than previous challenges and will add hours of new content to try out!"

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3082046_t.png] Prospectus

pre-released at Origins, with a full release July 5th. "In Prospectus

, players are apprentice-level mages who earn their tower rent by trading potions in the underground Kriztus potion market. Using their powers, they can peer into their crystal balls to predict prices and make their fortunes. But beware! Their prognostication is not perfect, especially when rival wizards cast spells to advance their own agendas! Meanwhile, the greedy, power-mad High Council demands potions as well. A timely sale will make a recipe fashionable, and raise its price in the market, but if the council does not get what it wants, they will retaliate, by telling the townsfolk that the potion is nothing but fizzwater and newt juice. The mage that is able to earn the most money through cunning investments, shrewd spell-casting, and lucrative sales to the council, will be the most successful potion trader and win the game! Heck, maybe you can even pay off your tab at the Drunken Dragon Inn..."

Fun Fact: "My Fun Fact this time is about Spurs

. Originally my niece was going to unveil the first Female Character in a very big way. (She was working on a pilot for HULU set in the world of Spurs

!) She has since been accepted to a big film school and that project is on hold, but it was such a cool opportunity for the game. We decided to do the Legends

expansion to fill the void of women characters in the game as our last installment of expansions for the game. Never say never though, if my niece ever gets that pilot, it will be hard to stay away..."

Meeple Source

Meeple Source is the place to find awesome high-quality game replacements. If you have a favorite game (or two, or ten), you might want to upgrade the components to these beautiful pieces.

Blue Orange Games

The Boss

pre-released at Origins, to be released July/August. This is a third in series of games orginally published by Blackrock Games

(France), brought over to the North American market by Blue Orange. The most popular game in the Blackrock line of games, it's a mafia-themed bluffing and deduction card game.

Vikings on Board

will pre-release at Gen Con, to be released August/September. This is the next game in the Blue Orange Games big-box series, which includes New York 1901

. This is a familyweight viking-themed worker placement game by Charles Chevallier ( Abyss

). The game includes 3D ships (fully assembled) and viking minis. You need area majority to control a ship.

Fun Fact: In New York 1901

, the artwork is based on historical postcards of real skyscrapers in New York

. Additionally the four legendary skyscrapers were, at one time or another, the tallest buildings in the world. Check out these beautifully illustrated and interesting designer's notes

by Chénier La Salle.

Stronghold Games

Piratoons

was released in June. Stephen Buonocore: "Players are trying to build the biggest, baddest, best pirate ship on seven seas." There two major parts of the game. First turning a "chest" of tiles over and, in real time, placing pirate meeples on parts of the ship for an area majority. Players have a minimum of 15 seconds (timer) but they can go until one says stop. Then, after pieces are collected, the remaining pieces either "sink to the bottom" (larger pieces) or are auctioned off in a closed fist blind bid. Players score for sets of pieces, e.g. people, flags, etc. as well as how "pretty" the ship is (i.e. certain pieces are next to each other).

The Dragon & Flagon

will be released at Gen Con. Designed by Geoff, Sydney, and Brian Engelstein, the theme is fantasy tavern brawling. You play one of nine fantasy archetypical characters who can throw mugs & chairs (wooden pieces), pull the rug out from under characters (paper rug), swing from chandeliers, cast spells, overturn tables (cardboard), fight with weapons, and roll barrels (wooden)... all in a 3D tavern environment. Players play cards to "program" two turns ahead. Cards contain movement, attacks, and special abilities, which are customized per character. Successful attacks gain reputation points. The player with most points at the end of game is the winner.

Fun Fact: There are at least a dozen Easter eggs hidden on The Dragon & Flagon

game board. Examples include some rats looking down at a cat, a cask that has a Stronghold logo, and a wanted sign posted in the tavern, showing a picture of Stephen Buonocore, President (...and Chief Cook and Bottle Washer) Stronghold Games.

HABA USA

Space Planets

released April 2016. This is a tactical dexterity game in which players roll a large die, hoping to land it on a planet card in a 3x3 grid of cards. Planet cards each have a star point value and may also have a special effect (positive or negative). The game end is triggered when one player has collected five cards; the round is finished and the player with the most star points on their cards is the winner.

Go Cuckoo!

is to be released August/September. It's a dexterity game in which players start the game with the same number of cuckoo eggs. The bottom tin of the game forms the base of the bird's nest. Players take turns drawing up to three bamboo-like sticks, with colors on each end that may or may not be the same color. They must stop if the ends match, in which case they try to use it to build the nest. Once placed, the player may try to put one of their eggs in the nest. If the egg falls in the can they must take an egg from the player with the most eggs; if it falls outside the can they take the egg back, in either case their turn ends. If they successfully play their last egg, they get to try to place the cuckoo bird; if they do so successfully they win the game.

Fun Fact: Lea Culliton, HABA USA, has been invited to attend and exhibit HABA games at the upcoming American Library Association (ALA) annual conference to speak to librarians about incorporating games into educational curriculums.

Artana

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3082037_t.jpg]Artana is selling the "Best Damn Gaming Coins Ever" including seven new sets of coins: two English sets (Anglo-Saxon, Old English Kings) and five Asian sets (Japanese, Chinese, Indian, Persian, Mongol). They also sell the "Best Damn Gaming Money Ever" including three new sets (US Presidents, SciFi Credits, Fierce Women). All of their monies are interchangeable. These new sets were released at Origins. The cost is $6 per pack of coins, with the jumbo pack including 6 coins, the large 9, medium 12, small 15, and tiny 18.

Corrupted Kingdoms

will be a Gen Con release. Players each control a corporation of evil monsters. The objective is to infiltrate the fair senate of the realm in order to pass nonsensical, destructive legislation. The corporation that does this most successfully will be rewarded by their special interests with ridiculous, unnecessary luxury goods that make the destruction of the entire realm well worth it. (Description from Nils Herzmann.)

Fun Fact: Corrupted Kingdoms

is a collaboration with a first-time designer, Raymond Chandler III. Raymond has a degree in video game design from Full Sale University.

Naturalist Games

The Lairs

Kickstarter launched during Origins; it's slated for a Q4 2016 release. Patrick Roach, Sean Cutler, Zack Brown are the designers. This is a dungeon crawl with mini card games (encounters) in each chamber. For example, a duel may include a short trick-taking game of a couple rounds. It has asymmetric game play. First there is a build phase to find an artifact then becomes asymmetric dungeon crawl.

Fun Fact: All of the illustrations in Lairs

were originally designed for a children's picture book about the end of the world. (There is a reason it's now in the board game.)

Stay tuned for Part 2

, including food (yeah, I can't believe I didn't put it in Part 1 either!), The Dice Tower, and more!

New Game Round-up: Spiel 2016 — HUCH! & friends Challenges You to Build, Sail, Coerce, Fight, Destroy Dragons, Gain Life Energy, and Devote Years to a Mystery

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/557…6-huch-friends-challenges

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic2842043_t.png]

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic2842041_t.png]• Time for another look ahead at late 2016 releases from a German publisher that will be highlighted at Spiel 2016, this time showing off a few of the items from HUCH! & friends

, starting with Skibe

from Viking-lookalike Arve D. Fühler

:

In Skibe, players assume the role of a tribal chief in the days of Erik the Red.

Erik has ordered the building of ships for the purpose of sending the bravest Vikings to Greenland. The players build longboats, supply them with provisions and equipment, and try to bring as many Vikings of their own tribe as possible on board. Will the ship stand up to inspection by all tribal chiefs? And which tribe will be best represented on the ships in the end?

• Adrian Adamescu

's Rival Kings

— the cover of which is not final — presents us with a setting, but no gameplay details:

In Rival Kings, two royal families compete for the country and its people. High-ranking personalities prevent the members of the opposing family from using their subjects for their own purposes and from erecting valuable buildings — but everything comes at a price. Who will lead his family to fame and honor?

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3081568_t.png]• I'm not sure whether Cards: Die Partie deines Lebens

from Renè Haustein

and Mathias Spaan

qualifies as a game or not, but it's close enough from the description to merit entry, possibly simply from something that pushes the envelope of what a game might be. An overview:

Cards: Die Partie deines Lebens is an unusual card game, one in which you have to master crazy tasks and tricky riddles. You play on your own, and the game can take weeks, months, or even years to complete. Each card provides a new challenge that works its way into the player's life. Only when you fulfill the condition on a card may you reveal the next one.

Cards: Die Partie deines Lebens contains fifty cards, and as soon as you have fulfilled the last card, you have completed the game.

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic2842012_t.png]

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic2842013_t.png]• Continuing in that vein of games about which we know v. little, let's look at all we know of Touria

from Inka

and Markus Brand

and Michael Rieneck

:

In Touria, Princess Tara has decided to marry – but not just anyone, of course. She expects a lot from her husband-to-be: Heroic deeds and precious gifts are a must.

A group of bold adventurers set out to pit themselves against dragons, dig up gems from the haunted mines of the country – and make a good deal from time to time, since the father of the bride demands an appropriate price for his daughter's hand. Touria's dancing towers show the heroes the way, so the brave men and women go from one adventure to the next. Brave women? Of course – or have we forgotten to mention that Tara's handsome brother, Prince Talan, is also of marriageable age?
Günter Burkhardt

's Ulm

offers even fewer peanuts with which to build a gameplay trail:

Ulm is at its heyday. The construction of the Ulm cathedral has not yet been completed, but the city is already wealthy and prestigious.

In Ulm, players try to expand their spheres of influence and to make optimal use of the hustle and bustle on the marketplace around the cathedral.

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3086702_t.png]

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic2842547_t.png]• The description for Dave Grigger's Ankh

leaves much to the imagination, but it does posit a strange theory about gender politics in the afterlife:

The key to immortality: When the female pharaoh holds court in the dark chamber, even the toughest mummies become unhinged. The petulant ruler distributes her favor and, at the same time, also the prospect of new life energy. But even if you've just been highly esteemed by the old Egyptian monarch in Ankh, you might fall into disgrace in the next moment.

• Danger of a different sort awaits in Michael Xuereb

's Clonk!

, which once again defines dwarves almost entirely by a desire to get dirty:

The dwarves are loose in Clonk!, with many valuable crystals to dig up from the cursed mine, but a sinister danger is lurking in the dark corners. Who will manage to collect the most valuable load in their wagon and exit the mine unscathed?

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic2842033_t.png]• Tatsu

, which will also be released by designer John Yianni

's own Gen42 Games

, features backgammon-style dice rolling and piece movement with each player trying to eliminate all of one type of the opponent's pieces from the game or knock all of the opponent's dragons off the board. Amazingly enough, we have video overview of this game thanks to Yianni showing it in advance at Spiel 2015:

Developer Diary: The Super Secret Story of Conspiracy! Exposed!

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/558…ret-story-conspiracy-expo

by Diane Sauer

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3071999_t.png]It's not surprising that Conspiracy!

has an origin that is not only not straightforward, but is as shrouded in mystery as the Reptilian Overlords. It begins with my first game, Legends and Lies

, which was all about cryptozoology in a rummy-based game. Legends and Lies

had successfully been Kickstarted and even already had a mini-expansion called "The Skeptic" that had been a Kickstarter stretch goal for the main game. I was working on the first full expansion, Mysterious Locations

, which would add a location for each player that would grant them some special cool ability — in short, a player power expansion with a theme that encompassed places like The Bermuda Triangle, The Roswell Crash Site, The Lost City of Atlantis, etc.

While creating Mysterious Locations

, I had come up with about twenty locations I wanted to test. For me, as in all design, it is critical that pieces in my games not only make sense and work mechanically, but that whenever possible the theme they represent is tightly tied to how they work

. For example, whoever controls The Bermuda Triangle in Mysterious Locations

can make one card disappear, removing it from play for the hand. One of the twenty test locations was Chichen Itza, which for those not in the know is where the most famous of the crystal skulls were found. The way I envisioned the location working was the following: When Chichen Itza was in the game, a number of Crystal Skull artifact cards were added to the deck based on the number of players. The person drawing a Crystal Skull would be able to get any card they wanted out of the draw deck by playing it, but after they used it, they would hand the card to the owner of Chichen Itza

, who could then use it on a later turn.

While playtesting, I fell in love with Chichen Itza and its Crystal Skull artifacts. This lead me down the path of brainstorming what other strange artifacts I come up with and what powers I would associate with them, things not that well known like the [BGCOLOR=#000000]Kecksburg Object[/BGCOLOR] or the [BGCOLOR=#000000]Voynich Manuscript[/BGCOLOR] as well as more commonly known strange/cursed artifacts such as the [BGCOLOR=#000000]Hope Diamond[/BGCOLOR]. This spiraled out of control to the point where I removed Chichen Itza because I felt the entire artifact idea could easily be its own expansion. Mysterious Locations

was successful, and though I did not immediately return to the artifacts, I instead did a direct sale expansion that added a fifth player to Legends and Lies

called Headlines and Hoaxes

.

It's not unusual for me to have several game ideas going at once, so I started developing another expansion for Legends and Lies

along with the artifacts expansion idea. As with all my games, I spent a good deal of time researching, so this meant reading up on all the various strange artifacts — both real and imagined — that I thought would work well for the expansion I had envisioned. This is always a fun part of the design process and not surprisingly this little project spiraled even further off course to the point where it was clear that what I was working on was more than an expansion; it was its own game

.

Once it was decided to make the strange artifacts their own game, I needed a theme that would work with it. My husband Nick (author of Looting Atlantis

) and I brainstormed a bit, and it was not too long before I suggested and we settled on the world of conspiracy theories. As a theme, conspiracy theories are not often seen, and this choice not only fit, but it also allowed me to carry over what I think is the coolest mechanism from Legends and Lies

: discrediting.

Discrediting, as far as I know, is a mechanism that I actually came up with. The way it works in both games is that at the end of each hand, the person who went out picks up the discard pile — the "Tabloids" in this game because it represents old tabloid newspapers such as Weekly World News

— and "reads" the tabloids. Every "story" (card) in the tabloids that matches a conspiracy that a player is trying to "prove" discredits that conspiracy, thereby causing the person with the most cards in that conspiracy to lose a card from it. Discrediting is important because after the tabloids have been read, any conspiracy that still has ten or more points revealed scores double for any player that has it in front of them. Discrediting is, if I do say so myself, an interesting mechanism that gives both games a unique way to interact with the other players.

With a plan in place, Nick looked at a way to change and streamline how the suits were going to be laid out in Conspiracy!

as opposed to Legends and Lies

. In L&L

, suits could have different numbers of cards in them, which made explaining the game more difficult than it should have been and in hindsight added an unneeded level of complication. We agreed on five cards for every conspiracy, along with one "Proof!" card.

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic2722780_t.png]While Nick was working on the deck layout, I was working on the conspiracies. In Legends and Lies

, I had experimented with two of the expansion suits doing something when they were played, and each expansion added one such suit like this (with none being in the base game). I thought that a good way to bring the game engine to the next level was to have every conspiracy have an effect associated with it. This would add a whole other strategic dimension to the game in that the order you played conspiracies — which is called "revealing" in Conspiracy!

— would often matter.

To keep it simple and streamlined, I limited the abilities that a given conspiracy could have to three categories: one-shot effects that would happen only when a conspiracy was revealed or strengthened (added to), continuous effects that grant you something as long as you have them in play, and scoring effects that matter only during the scoring phase.

Once the conspiracies were done and the action cards added, the artifacts were mixed in and we were ready to go. Since the original concept for the artifacts involved a player location, that was not going to work. These artifacts were built to be extremely powerful game-changing type cards, so I did not want them as random deck draws for the obvious reason. They had powers such as allowing a player [BGCOLOR=#000000]an additional turn at the end of the round[/BGCOLOR] or having them [BGCOLOR=#000000]reveal a conspiracy with two cards rather than three[/BGCOLOR].

What was settled on was an auction mechanism, but I didn't want to add another element to the game as some form of currency, so instead I proposed that when an artifact was drawn, players could bid how many cards they would be willing to draw in addition to taking the artifact card. Since cards in your hand count against you at the end of the hand and you're restricted in how much you can play on a given turn, my thinking was that people would shy away from bidding too many cards. In practice, however, this turned out not to be true; no matter what kind of restrictions were placed on bidding or how the bidding worked, it turned out more often than not to result in large bids. Even though the cards counted against the player at the end of the hand and they always ended up with cards left, what they could get out of the artifact more than made up for this penalty.

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic2839588_t.png]While the conspiracy effects, action cards and game mechanisms were refined, we STILL

were trying to make the artifacts work. This went on for about two months until I finally decided to try the game without the artifacts. This was not an easy decision as the artifacts were the original reason for the game's design. After playing just a few games on my own, I was 100% convinced that the artifacts had to go. I knew Nick would not want to remove them, so I prepared to present my case. If he was not on board, Conspiracy!

would be dead. It took about thirty minutes for me to get him to very begrudgingly play a game with me without the artifacts. To his credit, after just two hands he agreed that I was right. I had to get up and hug him.

Once the artifacts were removed, the game worked flawlessly, which was confirmed by our various playtesters. It was amazing how perfectly the game worked at that point, and it was clearly our desire to insert artifacts into the game that had been holding us back. (Don't worry about the artifacts, though. We haven't totally given up on them yet and will soon be testing another game designed to work with a new bidding mechanism.)

That is the official story of how Conspiracy!

came to be. I could go on and on about the selection process and mechanisms of each conspiracy, my love for inserting Easter eggs

into my games, and how the Reptilian Overlords were indispensable in the design process — All Hail the Reptilian Overlords — but I'll save that for another day.

Links: Leacock in Time, Awards in Passing, and Women Not in View

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/558…-passing-and-women-not-vi

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic669741_t.jpg]

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic1534148_t.jpg]• Designer Matt Leacock

was featured in a June 30, 2016 write-up in TIME

in the magazine's "American Genius" section. The article gets a few details wrong — Leacock self-funded the publication of his 2000 title Lunatix Loop

, not Pandemic

— but it's a nice summary of Leacock's career arc to date.

The really strange thing is that the article doesn't include a picture of either Leacock or Pandemic

. What's up with that?! We'll just have to settle for the old-school game references in the article title...

• In May 2016, Nicolas Ricketts — curator of The Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, New York — highlighted

the breadth of Sid Sackson's works, unpublished prototypes, and correspondence held by the museum.

• On The Cardboard Republic

, Erin Ryan surveyed the cover art

of new releases in the top one hundred games on BGG from 2009 to 2016 and concluded that "You are more likely to see a sheep on the cover of a board game box than you are to see a group of women". An excerpt:

On average, only 5.1% of games released within a year of making it onto the BGG Top 100 featured women alone. No games featured a group of characters made up primarily of women. Groups of predominantly men or men alone (i.e. without women) made up 74.4% of the sample. Groups containing an equal number of men and women came in at 20.5%.

But okay, like above, that’s an average. A more telling (and, thankfully, more hopeful) picture shows how representation has changed from 2009 to 2016.

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3091465_t.jpg]

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic2215153_t.jpg]• The 14th annual Japan Boardgame Prizes have been announced

, with the seven-member jury selecting Alex Randolph's Mahé

— a modern edition of his Die heisse Schlacht am kalten Buffet

— for the U-more Award aimed at beginning and family gamers.

In the Voters' Selection category, Libellud's edition of Mysterium

took first place, edging out The Voyages of Marco Polo

, Karesansui

, Deep Sea Adventure

, and Patchwork

in close voting.

• In older award news, the nominees for the 2016 GRAF LUDO were announced

in early June 2016. This award is intended to highlight aesthetically pleasing design in games, and the nominees for 2016 in the family category are The Bloody Inn

, Celestia

, Game of Trains

, Gum Gum Machine

, Mysterium

, and Die Wände haben Ohren

, with the last title being a complete mystery to me and something lacking from the BGG database.

GRAF LUDO nominees in the children's category for 2016 are BauBoom

, Die Drachenzähne

, Die Helden von Kaskaria

, Insekten Hotel

, My First Stone Age

, and Spookies

.

Designer Diary: Goons of New York 1901

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/559…diary-goons-new-york-1901

by Robert Hewitt

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic2515532_t.jpg]Picture a game jam. A month-long game jam. With three hundred designers. Under the age of 12.

That's what we do at Brooklyn Game Lab

every day.

One of our endeavors in a recent semester was to homebrew an expansion for the hit game New York 1901

. By the end, our kids — with the help of our friends at Blue Orange Games

— had made their first foray into game publishing!

Each day in our after-school program

(and summer camp), we guide students through something we call "lab". During this two-hour session, a group of fifty kids learn, play, and deconstruct a popular board game together.

After gameplay, each child provides structured notes on winning tactics, losing lessons, and ideas for new elements and mechanisms — then the students stand and present these thoughts, after which they vote for their favorites — all with the goal of reinventing the game.

In the case of New York 1901

, after two weeks of work we had whittled five hundred submissions down to 98 distinct ideas for modifying the game. These included things like airports, day and night phases, taxes, eminent domain, and of course zombies. The heavy-hitting classics made the cut, too: Godzilla, King Kong, and a "gigantic worm".

At this point in the process, our stellar creative team stepped in to review, consider, and sort the top hundred ideas. After working to surface common threads, three leading visions emerged:

• The first proposal was "King of New York 1901" in which we co-opted the monsters from King of Tokyo

/ King of New York

and added them as NPCs. These forces-of-nature were designed to stomp the city to bits as players built around them. I'll note that "monsters stomping things" is a permanent fixture on our mod shortlist.

• The second was "Into the 20th Century". In this version, the scoring track was treated as a literal timeline of the city of New York. The 1 spot on the scoring track signified the year 1901, while the 20 spot signified 1920 and the start of Prohibition! The Great Depression, World War I and II, The World's Fair of 1939 — all of these dates were given some in-game significance and tied to the timely progression of the game (as denoted by the leading-most player).

• The third was "Gangs of New York" or its softer-sounding cousin, "Rise of the Kingpins". In this model, dozens of PvP ideas were packaged together in a way that conveyed the feel of NYC in the 1920s and 1930s — grit and all. We loved designer Chénier La Salle's attention to historical detail in the original game, and this vision doubled down on his commitment to the time period.

As our creative team discussed more broadly how each of these visions might play, I sat turning one of the game's plastic "worker" tokens over and over in my hand, appreciating the detail. One of my only criticisms of the base game is that these fantastic pieces tended to spend as much time off the game board as they did on it. They commuted in and out of the city, but didn't live

there.

We asked ourselves: What if the opposite were true? What if they cluttered the board with old-timey hustle and bustle? Oppressive! Territorial! For us, the idea of turning the workers into "goons" immediately changed the feel of the city, creating a downtown that felt alive, occupied, seedy, imposing — and we knew that we'd chosen the best direction.

The other core concept that emerged to round out this vision was the idea of more distinct districts in the city, something emblematic of NYC, such as Chinatown or Little Italy — a sense of turf. We wanted the districts to have not just color, but flavor.

And so idea #33 of our 98 top ideas was selected as the keystone submission! It was simple: "You hire gangs to take over other companies' buildings, destroy them, and get rid of the reserved buildings." We arranged dozens of ideas related to PvP interference, all spiraling out from this hub...

We researched mafia history and drew up generic gangs (long live "the blue barbers"), laying out all of the lab-generated mechanisms that allowed players to use worker tokens underhandedly.

With the overarching goal of changing the feel of the city, we introduced five "dives", including a casino, a prison, and of course a speakeasy. These pre-placed buildings fit nicely over the parks and other unused decorative spaces on the original board.

Ultimately, the mod's general framework was simple: Control the most turf in a district, and you control its gang. Each turn you could deploy one worker as a knuckle-dragging goon or detour a rival goon into one of your dives.

Over time, a colorful boss emerged as the patron saint of each of our gangs:

The dives also took on lives of their own as our kids included mini-games to make visiting them even more immersive:

As we prepared to go to print, many of our beloved elements were put on ice — but as we teach our young game designers, the most important part of your design is the part you love, but leave out.

As we handed this document off to the Blue Orange team, we wiped our collective brow. My staff, my kids, and myself — all proud to have our work recognized and taken seriously, and to give some little thing back to the world of gaming that has been so incredibly good to us.

#ModEverything

•••

Editor's note: Here's a little more detail about how Goons of New York 1901

works: Once all players in the game have reached the Silver Age, you look to see who controls the most territory of each color on the game board (with pink being excluded in two-player games).

Whoever controls the most of a color takes control of that boss, and at the start of each of your subsequent turns, you can use the "goon power" of one of your bosses to place a goon in a particular location, such as on a street or on a specific Bronze Age skyscraper. You'll score points for this goon based on certain conditions, but if someone ever controls more territory of this color than you, that player takes control of the boss and you have to say goodbye to those goons. —WEM

New Game Round-up: Summoning a Genie Before Collecting Wood and Building a Habitat

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/560…genie-collecting-wood-and

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3100017_t.jpg]Following the release of The Pied Piper

in Q2 2016, Purple Brain Creations

will publish its next Tales & Games

series in September 2016: Tiago Damey

's Aladdin & The Magic Lamp

, a 2-5 player game that IELLO

will release in the U.S. Here's an overview:

The sorcerer has sent you, a street urchin like Aladdin, into a cave to look for a magic lamp that lets you call upon a genie's favors. However, the cave also encloses fabulous treasures sorted into three chests. If you're not too greedy, this could be your chance to become rich!

In Tales & Games: Aladdin & The Magic Lamp, a turn has three phases during which everyone plays simultaneously. First, choose how many chest cards you want to draw and from which chest. Then, call out to the genie by being the fastest. Finally, if you haven't been too greedy, draw chest cards while avoiding the scorpions.

The game ends when a player draws one of the three sorcerer cards and closes the cave.

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic2435028_t.jpg]• Harald Mücke of Mücke Spiele

says

that he's releasing another five hundred copies of Alexander Huemer's Lignum

in July 2016 ahead of a new edition of the game that will be released in Q2 2017 in German and a language to be announced later by Mücke Spiele and in English by Capstone Games

. This new edition will have "minor adaptions and rule optimizations", and an expansion will be available, with this item being sold separately for those who already own the original game.

• Habitats

is the next release from Cwali

's Corné van Moorsel

, and in this tile-laying game players each build their own wildlife park without cages and fences, with each animal wanting to have certain habitats around it, but with those habitats naturally having a tendency to conflict with the desires of other animals nearby. Van Moorsel has stated that he plans to Kickstart Habitats

in July 2016.

• At UK Games Expo 2016, designer Peter Burley

released a new edition of his long-lived, million-selling game Take it Easy!

through his own Burley Games

. This new "Daffodil" edition of one thousand copies includes double-sided game boards with the original Take it Easy!

design on one side and a daffodil pattern on the other. For this side of the game board, each player has four additional tiles that include wild card stripes, allowing for (potentially) more matches when they're drawn during play.

Codenames Wins the 2016 Spiel des Jahres; Isle of Skye Claims Kennerspiel

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/560…-des-jahres-isle-skye-cla

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic2334183_t.jpg] Codenames

from designer Vlaada Chvátil

and publisher Czech Games Edition

has won the 2016 Spiel des Jahres, Germany's game of the year award, which is intended to highlight an outstanding design that would be ideal for German families — and if you happen to belong to a family of some other nationality, there's a good chance that you'll enjoy the game as well.

The 2016 Kennerspiel des Jahres — an award aimed at game enthusiasts who are ready for something more challenging or involved — goes to Isle of Skye: From Chieftain to King

from designers Andreas Pelikan

and Alexander Pfister

and publishers Lookout Games

and Mayfair Games

.

Congratulations to both winners!

New Game Round-up: Crowing in Detroit, Building on Other Planets, and Drawing Like Lightning

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/561…troit-building-other-plan

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3105198_t.jpg]• I've mostly been working on the Gen Con 2016 Preview

the past couple of days — 340 game listings and counting! — and in the process of doing so, I've added a few new game listings to the BGG database, such as The Crow: Fire It Up!

, which Upper Deck Entertainment

will debut at Gen Con 2016 ahead of its retail release. Here's an overview of the gameplay:

In a world without justice, one man was chosen to protect the innocent! On Devil's Night in the Motor City, play as Eric Draven as he dishes out revenge against the gang that took his life and the life of his fiance, Shelly, in The Crow: Fire It Up!

As Eric Draven, the player uses the aid of Officer Albrecht, Sarah, and the mysterious Crow to track down the Motor City Gang and stave off their reign of terror, while the opposing players portray members of the vicious gang consisting of Tin-Tin, Funboy, T-Bird, Grange, Myca, and Top Dollar spreading fires and mayhem throughout the city as they seek to lure the undead avenger out of the shadows and take him out!

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3104194_t.png]• Victory Point Games

plans to release the Reiner Knizia

design Planet Rush

in 2016, and while the game description is brief, the title is tagged as a reimplementation of Knizia's Tower of Babel

, a 2005 release that I just happened to play again this year after a decade's absence from the gaming table. This design fits the Knizia model of seeming like not a lot is going on, while in fact everything is intricately linked. Here's the short description from VPG:

It's the age of the next great space race and you are competing to see who will control the newest earth-like planet. Can you build the greatest planet structures and prove you have technological mastery over the planet?

Planet Rush is a fun euro game of bidding and building. You take control of one of five corporate factions, each bidding to contribute the most to the colonization of the planet. The one who builds the most on the planet wins and gets to claim majority ownership of the world itself!

• On a related note, VPG announced

in July 2016 that it will relocate from California sometime in 2017, and at that time it will cease in-house production of its print-on-demand titles, moving instead to full production in China and external warehousing. Some of its titles have already made the jump to full production, but not all of them will, so act now or risk having to scour for used copies later.

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3107637_t.jpg]

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3107661_t.jpg]• Wonder Forge

will debut three new games at Gen Con 2016, with these titles being available exclusively from the Target retail chain in the U.S., and I have details on two of them for now, starting with Really Bad Art

:

Really Bad Art is what you're making in this party game, but not because you're a terrible drawer, no — only because you have exactly six seconds to see what you're supposed to draw, then draw it!

Each round, each player secretly takes a card with two phrases like "lack of confidence", "quality of life", "constructive criticism", or "yikes!", then draws a representation of one of those phrases based on whichever color was chosen. Those cards are then shuffled with a dummy card and laid out next to the game board, after which everyone secretly votes on which piece of art corresponds to which card. Guess correctly, and you score two points; have others guess your phrase correctly, and you score one point.

Rounds continue until someone has scored thirty or more points and won the game!
Stick Stack

from Brad Ross

and Jim Winslow

is another incarnation of players needing to place things on top of other things, which really should be the title of a GeekList, if it isn't already:

You don't want to be stuck with sticks in Stick Stack, so try to place them as carefully as you can on the wobble tower in the center of the playing area.

Each turn, you either draw a stick from the bag or choose one of the sticks in front of you (in case you had collected any on an earlier turn), then you place that stick onto the tower — but when you place it, the colors on that stack can touch only matching colors on the crow's nest or on other sticks that have already been placed. (If a stick slides onto other colors later as the tower tilts and wobbles, that's okay, but you need to match when placing!)

If any sticks fall off the tower on your turn, collect them and place them in front of you. When all the sticks have been placed onto the tower or when the tower falls over, the game ends immediately. If you caused the tower to fall, you don't collect any of the sticks, but you do score five points (which isn't good). Every player scores one point for each stick in front of them.

If anyone has eleven or more points, the game ends and the player with the lowest score wins. If not, play another round!

Asmodee in Negotiations to Acquire F2Z Entertainment

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/561…acquire-f2z-entertainment

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3108532_t.jpg]Following Asmodee

's acquisitions of Days of Wonder

( BGG News story

) and Fantasy Flight Games

( story

) in 2014 and the worldwide English rights to Catan

( story

) in 2016, many people have wondered which domino in the hobby game industry would fall next.

The answer turns out to be F2Z Entertainment, the Canadian publisher/distributor that owns the Z-Man Games

, Filosofia Éditions

, Pretzel Games

, and Plaid Hat Games

studios. Asmodee and F2Z Entertainment aren't strangers, having worked with one another over the years, with Asmodee distributing F2Z titles in France, Germany and elsewhere in Europe, while F2Z has distributed Asmodee titles in Canada. (This is the basis for the "partnership" referred to in the quotes from the press release below.)

Asmodee has issued the following press release about the deal, and Asmodee North America VP of Marketing Aaron Elliott told me that it can give no other comment at this time since the discussions are still under way. (The "exclusiveness" referred to in the first line of the press release means only that no one else is competing with Asmodee to acquire this company.) Here's what has been made public to date:

The Asmodee Group has announced today that it has entered into exclusive discussions to acquire F2Z Entertainment Inc.

In line with the acquisitions of the worldwide rights to Dobble/Spot-It!, Days of Wonder, and Fantasy Flight Games publishers, and more recently the set-up of Catan Studio, these exclusive discussions with F2Z Entertainment Inc. emphasize Asmodee's strategy to strengthen its intellectual property portfolio and international presence. Closing of this acquisition is expected to take place in the coming months.

Created in Canada in 2002 by Sophie Gravel, F2Z Entertainment Inc. has become, over the years, one of the most worldwide renowned publisher & distributor of modern board games, with key owned brands such as Pandemic (over 1 million units sold), Dead of Winter, and also publishing rights for evergreen games (Carcassonne for French and English version, Catan for French version).

Stéphane Carville, CEO of Asmodee Group said: "I am delighted to enter into these exclusive discussions with F2Z Entertainment, which is, for us, the natural next step of a strong and long-lasting partnership built over the years with Sophie Gravel and her teams. Through this acquisition, we will continue expanding our IP portfolio with fantastic games and incredibly innovative studios such as Z-Man Games, Plaid Hat Games and Filosofia. This will also enable us to increase our presence on the global game market."

Sophie Gravel, CEO of F2Z Entertainment added: "As we are close to celebrating 15 years of success with F2Z, we are proud to announce these exclusive discussions with Asmodee Group, a key partner since the beginning of our adventure. This deal is in the direct continuation of our close business partnership and will provide the best environment for our iconic games to reach their full potential and help our studios to continue publishing amazing games."

New Game Round-up: Cosmic Thrones Encounter Westeros, Invaders Arrive in Érin, and Thieves Invite Suspicion

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/561…ones-encounter-westeros-i

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3109099_t.jpg]• The sixth season of the Game of Thrones

television series has ended, but before too long players will have a new way to re-enact all the struggles of that show thanks to Game of Thrones: The Iron Throne

, a Q4 2016 release from Fantasy Flight Games

credited to Bill Eberle

, Peter Olotka

, Greg Olotka

, and Justin Kemppainen

that takes the game systems from Cosmic Encounter

and transports them to the world of Westeros.

FFG plans to demo Game of Thrones: The Iron Throne

at Gen Con 2016, with the game scheduled for a Q4 2016 release. Here's a preview of how CE

has been transformed:

In Game of Thrones: The Iron Throne, which uses the game systems from Cosmic Encounter, you and your friends each command one of the Great Houses of Westeros, pitting iconic characters against each other in epic battles and schemes. Negotiate, bluff, forge alliances, threaten your rivals — use every tool at your disposal to spread your influence, establish supremacy, and claim the ultimate prize: the Iron Throne!

In more detail, each turn centers around the resolution of an encounter between two players. These encounters can result in hostilities, startling conquests, and the spread of influence, or they can result in the formation of temporary alliances. And though only two players in any encounter will be the "active" players, your friends might offer you their support — or turn around and offer it to someone else.

Win enough of these encounters, though — and find the right ones to lose — and you might find yourself in position to seize the Iron Throne. The goal of the game is to spread five of your influence to your opponents' House cards and take the crown for yourself.

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3109861_t.jpg]• I just highlighted

the fab 1960s art of Ta-Da!

in early July 2016, and here's another title bearing the same retro look: Suspicion

from the design team of Forrest-Pruzan Creative

and publisher Wonder Forge

, with this title being available for demo games at Gen Con 2016. An overview:

You are a jewel thief, and you've been invited to the mansion of someone who doesn't know that you engage in such nefarious doings. While at that mansion, you're going to try to nick as many jewels as possible, but *gadzooks* the mansion turns out to be filled with jewel thieves who are all trying to do the same thing. Can you out them publicly, while staying unknown yourself and bagging a nice collection of gems?

In Suspicion, ten characters start on the perimeter of the game board, and each player is secretly one of these characters. On a turn, you roll two dice, then move the two characters shown (or characters of your choice if you roll a joker). After this, you play one of the two action cards in your hand, and carry out one of the actions on that card: stealing a type of gem in the space where your character is located, moving any character, asking someone else whether their character can be seen by someone on the board, and so on.

Gems come in three types, and when one of the piles is empty, the game ends. Everyone guesses who is which character, then all identities are revealed. For each player you've guessed correctly, you score 7 points; for each set of three different gems, you score 6 points; and for each individual gem aside from the sets, you score 1 point. Whoever has the most points wins!

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3109969_t.jpg]• To continue with the theme of the past returning in new forms, I present The Arrival

, which new German publisher Game's Up

describes as a revamped version of Martin Wallace

's Mordred

, which was first released in 1999 by Wallace's Warfrog Games. (Note that the cover image shown is not final.) This title will debut at SPIEL 2016 in October, with rules in English and German. Here's an overview of the setting and gameplay:

In a time long forgotten, the cruel Fomori rule over Érin, the green island. They praise their king Balor, who reigns from his fortifications in the north with an iron fist. Old paths and ruins spread over the island's face, which will be called Ireland many generations from now. But new tribes arrive at the island striving for permanent presence. Who will control Érin's fate over the next centuries to come?

Each player in The Arrival represents a tribe leader who tries to gain predominance over the mythical island of Érin while pushing back the demon-like Fomori. But the players are facing a dilemma, for spreading too quickly means becoming more and more corrupt and strengthening the Fomori in their power...

Over 4-6 rounds, the players determine their resources by means of a unique game mechanism, which will be used later on profitably. During a first phase (Earning Phase), players draw four cards, each showing three sections of different resources. Two of these sections are gradually blocked by the player, thus leaving one section. The resources shown on this section are the ones the player gets. During this phase, they have to decide which section is the best one; while the upper section of the cards offers many resources, it also results in unwanted Corruption Points. The middle and the lower sections offer fewer resources, but also less Corruption.

After that, the Action Phase takes place and the players must use their resources wisely while having the choice from different kinds of actions in order to get Fame Points.

The game ends when a certain number of rounds have been played or somebody reaches the corruption limit.

The winner is either the one with the highest amount of Fame Points or the one with the fewest Corruption Points. This depends on the scene of the board at the end: Do the tribes (players) control more locations on Érin than the Fomori do — or is it the other way around?

Designer Diary: The Networks, or Plugging at MacGuffins

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/561…ks-or-plugging-macguffins

by Gil Hova

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic2896170_t.jpg]What follows is the long, sordid design history of The Networks

. It's been a wild journey over the past six years, starting with me fumbling around in the dark as a part-time hobbyist game designer and ending with me running my own publishing company

.

Within, I'll reveal three shocking truths. I'm not very good at clickbait, so here are two right off the bat.

-----

• I've heard a few reviewers guess that this game was theme-first. I can see why they feel that way, but it was actually mechanism-first.
-----

• The mechanism on which this game is based is no longer in the game.

The third shocking truth is...well, you'll have to keep reading to the end of the article.

In the Beginning, There Was MacGuffin Market

Let's rewind ten years to 2006. I had a game called "Wag the Wolf" that the prestigious Hippodice game design competition

put on its recommended list, but the game made it no further than that. It was rejected by several publishers, and after a good amount of playtesting, I realized that the whole was less than the sum of its parts.

I had a lot to learn as a designer. I thought that if I combined a cool theme and a cool mechanism, I'd end up with a cool game.

This cool mechanism was an auction in which players could bid slightly less than the high bid to stay in the auction. In a four-player game, there were two underbid slots, so one player would always be left out. That player could raise the high bid, though, which would make the previous high bid an underbid, and force a mad scramble to the new underbid slots.

It really was a nifty mechanism. I wanted to salvage it, so I decided to design a new game around it. That game turned out to be Battle Merchants

, which Minion Games

eventually released in 2014.

If you've played Battle Merchants

, you'll notice that it has no auction. That's because playtesters realized that the auction, while fun and interesting in its own right, didn't fit with all the stuff I built around the auction. Sure enough, when I removed the auction from Battle Merchants

way back then, the game worked great.

Designers, never hesitate to kill your darlings. It might just make your game better.

So now it's 2010. I had this auction mechanism recently sliced out of Battle Merchants

, and I still wanted to make another game around it. I didn't want to fall into the same trap as before, so I figured that I'd design the game completely around the auction. Stripped down, no theme.

The new game was called "MacGuffin Market". It had no theme — or more specifically, its theme was that it had no theme. The players were bidding money on a "Wag the Wolf"-style auction that would give them turn order and gems. They could spend gems or money on MacGuffins, pick up power cards, or end their rounds by getting income, with players who dropped early receiving more income.

MacGuffins were the big objects in the game that everyone wanted to get, named for the film trope

of an object that every character wants, without its actual function ever being explained to the audience. It doesn't matter what the MacGuffin is or what it does; it just matters that everyone wants it.

So in this protoplasmic version of the game, you can already see the seeds of The Networks

: Buy big things that give you points, pick up power cards, end your round by getting income.

If only it were that easy!

From MacGuffins to TV

My identity is just as important to this designer diary as the game, so keep in mind who I saw myself as when I began this process. I had a day job that was slowly transitioning into computer programming. I was putting a lot of time into my work, and my career came first. I saw myself as a hobbyist game designer. I'd heard of people who started their own game companies, and I knew with all my heart that I would never self-publish my games.

Ha. Haha. Hahahahahahaha.

Anyway. At the time, I was playtesting about twice a month, maybe three times if I was lucky. It was a decent amount of testing, although I envied my game designer friends who tested once per week. Progress on my game was rather slow.

Still, I'm lucky to playtest with some amazing designers. Eric Zimmerman

gave one of the game's most vital early suggestions: the theme (or lack thereof) just wasn't working.

I realized he was right. Teaching the game wasn't easy. You had MacGuffins, gems, and money, but nothing really made intuitive sense because nothing mapped into anything a player would recognize.

It was a lesson that took me years to learn, but one I preach any time I can. It's not enough to have a cool theme. It's not enough to have cool mechanisms. Your game lives at the intersection of its theme and its mechanism. One is not more important than the other, and it's not more important to start with one over the other. You have to find the best possible way to join them, then make that join as tight as you can.

The problem with "Wag the Wolf", and now with "MacGuffin Market", was that there was no theme/mechanism join to speak of in either game. Nothing tied together. It wasn't even a matter of "pasted-on" because there was no paste. The theme and mechanism were like an estranged couple, sitting at opposite ends of the room and refusing to talk to each other.

Kill your darlings, again. The game needed a theme. We discussed possible candidates. Secret agents? City building? Making movies?

I thought about the last one. Making movies was done beautifully in Traumfabrik

, but what about making television shows? No games about making TV shows were available at the time.

We talked about the various ways we could reskin the game. MacGuffins would become the shows. Gems could become stars. Everything else would pretty much remain the same. Simple, huh?

Not Ready for Prime Time

I renamed the prototype "Prime Time" and started testing. Viewers were points; that was in from the start. When you got a show, you immediately got money or Viewers; that was grandfathered in from "MacGuffin Market".

A few new mechanisms quickly fell into place. First, you were limited to three time slots, so your fourth show would mean you'd have to cancel one of your existing shows and send it to reruns. The player with the most Rerun Viewers got a bonus.

Second, instead of always scoring a flat value like the MacGuffins, your shows would score you a different number of Viewers every round. They would constantly age. I have to give credit for this mechanism to the brilliant, underrated auction game BasketBoss

, which deserves a lot more love than it got.

Third, the Gems became Stars. I felt they needed some differentiation, so I made Male and Female Stars and put requirements on the Shows for the different genders of Stars.

Things seemed to be going well until BGG.CON 2011. I had a fateful playtest in Dallas that year. I thought the game was in great shape, but I got a bunch of feedback that pushed me right back down into the hole again. The feedback I got was familiar: The testers realized that the auction, while cool, didn't fit in with all the stuff I built around the auction. Just like what happened in Battle Merchants

, it was time to drop the auction.

Kill your darlings.

I wasn't ready. I was going through a tough time. I had an abusive boss at work at the time, I was suffering through a move and the after-effects of a divorce, and I was working on getting Battle Merchants

ready to pitch to publishers. (It would get picked up the following year.) So I shelved "Prime Time".

In the next twelve months, I brought the game out for testing only once. It was a halfhearted test, without any different Seasons. Just one continuous flow in which you chose a new Show, immediately scored it, then a new Show came out.

It was terrible. It was boring. Back on the shelf it went.

At some point in 2012, I realized that if I didn't replenish cards as they were taken, and if I split the game back into discrete Seasons, that might add much-needed tension. I finally tested it late that year and was stunned to find that it felt good. There was something there.

At some point, I set the game in the 1980s and 1990s, during the dawn of cable. I made up a bunch of silly show parody names and pasted in the pictures of various 1980s Stars. Sure enough, that became a great part of the experience. People loved

putting, say, Ricardo Montalban on Knight Rider

.

I was heartened again. "Prime Time" was back on its feet!

80% Is Halfway Done

Let's fast-forward to 2014. This was a huge year for me and a huge year for the game.

I'd been testing the game steadily at my twice-a-month intervals. It was feeling close to done. I'd balanced the Male and Female Stars, I had a great set of Network Cards, and I had this brilliant mechanism where, at the start of each Season, you reached into a bag and pulled out these Drop and Budget chips. They varied in value from $2 to $20, and you pulled out only as many as the number of players. Some Seasons, you'd get a ton of money; other Seasons, you'd get almost nothing.

But things were beginning to change. Battle Merchants

was close to coming out; I'd been hard at work on writing and editing the rulebook, helping guide the art and graphic design, and handling final playtesting. My day job was starting to feel distant from me. I was rebuilding my social life from my divorce. I tried my hand at sketch comedy and improv. This pulled me away from game design, but gave me some nice perspective, good times, and a few good friends.

Who was I? Was I a computer programmer? Was I a comic? Was I a game designer?

About this time, lightning struck. I'd been trying to get into The Gathering of Friends, Alan Moon's invite-only convention, for a few years. Somehow, I lucked into an invite.

To say the convention changed everything is an understatement. First off, I ran 13.5 playtests of "Prime Time" in ten days. I did a lot of tinkering with the game's economy. One interesting phenomenon was when I once accidentally made the economy too loose. Playtesters didn't tell me that they had too much money; instead, they started suggesting adding all these mechanisms that would be ways they could spend their money.

A few years before, I would have listened to them. Thankfully, I'd learned enough as a designer by then to understand that they were trying to solve a problem that had a different root cause. I re-tightened the economy, and the players no longer suggested extra money sinks.

I showed "Prime Time" to three different publishers: two rejected it, and one was intrigued, but wanted a different, more interactive scoring system.

I looked for more publishers to pitch to and realized just how many more designers there were in the room than publishers. I was fighting a losing battle, and none of these publishers had the passion for my game that I did.

I didn't know it then, but the seeds of change had been planted at that fateful convention, surrounded by people who made games for a living. A few weeks after I came back from the convention and after an especially troubling day at work, I thought to myself: How much better at game design would I be if I did it every day?

I backed away from comedy. I started pushing my playtest group to meet every week instead of every month. I had already had some experience with this through running my annual 4P challenge

every January, but I was amazed at how much more progress my games made with more frequent playtesting.

One day at work during a meeting, a co-worker criticized the job I'd done on a project and I realized I felt nothing inside. I spent a difficult month not telling anyone but family and friends, making sure my mind was set. It was.

In November 2014, I quit my full-time job to freelance part-time as a sound editor and open up more time for me to run Kickstarter campaigns and attend conventions as a game publisher.

My mind was made up. I was going to self-publish "Prime Time".

The Last Throes of Design

After The Gathering of Friends in 2014, I realized there was a lot I needed to change about the game. Having Male and Female Stars bugged me; why did gender matter? I had show genres on the cards, but they were just flavor, with no accompanying mechanisms. Players who started a Season with little money had to drop out early. I had that "brilliant" Drop and Budget mechanism. And most of the twenty-somethings I played with humored me with my 1980s and 1990s references, but really had no idea what any of the Shows and Stars were referring to.

These problems resolved with thunderous effect in the game. One tester was surprised there were no ads in the game, and I smacked my forehead. Of course! Get rid of the genders of Stars. Instead of Male Stars and Female Stars, you have Stars and Ads. It's incredible how late in the process the Ads entered, and how right they felt once they made it in.

At first, you paid for Ads, just like you paid for Stars. The always-clever Paul Incao, who develops Vital Lacerta's games, tried "Prime Time" and suggested that players should earn money from Ads instead. Not only was it thematic, it solved the problem of poor players dropping out too early. He also suggested the Attach Star/Ad action, which I fought because I didn't want to complicate the game, but the suggestion turned out to work perfectly if I made some Stars and Ads optional on Shows.

I also reluctantly changed the time setting of the game. No more 1980s and 1990s references that confused millennials. Once I switched to modern shows and stars, everyone seemed to get a huge kick out of the experience, regardless of age.

It was about here that the "rotation" mechanism entered, which has become one of the most defining features of the game. I could finally play off of Show genres, with some Stars preferring to be on certain kinds of Shows, like Dramas or Sitcoms. They seemed to work with Ads to, although it took quite a few frustrating playtests to get income and upkeep working properly!

Finally, after months of begging from my playtesters, I relaxed my iron grip on my "brilliant" pet mechanism in the game: the variable chips that decided the Drop and Budget values. I went with a flat track of values instead, with a number of spaces equal to the number of players, and amazingly no one missed my weird, ingenious system.

Kill your darlings.

That left two problems. First, the Genres still didn't feel like they were pulling their weight. Second, the game felt like a tactical grind. It lacked an arc. Each Season really didn't feel different from the next, and no one was working towards anything; it felt like a rinse, later, and repeat exercise.

Then came BGG.CON 2014, and the final huge piece in the puzzle. I had one test with three players, and I nervously introduced a new mechanism: If you got three Shows of the same Genre, you could draw Stars from the Star deck, or Ads from the Ad deck (along with some money).

I was flabbergasted to see what the change did. Suddenly, the game had strategy. You were working

to a goal. You wanted to become Comedy Central, or Syfy, or ESPN. It was thematic, and it was strategic, and it worked perfectly.

Even better, it was no longer a grind. Getting the Genre Bonus injected your network with new resources, and you could jump right back into the thick of things without having to tediously pick up new Stars and Ads.

Up until then, testers had mildly enjoyed the game. They'd found it, y'know, fun, they liked it, it was good. From this point on, they loved the game — as in, they asked me when it was going on Kickstarter, and they enthusiastically signed up for my mailing list.

There was still some buttoning-up to do. The three-player game took a lot of massaging, but I realized that removing a Genre would make things much smoother. I made a solo version of the game that had a new mechanism of card burning, and after a bunch of boring two-player tests, I realized that the two-player game needed card burning as well. The solo game was logistically easiest to test, of course, and went from good to great once I figured out how to put in an immediate-loss condition and midgame feedback that let the player know if they were doing well or not, score-wise.

But it was time to put on the publisher hat.

Networking

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic2724833_t.jpg]There was a storm cloud on the horizon. I found out that there were two other games called "Prime Time" in development: One was a deckbuilder that unfortunately didn't fund on Kickstarter

, while the other was a heavy strategy game from an established designer/publisher

.

I didn't know Elad Goldsteen

at the time, and I was pretty sure he would beat me to market. I hated the idea of changing my game's name. "Prime Time" was perfect! But I did what I had to do. I let Elad have "Prime Time", and I renamed my game The Networks

.

My next order of business was to find a graphic designer. I thought of all the graphic designers I knew of and who would be a good match.

You've seen pictures of the prototype all throughout this post. It's a lot of cards with a lot of numbers. This game throws a huge amount of information at the players, and I needed a graphic designer who was amazing

at distilling a large quantity of information into a streamlined form. I needed someone like Heiko Günther

.

I am ashamed to say that I spent a measurable amount of time trying to figure out graphic designers who could a job similar to Heiko, until I realized that I could just, well, email Heiko myself and see what he thought.

Here's what I didn't know: A few years previously, Heiko and a very talented illustrator, Travis Kinchy

, worked on Silver Screen

, a Knizia-designed card game version of Traumfabrik

. It was to be published by Cambridge Games Factory

back when Heiko did most of their work. Sadly, CGF encountered financial difficulties and stopped releasing games before Silver Screen

could be published.

Heiko and Travis were disappointed; they had come up with a unique visual style for the game, and for a long time, they thought it was just a dead project. But then there I was, with my TV network game. Couldn't they resurrect the visual approach?

I checked it out and realized that it was perfect. I wanted something that was light and funny but not cartoony, yet somehow didn't present itself as a simple take-that filler game. Travis' illustrations somehow perfectly walked the line, and were incredibly funny to boot.

Meanwhile, Heiko set about taking my confusing mess of a visual design and putting it in order. He figured out a way to push all the information for the cards to their edges and leave most of the card available for Travis' excellent art.

The boards became modular. My system would have been ugly and text-heavy; his system allowed for the clean, elegant presentation of information. Instead of having set-up cards to remind players of how many cards went out each Season, he printed it directly on the rightmost board and had players swap out different boards based on the number of players. This let us put just about everything onto punchboard, using only a single cutting pattern to boot.

Make no mistake, Heiko and Travis were essential to this game's success. There is no The Networks

without them.

I had to use my "publisher's hammer" only a couple of times; most notably, I insisted on a scoring track that wrapped at 100 Viewers instead of 50, only because I'd tried that in a previous prototype and my playtesters hated it. I also insisted on testing the graphic design, and I came back to Heiko with quite a few revisions when I saw players were confused by a given graphic design element.

Throughout this process, Heiko was his typical professional, brilliant, and often hilarious self. After a few iterations, we wound up with a graphic design that got raves from just about all my playtesters, especially as Travis' art started to spread across the game.

I started sending the game to reviewers and was heartened to see people like Rahdo and Undead Viking willing to try out the game. Your Moderator Chris from Flip the Table

seemed very excited about the game, so I sent him a review copy, making sure he knew I didn't expect a review of my game on his show. I was relieved to see everyone give the game glowing reviews.

Then one beautiful Sunday I was about to go on a day trip with my girlfriend, when I got this email from Rahdo: "Also, I'm curious, since you're going to be directly competing with Prime Time

, which is going to be on Kickstarter at almost the exact same time as you..." It turns out that Prime Time

was going to launch two weeks before The Networks

!

Of course, Elad had no ill intent. In fact, he had no idea my game existed, so Rahdo was kind enough to introduce us over email. I've had the pleasure of meeting and hanging out with Elad a few times since then, and we've laughed about this crazy coincidence. I mean, we had both worked on our respective TV network games for six years each. We couldn't have timed this better if we tried!

And Kickstarter was kind to both of us; we both overfunded significantly, and we both got our games out. In fact, I picked up Prime Time from Elad at Essen 2015!

Final Thoughts

So in the end, why did The Networks

turn into a great game?

Obviously, there's the constant, relentless playtesting and iteration. After my turning point at The Gathering in 2014, I was playtesting at least once a week, usually twice. Iterations went fast and furious, and I was never afraid to try something for fear of failure. I got better at killing my darlings and wound up with a streamlined, well-developed game.

Also, this theme is really hard, and I think I backed into some fortuitous decisions. I've played friends' prototypes with TV themes, and they get hung up on a couple of things.

First, scoring in those designs is usually handled with an output randomness

mechanism. For those of you who don't listen to the marvelous Ludology podcast

(please start!), output randomness is any random event that happens after

a player's decision. For example, when you attack the zombies, then roll a die to see whether you hit them, that's generally output randomness as the die roll dictates the outcome.

Input randomness, on the other hand, is when the random event happens before

your turn begins. When you get dealt your hand of cards, that's input randomness; your play happens after the random event.

Most TV prototypes I played had viewer scoring as output randomness. This is understandable because it's realistic. No TV executive can predict how many people will watch their shows! That's just the business.

But it makes the game less fun. The whole interesting experience is in assembling the TV show. Having it be judged by a random mechanism devalues the experience of putting the show on the air. It feels meaningless.

Second, remember that publisher who wanted my game to have more "interactive" scoring? That's how most TV games and prototypes I've played try to handle it; the player with the most viewers gets the best ratings, the player with the second most viewers gets the second-best ratings, and so on. Some games even split these into different demographics!

This makes scoring an opaque beast. Logistically, these games are a pain in the neck to score. Worse, it means that a player must evaluate each of their move's potential outcomes on each demographic. This makes for a huge outcome tree and is an invitation to mindbending analysis paralysis.

The Networks

gets around both problems by having fixed, deterministic scoring for each show. This would normally be anathemic to the theme, but between the aging mechanism and the extra complexity of the rotate mechanism, there's enough variability in a player's possible score that it feels correct and thematic. Furthermore, if a player's show scores poorly in a given season, the player can easily track that to a specific decision they made. That feels much better than some arbitrary die roll!

Also, the deterministic scoring means that players don't have to study other players' boards and do a ton of math to determine what a good move is. Make no mistake — in The Networks

, a player will have to study other players' boards, but what you're looking for is a lot simpler, logistically speaking. Do they need that 8:00 p.m. Drama? Or would they rather go for the 9:00 p.m. Sci-Fi? Or maybe a Star, or a Network Card? There are still decisions to be made and players to watch, but it's not hidden behind an opaque layer of scoring.

That is about it for the huge design history of The Networks

. It's been an amazing ride, and it leaves us with one order of business. That is the third and final shocking truth about the game:

-----

• I, Gil Hova, barely watch any TV

. It's not a hipster I'm-better-than-you thing. It just doesn't fit in with my lifestyle.

I am deeply indebted to my playtesters and my girlfriend for helping me with all the references to modern shows. I couldn't have done it without all of you!

New Game Round-up: New Mansions to Explore, Digital Cards to Purchase, and Tasty Cupcakes to Save

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/562…ons-explore-digital-cards

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3112699_t.png]• Pre-Gen Con 2016 announcements continue from Fantasy Flight Games

, with the revelation

that Mansions of Madness: Second Edition

from Corey Konieczka

will be available for purchase both at that show and through other retail outlets.

The big news of this new edition is that the role of the Keeper — a player who would control monsters in the game and work against everyone else — has been replaced by an app, thereby allowing for fully cooperative play, in addition to solitaire play. To quote from the announcement: "Throughout every game, the app generates an entirely unique map, full of differing items to utilize, monsters to confront, and events to endure. Instead of the map being fully visible from the start of the game, however, the app obscures the majority of the board in shadows until you endeavor to explore further."

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3113368_t.png]• Stone Blade Entertainment

has announced the August 1, 2016 launch of Ascension VR

, which it describes as a virtual-reality deck-building experience. This experience can be demoed at Gen Con 2016, and here are more details from the press release:

Bringing the tabletop world into the digital sphere by connecting players from all over the world into one virtual space, Ascension VR uses 3D fully animated avatars and showcases social elements including spatialized voice chat, avatar lip sync and avatar animation triggered by real time player movement. Players can battle for supremacy regardless of what platform they're on, whether mobile or PC and from a variety of VR headsets.

For new gamers, learning to play is as easy as if they were sitting around a real table together. Ascension VR features a full single player tutorial, as well as single player AI modes. Fans can play with up to three AI opponents to build familiarity with the cards, or dive right into multiplayer to learn with friends.

More solitaire play!

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3113407_t.jpg]• As it has done for the past two years with Red7

and One Deck Dungeon

, at Gen Con 2016 Asmadi Games

will debut an "instant game", this being Save the Cupcake

by Asmadi owner Chris Cieslik

. A description:

In Save the Cupcake, one of you has a cupcake, while the other one desires to crush the cupcake in the most epic way possible — by rolling a ball down a hill to run it over.

The Defender of Cupcakes will hide the cupcake in one of many possible locations at the bottom of the hill. The Crusher of Cupcakes will roll four balls down the hill, through an elaborate network of fruit-themed pathways. The Defender and Crusher must cleverly use these pathways to meet their ultimate cupcake goals!

• In non-Gen Con 2016 news, Gamelyn Games

has revealed the cover art for Scott Almes' Tiny Epic Quest

, a 2017 release that can be demoed at Gen Con 2016. Okay, nevermind — everything is about Gen Con these days!

Origins Game Fair 2016 — Part 2

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/556…ins-game-fair-2016-part-2

by Mary Prasad

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3082639_t.png] [Ed. note: Head here for the first half of Mary Prasad's report from the 2016 Origins Game Fair. —WEM]

Food!

As usual, many trips were made to the North Market

. Hot Chicken Takeover was as good this year as I remember from last. The chicken is always hot and fresh. They actually can sell out early (on a chalkboard they have a countdown for number of chicken pieces left) and there is usually a line, but it's worth the wait. I wasn't impressed with my Katzinger's Little Deli Ruben sandwich – too pricey for the little meat/too much bread I received. Market & Boar (Holy Smoke BBQ)

has awesome BBQ. I can't resist their Loaded Barrel Chips. From memory (admittedly not my best feature), it has Barrel chips (seasoned, made potato chips), choice of smoked meat (I got pulled pork this time), cheese sauce, jalapeños, tomatoes, and chipotle sour cream! OH YUM! I ended with a double delectable treat: a trip to Taste of Belgium for a waffle to go, on which I put a couple scoops of Jeni's Splendid Ice Creams. Heaven! (I had to split with a friend so that I wouldn't burst.)

This is becoming an annual tradition as well – a trip or two to Moy's Chinese restaurant

for some fresh, delicious food. The R&R guys (who are also foodies) introduced me to this wonderful establishment. Afterwards we stopped at Buckeye Donuts, right next door, where we had cronuts. The memory of it is making my mouth water; it was so freaking good!

Another fairly new favorite is Aab

(introduced to us by Ken Hill, CABS and Rio Grande Games rep.). It's a little bit of a hike from the Columbus Convention Center, but they have excellent Indian food and it's right down the street from another Jeni's Splendid Ice Creams location!! I like to walk over from Aab to help burn off some of the guilt.

The Dice Tower Live

The Dice Tower podcast did a live taping at Origins. About 250 people showed up for the event. As somewhat typical at these events, a "gameshow" was held with funny and/or game related questions (and sometimes funny answers) where select audience members were able to win prizes for participating.

Exhibit Hall and Gaming Hall Publishers Part 2

Hill's Wholesale Gaming

They're back! After a four-year hiatus, Hill's is finally back selling many, many TCG and CCGs (among other things)! Unfortunately I bought two boxes I really didn't need (but WANTED!), and yet again I was stopped at airport security for having those dangerous foil cards.

North Star Games

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3042047_t.jpg] Happy Salmon

released in April, 2016. It's a fast-paced game for 3-6 players (with two decks you can play up to 12), which plays in about a minute. Each player starts with a deck of 12 cards held face up in their hands. The idea is to find a person with the matching card by shouting out the name of the action on the card. For example: fist bump and high five are two of the actions. Once this person has been found you both perform the action to discard the card, revealing the next card. The goal is to get rid of all your cards.

Evolution: the Beginning

, releasing in August, is a standalone card game (i.e., it is not playable with the base game). This is a simplified (i.e. lighter, faster — about 30 mins) version of Evolution

for family and casual gamers. It will be a Target store exclusive.

Fun Fact: Evolution

was originally designed by Russian biologists to teach kids about evolution. (The original game was named Evolution: Origin of the Species

.) The artwork for the game was done by Catherine Hamilton, a high-school friend of North Star founder Dominic Crapuchettes.

Tasty Minstrel Games

Guilds of London

pre-release at Origins, to be released in August. They had one hundred copies available, which sold out in sixteen minutes. This is a card driven area majority game.

Orléans: Invasion

will release in August/September. This is a modular expansion to Orléans

with several scenarios that enhance the game.

Fun Fact: In Guilds of London

, three of the coat of arms are actual historical representations of the real Guilds of London crests; you may see them on the shields on the tiles.

Arcane Wonders

Royals

pre-relased at Origins, will release at the end of August. The art was updated for the U.S. market to give it a more medieval English look and add more vivid color. The distribution of cards was also slightly revised. The city in Britain now has two nobles instead of one.

Speechless

will be a Gen Con pre-release, to be released soon after, and is designed Mike Elliott (designer of Quarriors

, Dice Masters

, etc.). This is his first party game and the fourth in the Dice Tower Essentials Line. Talking is not permitted during the game. Players take turns being the "presenter". The presenter has 90 seconds to act out six words (three cards with two words each), trying to get the other players to correctly guess each word. While the presenter is acting out the words, the other players are watching and trying to guess which word is being acted out. If they think they know the word, they write it down on their dry erase marker board. Players score up to 2 points for each correct answer: one person guessing the wrong answer scores 0, multiple people guessing the same wrong answer each get one point. The presenter gets the highest score in correctly guessed words that round. The game is for 3-8 players with two rounds for three players, or once around for four or more.

Fun Fact: Arcane Wonders sent the artist for Royals

, Jason Engle, a photo of Kevin Burkhardsmeier (podcaster, Board Game Theatre) as a model, because he does cosplay as a king.

Calliope Games

Hive Mind

, by Richard Garfield, will release in September. Each turn all players secretly answer a question, then answers are revealed. Players get one point for each answer plus one point for each answer matching another player. A die is rolled to determine how many people will move down the hive (printed on game board) for having the lowest score. Sometimes one player may also move up for having the highest score. There is a catch-up mechanism for players reaching the lower levels; a player can remove a barrier rather than moving down. Any players kicked out of the hive lose, then everyone else wins.

Running with the Bulls

, by Paul Peterson, releases in September. Each player gets six runner dice at the top of the board. There are six bulls, also across the top of the board. Players try to get their runners to one of the destination cards at the bottom of the board (sort of like a Plinko

, disk drop, game). Players get a hand of five cards per round to help them move to the bottom, four of which will be played. There are three (scoring) rounds to the game.

Fun Fact: Board artwork for Running with the Bulls

includes Chris Leder, "Director of Fun" at Calliope Games (bottom right), above him and the big red die is the President of Calliope, Ray Wehrs (right), and Paul Peterson, designer (left). Artwork was done by Mike Bocianowski who signed his name on the toilet paper on Chris' foot. There are some puns/Easter eggs about bulls all over the board (e.g., bulldozer, bull horn).

Formal Ferret Games

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3098532_t.jpg] The Networks

released at Origins (U.S. debut). This is a tableau-building game using card drafting. Players each run a network. The goal of the game is to get the most viewers by developing shows, signing stars, and landing ads.

An expansion to The Networks

is planned for 2017. Currently they plan on offering a modified set-up, new shows and stars set in the 1980s and 1990s, and individual player powers based on their network.

Fun Fact: Gil Hova, owner of Formal Ferret Games, has owned various ferrets for over the course of twenty years: seven in total so far, usually with two at a time.

Japanime Games

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3100706_t.jpg] Naruto Shippuden: the Board Game

released June 2016. This is a cooperative board game in which players are trying to stop a network of evil ninjas from taking over the world. Characters and locations are from the show Naruto Shippuden

. Each player has their own character with powers, etc. as well as a specialized deck. Highly thematic.

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3100710_t.jpg] Heart of Crown

will be released in September. This is a deck-building card game in which players each take on the role of "campaign manager" for their princesses. Their job is to get their princess elected to the throne by using military tactics, bribery, and witchcraft. The game is split into two eras. During the first era players accumulate wealth in order to back a princess. Once they have a princess, money is not as important; succession points become important for the second era and winning the game.

Fun Fact: The art of Heart of Crown

was done by Yuji Himukai, the same artist for the video game Etrian Odyssey

.

Brotherwise Games

The Boss Monster: Paper & Pixels

mini-expansion released in June 2016. (It was previously only available as a retailer incentive.) This is an expansion for the Boss Monster

games (playable with both one or two). It has three new bosses, four new rooms, and one new spell.

The Boss Monster: Crash Landing

mini expansion extends the base game, normally for 2-4 players, to 5-6 players. It introduces a new hero class as well as a new related treasure type. For the first time, this will add a sci-fi theme, with aliens landing in the fantasy world of Boss Monster

.

Fun Fact: Almost every card in Boss Monster

includes an "Easter egg" that parodies classic video games, fantasy and sci fi movies, and fantasy literature.

Passport Game Studios

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic2877079_t.jpg] Salem

was released at Origins. This is a social deduction game in which you play a family during the Salem witch trials. Three of the members are witches in each family. You are trying to determine who are the witches in the other families while being more accurate in your accusations than the other players. The game sold out at Origins.

Quartz

was shown at Origins and will be released at Gen Con. This is a push-your-luck game in which you are a dwarf trying to create the most lucrative mine. As you are mining, you might turn up obsidian, which will make you crash, causing you to lose all the gems you just mined and knocking you out of the round.

Fun fact: In the game Salem

, all the family members are historically accurate. A lot of research went into creating the game.

L4 Studios

Information provided by Keith Blume, President, L4 Studios.

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3098835_t.jpg] WarQuest

, co-published with Mr. B Games

, was pre-released at Origins. WarQuest

was designed by Glenn Drover ( Age of Empires III: Age of Discovery

, Railways of the World

, among others) and developed by the same team behind Age of Empires III: Age of Discovery

.

In WarQuest

, you take on the role of a warlord; your goal is to reunite a fractured land. Achieve this goal by quest, conquest, and combat! The game is card driven — Quests and Conquests are cards in your hand, and every time you complete one, you get a new card — with variable start locations, hidden endgame victory conditions, and awesome miniatures for your armies (it does have war in the title after all) so each game will unfold with a different story. The world of WarQuest

(Myrathia) also has a novel from Don Beyer ( Swords of Mercy

).

For Q4 Mr. B Games and L4 Studios plan to release the 30th anniversary edition of Liar's Dice

. This will be in the mode of the classic Milton Bradley version (six players, with the star replacing the "1"). They are playing around with the cover (below), but this is one of the styles they're considering, with them probably doing some kind of polling on BGG or another media vehicle to get consumer feedback.

Fun Fact: Keith Blume: "My family and I played the Milton Bradley version of Liar's Dice

non-stop at our family reunion 28 (or so) years ago and it has remained a family favorite. Thus getting to print the game is a full-circle dream come true."

Queen Games

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3098833_t.jpg] Mighty Monsters

will release in August. Players assume the roles of Trolls, Undead, Aquatic animals, Demons, Insects and Dragons with only one thing on their mind: the Gold in King Edgar's treasury. You have to cooperate to overcome the pesky guards, but the real monster in you still wants a bigger share than your fellow monsters! Have the most gold by the end to win in this fast paced monstrous card game.

World Monuments

will release in August. In this game you and your fellow players choose one of four buildings and start constructing it from the ground up: the Capitol in Washington, Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, San Pietro's Basilica in Rome, or the Taj Mahal in Agra. Once building has completed, only the most talented master builder among the players who gained the most points will win the game.

Fun Fact: World Monuments

already has two more monuments in production. These will be offered only as Queenies (promos) at conventions and at the BoardGameGeek Store, early next year.

IDW Games

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3100629_t.jpg] The Godfather: A New Don

releases in August. This is an area-control game in which players take control of one of the six crime families from The Godfather

(books/movies). Players battle over the boroughs of 1950s NY. They claim territories by turning in sets of dice.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shadows of the Past

releases in August. This is a scenario-driven campaign game featuring story content from the IDW TMNT comic. Players may take on the role of their favorite turtle or the ultimate villain Shredder through a series of 60-90 minute missions in which they develop their characters' strengths, fighting styles, and equipment creating a story arc. Favorite characters (e.g. Casey Jones, Alopex) appear throughout the missions as the Turtles call on their allies to help battle their deadliest foes.

Fun Fact: There is a secret Easter egg in The X-Files

that no one has been able to figure out. Nate Murray, Product Manager for IDW Games, offers a bounty of any free IDW game if you can determine what it is.

Academy Games

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic2435601_t.jpg] Conflict of Heroes: Guadalcanal

pre-released at Origins, to be released in July. This is the next standalone game in the Conflict of Heroes

series. It includes the U.S. army expansion and incorporates the Japanese Bushido code ("saving face").

879: Viking Invasions of England

will be on Kickstarter in July, released planned in October. This is a standalone game, next in the series with 1775 Rebellion

. It will be an all miniatures historical game.

Fun Fact: Collaboration can be tricky sometimes. Academy Games' French partners complained that Academy Games was as overly picky as Germans, but as pushy as Americans (the worst of both worlds).

Renegade Game Studios

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3099210_t.jpg] Brick Party

released July 6th. In the game, teams of two work together to build a pattern on a card (worth 5 to 8 points, varying appropriately in difficulty) with interlocking blocks. The cards depict a silhouette of what will be built. One person is communicating what to build while the other player builds it. Each round there is a rule card making it more difficult to either communicate or build (e.g., no thumbs may be used this round, eyes closed, no talking, etc.). The first team finished gets extra points, then the other teams will have only 30 seconds more to complete building in order to score points. Teams get to decide which card to build after the rule card has been revealed. When a new round starts, there will be new partners, a new rule, and new shapes. Play continues until one player meets a point goal.

Covert

will pre-release at Gen Con, to be released in August. This is a tactical game of dice placement and set collection in which players try to complete a designated number of mission cards. The first person to do so is the winner. Players roll a hand of dice each round and may use them in different ways, for example they may be used to select an action by playing in an action area in one of six spaces. A player may use any space if no one has yet played there otherwise the player must play numerically adjacent to another die. A player may use one die to help crack a code to try to match a code behind their player screen. A player also gets to swap two tiles of the code during the code-cracking phase. If a player matches their code, they get a resource and another code. Actions include things like moving on the board, getting more resources, and collecting mission cards.

Fun Fact: Kane Klenko, the designer of FUSE

, loves to sneak little hints about his wife Carrie into his rules, including an image of her in the back of the Fuse

rulebook: Carrie as the ship's computer in FUSE

(hologram).

Wyrd Games

Darkness Comes Rattling

was released September/October 2015. This is their first board game in a couple of years; they are mostly a miniatures company. In the game there is a spirit snake called Darkness who is jealous of the sun, so he swallows it, plunging fantasy world Tallil into darkness. This is a cooperative game in which 2-6 players play warriors from the tribes of man attempting to save the sun. Players travel to different regions of Tallil to find items and spirit weapons needed to defeat Darkness.

Fun Fact: When Through the Breach

was developed, the lead designer immortalized one of the playtesters, Aaron Darland, as a non-player character (named Aaron Darlin!). His character is known as the mecha-tyrant of Virginia who burns down Richmond. Flash forward to today, Aaron now works for Wyrd Games on the design team; players sometimes think he wrote himself into the game.

Custom Tables for Board Gaming

There were a couple of companies selling board game tables. Boardgametables.com has custom made to order tables; choose from five types of wood and six styles of table. Add-ons include card holders, cup holders, drawers, toppers. Carolina Game Tables had three tables in the Mayfair Games play area so that people could try out one of their tables while playing a game.

WizKids

Information provided by Stephanie Gelband, Marketing Manager.

Star Trek: Frontiers

released on June 29. Designed by Andrew Parks, Star Trek: Frontiers

puts a new spin on the bestselling board game, Mage Knight

by Vlaada Chvátil. Command your ship, recruit new crew members, earn experience points, and use your skills to confront the challenges of the Star Trek Universe. Explore and face a variety of challenges on a randomly built Space Map using the Venture Tile System, first introduced in Mage Knight. The game is for 1-4 players with multiple competitive, cooperative and solo scenarios. Work together to defeat hostile ships or compete to explore and uncover hidden mysteries. Players will need to overcome obstacles to expand their knowledge and use their leadership in order to win.

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3099505_t.jpg] Blank White Dice

, designed by Jonathan Leistiko, is a thrilling new take on dice games. Roll the game dice to activate the icons on the dice, and gain enough points to win the game! But that's not all because if a player rolls a blank face, they need to get creative and show their artistic skills by drawing their own icons on the faces of their dice! Some icons will give players points, others may cause opponents to lose points, force competitors to re-roll, and much more! The first player to reach 13 points at the end of a round wins the game. Planned for a SPIEL 2016 release.

Fun Fact: Stephanie Gelband, Marketing Manager: "WizKids held both the 2016 U.S. National and World Championships for HeroClix, Dice Masters, and Attack Wing at Origins Game Fair. For the first time, WizKids gave a Fan Appreciation Presentation at the event. Attendance was so high that we had to change rooms, cut the presentation shorter, and run two sessions!"

Cryptozoic Entertainment

Mad Science Foundation

pre-released at Origins, to be released in July/August. Each player is a mad scientist trying to build inventions to gain infamy (points). This is a card-driven game in which, each round, one player splits a number of cards into piles equal to the number of players, then the other players choose which pile they would like with the dividing player going last. Cards include resources and inventions. Inventions must be constructed using resources before points are gained. Minions are also in the resource deck; certain advantages may be gained by controlling a minion. Players also have a hidden goal card. The player with the most points at the end of the game is the winner.

Attack on Titan Deck-Building Game

is planned for September/October release. The game theme came from the Attack on Titan

popular anime and manga series about monstrous Titans.

This fully cooperative game is based on the "Cerberus game system" but with added movement. Players are heroes trying to defeat all Titans in the deck before they destroy the wall that protects civilization (which is representated by five tokens in the middle of the table). There is a board with ten spaces and a wall in the middle, with player heroes moving from space to space. The location of your hero in the game area matters. If you are on a titan space (outside the wall), there will be a fight.

Fun Facts: Dekan Wheeler, Manager of Marketing: "We actually found the designers (Sharang Biswas, Max Seidman) at Gen Con 2015's developer speed-dating event. We loved their game Mad Science Foundation

so much we decided to publish it. The Attack on Titan: Deck-Building Game

is built using our Cerberus engine, but is the first of our deck-builders to be designed with co-operative play from the ground up."

Jasco Games

Mega Man: Battle for Power

is planned to be released in August. This is a Universal Fighting System (UFS) CCG, compatible with some of their other titles such as Darkstalkers

and forthcoming Street Fighter

, Mortal Kombat

, Cowboy Bebop

. The game features the character Bass.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Board Game

has a planned release for October. This is a cooperative horror game for 1-6 players. The goal of the game is to try to keep the Hell Mouth from opening and consuming the city of Sunnydale. Players try to protect the townies from various dangers (e.g. vampires, zombies, etc.) and defeat the monsters of the week (there are thee random mosters of the week in each game) to collect various clues to beat the big bad (boss).

Fun Fact: Jason Hawronsky, founder and CEO of Jasco Games, started in the boardgaming industry when he was really young. He owned a 3,000 sq. ft. retail game store in the Dallas Metroplex when he was 13. (Although he did all the management — working store hours around school hours — he had help from his parents until he could legally take over); he ran it for 11 years. He started publishing in January 2010 at the age of 24.

Capstone Games

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3100346_t.jpg] Arkwright

released at Origins. This is a heavy economic game with action selection and a stock market. Players produce and sell goods, build factories and machines, hire workers, etc.

Haspelknecht: The Story of Early Coal Mining

will release in September. This is a mediumweight action selection game about discovering coal in 16th century Germany. Players extract coal and obtain unique developments (e.g., to more efficiently extract the coal). This will be part one of a trilogy of games spanning centuries. The complexity will increase across releases.

Fun Fact: It took three months to update and enhance the English version of the three rulebooks in Arkwright

.

Cool Mini Or Not (CMON)

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3098598_t.jpg] The Grizzled: At Your Orders!

pre-released at Origins, released at the end of June. It adds a solo play mode (not in the original game), a new two-player mode, new missions that replace the original game's set-up difficulty level, character cutouts to help visualize who's on the mission, and Final Assault/Last Stand card (for desperation moves).

Potion Explosion

will have an early release at Gen Con, to be released September/October. Player are student wizards and witches learning to brew potions. Each has two potions they are working on at a time. There is an ingredient dispenser, consisting of marbles in vertical lanes in a slightly sloped cardboard holder (so the marbles will slide together), from which players take one marble on their turn. This may trigger a "potion explosion" if two marbles of the same color connect, possibly causing a chain reaction. The player may take all marbles of the same color that touched to form the explosion. Potions are cardboard pieces with holes on which marbles may be placed, color coded for the potion. Once complete, potions may be "drunk" (turned upside down) to provide a one-time special ability. Potions are worth points. Players may gain skill tokens (also worth points) by collecting three of one type of potion or one of each potion (5 total). The game ends when the skill tokens are gone. The player with most points is the winner.

Fun Fact: Designer Eric Lang is obsessed with pandas. He tries to work a panda into each of his games: cover art, character in the game, etc. He even tried to sneak one into the Blood Rage

rulebook, but editing found out and removed it before the final print.

Smirk & Dagger Games

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3021686_t.jpg] Dead Last

pre-released at Origins, to be released in July. This is a party "social collusion game" that will appeal to gamers who enjoy casual games and social deduction games, although there are no hidden roles or traitors. Each player has a color identity, shown on a card displayed in a stand in front of them, as well as a hand of cards which includes every player color including their own as an "ambush" card (used if they suspect they will be a target). Targeted players are eliminated (unless they played an ambush card). Also, all players except those in the largest voting group will be eliminated. This forces players to form alliances... although you won't know if they are being truthful. Anything goes as far as communication, including glances, nods, pointing, flashing a card, etc. — just try not to tip off the target. The last player standing receives four gold bars with points ranging from 3 to 5 points. The game ends when one player gets to 24 points. The trick is trying to get others to vote with you without alerting the target. If there are two players left, there is a "final showdown".

J'accuse

will be released at Gen Con. This is a blind-voting card game. Like a reverse version of Clue

, all players conspired to kill the old miser. Each are trying to pass off the evidence onto the other players. In the end, there will be one loser and a table full of winners who got away with murder.

Fun Fact: Curt Covert, Smirk & Dagger Games: " Cutthroat Caverns

was inspired by the transition from my high school D&D

group (me and six women) who played very Lawful Good characters to my college group (all guys) who were anything but. I was horrified when I realized the other characters I was traveling with were far more dangerous than anything the DM could throw at me. That feeling of shock and horror was the feeling I wanted to be pervasive in Cutthroat

."

Ninja Division Publishing

12 Realms

released in June. This is a game in which players are adventurers trying to accumulate land, gain fame, etc. through questing, purchasing.

Raid & Trade

will be released July. This is a post apocalyptic modular board game of negotiation and resource management. From the ashes of a third World War, a few golden cities emerge offering hope to those who struggle for survival in the wastelands. Using action points and a player specific skill, players explore the ruins of the modern world completing quests, honing their skills, and maneuvering for social status in order to claim a spot as a citizen in a Golden City.

The Broken Token

This company makes game boxes, inserts/organizers, and some game pieces. Their newest release, launched during Origins, the Biohazard Containment Unit for Pandemic

is a custom box to replace the original box; it holds sleeved cards, the base game, plus all the expansions. See photo below. An "in box" organizer for Codenames

will be released at Gen Con. A custom box for Splendor

will be available after Gen Con.

New Game Round-up: Previews at Gen Con 2016 — New Doom, Tickets for Tots, and Inventing Bit By Bit

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/563…en-con-2016-new-doom-tick

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3116318_t.jpg]• The pre-Gen Con 2016 announcements continue, with Fantasy Flight Games

announcing

DOOM: The Board Game

, an adaptation of the Bethesda Softworks and id Software, for demo at the convention ahead of a Q4 2016 release.

Now, FFG released Doom: The Boardgame

by Kevin Wilson and company CEO Christian T. Petersen back in 2004, but the publisher notes that aside from the asymmetrical play and a customizable Invader deck, this new design from Jonathan Ying

is almost completely new: "It is designed capture the feel of the video game's most recent incarnation, complete with fast-paced action, aggressive combat, relentless suspense, and even Glory Kills that allow marines to swiftly execute wounded demons and recover damage at the same time."

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3116341_t.jpg]• Another pre-Gen Con 2016 (sort of) surprise comes from Days of Wonder

, this being Alan R. Moon

's Ticket to Ride: First Journey

. I say "sort of" because this title is being released exclusively at the Target retail chain in the U.S., and Target initially had an embargo date for July 31, 2016 — the day that the game will go on sale (MSRP $35) — but a few Target stores released the game ahead of time, so now Days of Wonder has published

details on the gameplay:

Ticket to Ride: First Journey takes the gameplay of the Ticket to Ride series and scales it down for a younger audience.

In general, players collect train cards, claim routes on the map, and try to connect the cities shown on their tickets. In more detail, the game board shows a map of the United States with certain cities being connect by colored paths. Each player starts with four colored train cards in hand and two tickets; each ticket shows two cities, and you're trying to connect those two cities with a contiguous path of your trains in order to complete the ticket.

On a turn, you either draw two train cards from the deck or discard train cards to claim a route between two cities; for this latter option, you must discard cards matching the color and number of spaces on that route (e.g., two yellow cards for a yellow route that's two spaces long). If you connect the two cities shown on a ticket with a path of your trains, reveal the ticket, place it face up in front of you, then draw a new ticket. (If you can't connect cities on either ticket because the paths are blocked, you can take your entire turn to discard those tickets and draw two new ones.)

If you connect one of the West Coast cities to one of the East Coast cities with a path of your turns, you immediately claim a Coast-to-Coast ticket.

The first player to complete six tickets wins! Alternatively, if someone has placed all twenty of their trains on the game board, then whoever has completed the most tickets wins!

My understanding is that Ticket to Ride: First Journey

will be available for demo games at Gen Con 2016, but not sold there. We'll see!

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3116438_t.png]• Finally (for now) is Legendary Inventors

from Frédéric Henry

and Bombyx

, with this design sounding similar to Henry's The Builders

in the way that players apply the skills of their workers, but now all players both compete and cooperate to finish building things. Here's an overview of Legendary Inventors

, which will be available for demo at Gen Con 2016 ahead of its Q4 2016 release date:

Lead a team of history's greatest minds to glory in Legendary Inventors, a game in which 2-5 players each captain a group of four inventors working to bring their knowledge to life by creating useful objects to improve the world. Compete against rival teams to patent inventions and work to improve the knowledge of your inventors. The inventing team who has patented the most inventions or who has the smartest inventors wins.

In more detail, the game takes place over three ages, with each age representing a different period of technological advancement and those inventions becoming more complex in each subsequent age. On a turn, you either send one of your inventors to work on an invention or refresh your inventors to make all of them available again. When you send an inventor to work you apply that character's skills — Albert Einstein has a starting skill of four Physics, for example, while Johannes Gutenberg has a starting skill of two Mechanics — against the needs of the invention, marking off what you've done with colored cubes.

When an invention is complete, the three players who have contributed the most reap the rewards of its completion! Players can choose to acquire and patent the invention by placing the invention card face up in front of them, or they earn reward tokens to upgrade their inventors, gain extra victory points, and even add additional knowledge to an invention.

As soon as all but two inventions in an age are complete, that age ends and a new one begins. After the third age, the team of inventors with the most victory points wins!

Star Wars: Destiny Wants You to Play Dice for the Fate of the Universe

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/563…ou-play-dice-fate-univers

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3117315_t.jpg]

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3117314_t.jpg]

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3117316_t.png]In what is perhaps its final announcement

prior to Gen Con 2016 (but not likely), Fantasy Flight Games

has revealed yet another game set in the Star Wars

universe: Star Wars: Destiny

, a collectible dice and card game for two players.

Yes, collectible — a word dreaded by some and embraced by others, a word to divide all against one another similar to the light and dark forces present in this game. In this game's announcement, designer Lukas Litzsinger

says, "We haven't made a collectible game in years, even though many gamers enjoy this format's aspects of discovery and trading. Star Wars: Destiny

is a game that could only exist within this category, and we're excited to reenter the collectible marketplace and start supporting fans of this genre once more."

Here's an overview of the setting and gameplay:

Star Wars: Destiny is a collectible dice and card game of battles between iconic heroes and villains that encompasses characters, locations, and themes from the entire Star Wars saga.

In Star Wars: Destiny, two players engage in a fast-paced duel, each striving to eliminate the other's characters first. The game's innovative mechanisms combine dice-driven combat with faction-driven hand management. Straightforward rules make the game easy to learn, but also enable deep strategic thinking and clever deck-building. Players can create decks that include characters from every faction and any era, as long as heroes and villains are on opposite sides of the fight. For example, Padmé Amidala might fight alongside Rey and Finn, taking on Jabba the Hutt, Kylo Ren, and Jango Fett.

Each round, you use your characters' abilities, an assortment of dice, and a carefully constructed thirty-card deck filled with events, upgrades, and supports. You and your opponent alternate actions: activating your dice, playing cards from your hand, attacking your foes, and claiming the battlefield. You need to prove your skills and defeat your opponent's characters to claim your destiny!
Star Wars: Destiny

can be demoed at Gen Con 2016, but it won't be released until November 2016, with two starter decks — Rey

and Kylo Ren

, each $15 MSRP — being available and each player needing a starter set in order to play, along with Awakenings booster packs ($3). The starter sets each have nine dice and 24 cards, while the booster packs contain one die and five cards.

Crowdfunding Round-up: The Heart and Solo of the Party

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/563…ound-heart-and-solo-party

by Dustin Schwartz

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3097992_t.png]• As board games amble out of the back alley and into the social conscious, shrewd merchandising mavens have turned a hungry eye, and geek-magnet IPs are cropping up in cardboard form. Cryptozoic Entertainment

was on the forefront of that movement, and fans of a certain AMC drama may finally have their grail in The Walking Dead: No Sanctuary

from sibling designers Brady and Adam Sadler, both former in-house design talent for Fantasy Flight Games

. A slick product rollout includes planned expansions to the 1-4 player base game, with fan-favorite playable characters spread across those releases. ( KS link

)

• Today’s film makers, comic writers, and game designers continue to raid the ’80s pop culture cupboards for inspiration. 1987’s Evil Dead II

is getting a film reboot, Space Goat Productions

has been publishing Evil Dead 2 comics, and now they’re completing the trifecta with Evil Dead 2: The Official Board Game

by rookie designer Taylor Smith. Memorabilia hounds will be interested to know that the custom wooden dice included in higher pledge tiers are made from the wood used in the iconic cabin of the original film. I can’t imagine they afford too many friendly rolls… ( KS link

)

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3103693_t.jpg]• According to Julie Andrews and the Von Trapp family singers, far is a long long way to run, but Ryan Laukat of Red Raven Games

is accustomed to going the distance with his KS projects, and the campaign for Near and Far

is his most popular yet. Its success is no doubt precipitated by the strong critical reception of Laukat’s Above and Below

, to which it serves as a sequel of sorts. What caught my eye is the spiral-bound atlas that, when folded open, provides a set of 11 different game maps. Variety without modularity! Whoa. ( KS link

)

• One of the hallmarks of a well-produced euro game is custom wood shapes instead of simple cubes to represent the game’s resources. Sotirios Tsantilos, Pantelis Bouboulis, and the rest of the LudiCreations

team know that well, and are offering a “deluxe” version of Crisis

, which has proven 20 times as popular as the cheaper, cubes-only version. Despite success in video games and RPGs, dieselpunk isn’t done all that often in cardboard; in fact, it has no category here on the ’Geek. Perhaps this release will grease the zerks for others to follow. ( KS link

)

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3025051_t.jpg]• Though it didn’t win the Golden Geek for best solitaire game last year, A.J. Porfirio’s Hostage Negotiator

, published by Van Ryder Games

, has a dedicated player base (especially among the 1 Player Guild

, who gave it GOTY honors) and is currently ranked among the top 10 solitaires in the database. The game has already seen expansions, but Crime Wave

is both expansion and standalone. The box dwarfs the original’s — necessitated by all the new content. Now just fork over the ransom money and no one gets hurt. ( KS link

)

• Given the ubiquity of classic solitaire — also known as Klondike

— among modern audiences, I’m surprised that its core conceit has been so seldom used as the foundation stone for modern hobby designs. The folks at 8th Summit

are crossing their fingers that it could work as an entire system of solitaire decks with overlaid themes. The first concept from Robert Kouba and Jason Maxwell is Superhero Solitaire

. The two red suits relate to the player’s hero character, the two black suits to the villain AI character. If it’s a retail success, more themed sets will follow. ( KS link

)

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3034489_t.png]• There’s been some impetus to introduce “mid-Atlantic” as a term for the melding of European and American game design sensibilities. Brian Suhre’s Coldwater Crown

is full euro in its design, but at least the theme lets you go fishing in the mid-Atlantic! (Sorry for the bait-and-switch.) This marks Bellwether Games

’ first deep sea charter, after getting their feet wet with a handful of smaller productions. The worker placement genre is fairly muddy waters these days, but this game’s unique hook is triggering actions on both placement and removal of pawns. ( KS link

)

• The most indie title on this list comes to us by way of new publisher Druid City Games

and designer James Hudson, whose debut title Barnyard Roundup

is interesting in that it puts bluffing in a title aimed at mixed-age audiences. It’s basic set-collection, but you have to out-Vezzini your opponents to get the cards you want and avoid the cards you don’t want. The Mr. Cuddington team lent their talents to the game’s appearance; the airy illustrations belie the experience of getting back-stabbed by your friend’s fistful of crows. Who knew the barnyard could be so vicious? Orwell, maybe. ( KS link

)

• A lot of game publishers have tapped the 16-bit well for its magic geek fuel, but Magic Meeple Games

, founded by video game and board game enthusiasts, is crafting a product line aimed squarely at the intersection of those two interests. The line, dubbed the “Super Nano Enhanced Series” (boil it down to an acronym to get the reference), will be portable-friendly games bristling with classic video game graphics and homages. The first release is Fire of Eidolon

from designer Michael Lipton, a co-operative game of exploring a dungeon with a group of adventurers. ( KS link

)

• Lovecraft may have been a nihilist, but nothing says you can’t contemplate your existential helplessness while you plot the downfall of humanity, right? Greater Than Games is making use of their new-ish Fabled Nexus

imprint to summon forth Fate of the Elder Gods

, an arcane creation from Richard Launius, Darrell Louder, and Chris Kirkman. Eschewing the cooperative elements so native to mythos games, FotEG

(which I like to pronounce phonetically, like the name of some gibbous elder being: foe-tegg

) invokes in-your-face PvP elements and also sports a solo mode ( 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

Final Pre-Gen Con 2016 Preparations

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/564…gen-con-2016-preparations

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3107569_t.png] Gen Con 2016

starts on August 4, and I'll be in Indianapolis with the BoardGameGeek crew starting on Wednesday, August 3 — i.e., tomorrow (yikes!) — to help set up our booth (#1949) and to take pics from the show floor. What might you need to know before that happens?

• If you're going:

The BGG Hot Games room

will now feature donations from 59 publishers, giving up to 120 gamers at a time the chance to play or fondle the newest releases from Gen Con 2016. We'll post a final list of games once we collect everything from the publishers (or see what they drop off), then prep, punch, and bag everything to be ready for the opening bell on Thursday.

• If you're not going:

BGG's Gen Con 2016 broadcast schedule

is now live! Yes, for all four days of Gen Con 2016, BoardGameGeek will be livestreaming interviews with designers and publishers about their creations.

In addition to watching us for four days, you can also follow our posts on Twitter

as I'll be snapping pics throughout the show and trying not to fall too far behind in posting them.

• Whether you fall into either category:

BGG's Gen Con 2016 Preview

is now (almost) complete, with its 411 listings being just a smidge more than we saw on the 2015 Preview

. That said, I threw in the "almost" caveat because a couple of publishers sent me info on August 1, which I had set as my cutoff date; if I have the time, I'll add them to the Preview, but I might not have time since I'll be jamming on the SPIEL 2016 Preview, which will launch on Monday, August 8.

Yes, we'll slingshot our way straight from the ashes of Gen Con to the fevered beginnings of SPIEL, which opens October 13. I already have eighty titles on that preview and a stuffed inbox folder to which all my requests for information have been routed. Time to crack that open and get to work...again!

New Game Round-up: Race to a New Galaxy with Jump Drive, Explore Alternate Realities for Temporum, and Briefly Relive the Cuban Missile Crisis

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/564…galaxy-jump-drive-explore

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3121227_t.jpg]• While preparing our broadcast schedule for Gen Con 2016

, I heard from Rio Grande Games

' Jay Tummelson, who asked about showing a few upcoming games on camera since he had presented all of the new RGG at Origins 2016. He didn't reveal what those titles are, but now we have info on two likely candidates, starting with Tom Lehmann

's Race for the Galaxy: Jump Drive

, a Q4 2016 release that bears this description:

With the invention of Jump Drive, the race for the galaxy begins! Develop new technologies and settle worlds to build a space empire. Find winning card combinations!

Race for the Galaxy: Jump Drive is a fast-paced card game that introduces players to the Race for the Galaxy universe. Can you build the most prosperous galactic civilization?

In a teaser post

that contains a few card images from the game, Lehmann writes, " Jump Drive

is a stand-alone game for 2-4 players, separate from Race for the Galaxy

, intended to introduce players to some Race for the Galaxy concepts. While Jump Drive

borrows a bit from my earlier game, The City

, it is NOT a simple re-theme or 're-skin' of that game. Jump Drive

has two card types, different actions and bonuses, military conquest, and some new player interactions. Unlike Race for the Galaxy

, Jump Drive

doesn't have goods, production, or consumption."

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3121246_t.jpg]• The other RGG title, also likely to be released in Q4 2016, is Temporum: Alternate Realities

, an expansion for Donald X. Vaccarino

's Temporum

that is more description than details at this point:

What is time? Is it like a river? Or maybe an ocean? Is it like up, but sideways? Is it churning chaos, background noise, held together only briefly by our own awareness of it? You don't know. You just work the machinery; someone else built it. To you, time is a means to an end, a glorious end in which humanity's crowning achievement turns out to be your own benevolent rule. It's a simple process of weeding through the alternatives, snipping prudently — an ungrateful utopia here, a useless revolution there. In the end, from the Age of Atlantis to the Zombie Apocalypse, the eras will sing your praise.

Temporum: Alternate Realities, an expansion for Temporum, adds 48 more Zones and 60 more Player cards, plus chits and cards used by the new Zones.

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3119514_t.jpg]• Asmodee has announced

a new edition of Bruno Faidutti

's Citadels

from its Windrider Games

studio for release Q4 2016, with this edition featuring the same gameplay as the original Citadels

from 2000, but now with twenty-seven characters — eight from Citadels

, ten from the Dark City

expansion, and nine new ones — along with thirty unique building districts. The rulebook includes six preset lists of characters and districts beyond the starter list, and this new version of Citadels

can be demoed at Gen Con 2016.

• Another Q4 2016 release that you can demo at Gen Con 2016 is 13 Minutes: The Cuban Missile Crisis

, a sequel of sorts by Asger Sams Granerud

and Daniel Skjold Pedersen

to their own 13 Days: The Cuban Missile Crisis

from Jolly Roger Games

and Ultra Pro

. Here's an overview:

13 Minutes: The Cuban Missile Crisis is a card-driven microgame with tough decisions. Playing as either Kennedy or Khrushchev, your aim is to exit the Cuban Missile Crisis as the most powerful superpower. During the game you play only five strategy cards that you use to place Influence on battlegrounds to score majorities or manipulate battlegrounds. Each card you play turns into a new battleground, so the "world map" is ever-changing. Be careful because each decision is important and you may trigger global nuclear war!

Designer Diary: Terraforming Mars, or Life to Mars and Mars to Life!

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/564…ing-mars-or-life-mars-and

by Jacob Fryxelius

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic2891964_t.jpg]My first Spiel was 2011, the year that FryxGames

was founded. We were five brothers there, of which four were in the company, and the fifth was just company. Our few handmade Wilderness

sold out and my low-production Space Station

didn't fare so badly either. Spiel was amazing, and we were greatly encouraged, deciding to go for it and start making high-quality games in decent (for us) print-runs.

Shortly after that first Spiel, I thought to myself one day: "I should make a game about terraforming Mars." The thought wasn't far-fetched since I LOVE Mars, science and epic scales — and so I did. Now I will show you how Terraforming Mars

evolved.

My love for card games shines through all my designs. It is so easy to start prototyping a card game, and the format allows you to simulate almost anything! Beginning as usual with just pen and paper, I made the first prototype with pieces of paper torn from ordinary printer paper. (I get 16 from each sheet.) There are a number of aspects that need to be addressed when terraforming Mars, of which I deemed oxygen, temperature, and ocean coverage to be the most important, so I also had a sheet of paper for these scales.

Aside from being card-based and having scales for different things, other things started to become clear, too:

-----

• That the players were corporations paid for terraforming, which was simulated by a terraform rating that provided both income and victory points.

-----

• That I wanted unique cards that could simulate anything from importing water and building various industries to introducing life and hurling asteroids at the Martian surface to create heat.

-----

• That I would need different resources to simulate these things.

-----

• That many cards would continue to work over time, necessitating a production phase.

-----

• That I wanted the cards to have thematic tags that could be used to create cool combos and enhance the thematic simulation of the project cards.

-----

• That the scales should have bonus steps that could simulate different things, e.g., water being released when the permafrost begins to melt at 0º C, and an increasing greenhouse effect and rising temperature due to a thickening of the atmosphere.

-----

• That the game would end when Mars was fully terraformed.

-----

• That I wanted to be able to raise temperature gradually, introducing the heat scale that feeds the temperature scale.

One of the most important aspects of terraforming Mars is plant life because it can turn carbon dioxide from the Martian atmosphere into breathable oxygen via photosynthesis. It can also give food and useful materials, in addition to binding the dust. Thus, I had a plant scale on which players marked their accumulated plant resources and received extra oxygen increases and VPs accordingly. All of these aspects still remain in the final, printed game (plus more as you will see).

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3121238_t.jpg]After a month or so, I made a simple Word version of the "cards" and "board" to get a clearer and more playable experience. Algae, for example, costs 1, is a plant bio project, produces 2 plant resources every round, requires there to be 5% ocean in play before you can play it, and gives you 1 immediate plant resource when you play it. This card gets you higher on the plant scale over time, causing oxygen to rise (and your terraform rating!), and is worth extra VPs at the game end.

After designing for a couple of months, I remembered that the Red Mars

trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson was about terraforming and began rereading it, discovering that most of "my" ideas in the game subconsciously came from my earlier reading of those marvelous books. I also found more stuff to put in the game, of course. Anyone familiar with the Red Mars

trilogy will feel at home in this game! But inspiration has also come from NASA, ESA, Wikipedia and other web-articles, as well as Mars One, and the Mars Society president Robert Zubrin (who, by the way, really liked this game and came up with the slogan "Life to Mars, and Mars to life" that I used for this designer diary). Collecting all this information and inspiration on terraforming naturally got my own cogs turning, too, and I came up with a few terraforming ideas myself, being the nerdy science teacher I am.

The next step in the design process was to visualize the parameters on an appealing game board. You cannot do a theme like this justice without some cool graphics, and here is what I came up with:

The market is where you buy new cards for your hand. This was a feature we abandoned because with all the cards being unique and players buying cards from the market all the time, it was a real chore to constantly reevaluate the market. Instead, I decided that players should simply draw cards and choose the ones they want for their hand, paying for each of them and discarding the rest. This created an investment and a difficult choice: Buy more cards for your hand, or save the money to afford playing the ones you already have?

I realized that this layout wouldn't really visualize the terraforming process, so the next iteration had the surface divided into areas that you could claim and on which you could place cities, forests and ocean markers.

Maybe a cool idea, but markers would still not visualize the spreading of water and life on the surface, so another solution was needed.

By using hexagons, tiles could fill up the areas and create continuous oceans and forests. By this time, we'd also worked in standard projects to complement the cards, and milestones and awards for which you could compete. All these changes greatly increased player interaction and helped visualize the development of a living planet.

We also moved much of the resource management to a player board on which resources and production were marked. Gone were the days of filling up cards with common resources! The plant and heat scales were replaced by a simple conversion of resources, which felt much better. The production phase was also much simpler when all production was summarized on the player boards instead of on all the individual cards.

Speaking of the cards, they also got an overhaul by Jonathan:

The player board shown above features fancy icons that we used for a while, designed by Daniel. (Oh, the blessings of a big and creative family!) We went back to plainer icons in order to increase readability.

Just as the game board now illustrated the theme better, we needed the cards to do the same, but adding pictures to Jonathan's design was tricky because of the semi-transparent panels covering a big part of the picture area, so we needed a new card template with opaque panels and dedicated space for the illustration. I made a first design to illustrate the concept, and handed it over to Daniel — and you can see who the better artist is!

However, we felt that this game should have a positive, scientific look to it, not the usual dark dystopia we always see in sci-fi, so we eventually handed the graphics over to another brother, Isaac, who made the final graphical design for Terraforming Mars

:

Needless to say, we are very happy with the result. Another development was that of the corporations. From being anonymous and equal, I invented twelve different ones for the game, each with a background and a specialty.

We still had three problems with the game, though, going into beta-testing.

The first problem was the feeling of being overwhelmed when new players tried to digest their starting cards and choose which cards to buy for their starting hand of ten drawn cards and two corporations. Having all these cards to choose from at the start of the game is important to get enough for a strategy. The solution was beginner corporations for new players that simply gave you the cards and have no extra functions for players to track. Instead of needing to evaluate which cards to buy before even knowing the game, new players could now focus on how to use the cards they received while the experienced players chose their starting hand and corporation. This created a much better learning experience.

The second problem was downtime. As the game progresses, you increase your economy and abilities, meaning there's more to do on your turn; the game bogged down considerably towards the end! A beta-tester suggested that players should alternate doing actions one at a time. This I knew wouldn't work because then the players could just wait until another player was ready to grab a bonus — such as a milestone or bonus step on a parameter — and simply grab it right before their nose without the other player being able to do anything about it. Then it hit me: Let the players choose to do one OR two actions at a time; then it would be much harder for the players to control each other completely, but still the turns would pass quickly. As a bonus, this change allowed players to play fast or slow in order to either race towards a bonus or try to wait out the other players. Worked like a charm...

The third problem was the game time. Even with the new turn structure and its nice flow, the game was long. That's okay for many players, but sometimes you just don't have that time. Shortening the game by adjusting the length of the parameters didn't feel right, so what could we do? Terraforming Mars

ends when Mars is terraformed! There are cards that help you towards this goal and cards that increase your economy or victory points. Each action you do in the game takes a few seconds to perform, so shortening the game time would mean reducing the number of actions that players perform, which means taking out cards that don't help move the terraforming along (which turned out to be about a third of all cards).

A lot of fun and interesting cards were cut, so we decided to keep them in the box as a kind of expansion called "Corporate Era". We also decided that the basic game should have starting production to give the players a jump start. As a result of these alterations, the game time was reduced by a full hour!

Many people (and companies) have put work into this game to make it great – thank you so much! There is, of course, much more to say and many more design iterations that I haven't shown you here, but I'll stop now and hope this has been an interesting read for you.

Cheers!

Jacob Fryxelius

FryxGames

Explore Arkham and Westeros Anew

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/564…-arkham-and-westeros-anew

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3122349_t.jpg]In an effort to ensure that Gen Con 2016 attendees spend no time anywhere but its booth, Fantasy Flight Games

has announced two more Q4 2016 releases in the past couple of days, including Arkham Horror: The Card Game

, the existence of which was leaked in May 2016

.

This cooperative design by Nate French

and Matthew Newman

is for 1-2 players — which continues the trend of games including solo play as an option — with players three and four being able to join the game should you have a second Core Set, and at the mention of the words "Core Set", you should recognize Arkham Horror: The Card Game

as a Living Card Game, that is, a game for which regular mini-expansions will be released in the months and years ahead. Here's an overview of the setting and gameplay:

Something evil stirs in Arkham, and only you can stop it. Blurring the traditional lines between roleplaying and card game experiences, Arkham Horror: The Card Game is a Living Card Game of Lovecraftian mystery, monsters, and madness!

In the game, you and your friend become characters within the quiet New England town of Arkham. You have your talents, sure, but you also have your flaws. Perhaps you've dabbled a little too much in the writings of the Necronomicon, and its words continue to haunt you. Perhaps you feel compelled to cover up any signs of otherworldly evils, hampering your own investigations in order to protect the quiet confidence of the greater population. Perhaps you'll be scarred by your encounters with a ghoulish cult.

No matter what compels you, no matter what haunts you, you'll find both your strengths and weaknesses reflected in your custom deck of cards, and these cards will be your resources as you work with your friends to unravel the world's most terrifying mysteries.

Each of your adventures in Arkham Horror LCG carries you deeper into mystery. You'll find cultists and foul rituals. You'll find haunted houses and strange creatures. And you may find signs of the Ancient Ones straining against the barriers to our world...

The basic mode of play in Arkham LCG is not the adventure, but the campaign. You might be scarred by your adventures, your sanity may be strained, and you may alter Arkham's landscape, burning buildings to the ground. All your choices and actions have consequences that reach far beyond the immediate resolution of the scenario at hand — and your actions may earn you valuable experience with which you can better prepare yourself for the adventures that still lie before you.
Arkham Horror: The Card Game

is available for demo games at Gen Con 2016.

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3122395_t.jpg]• With Hand of the King

, FFG will add another title to its stable of games based on the works of George R. R. Martin, with this design having neither realistic fantasy art nor screenshot stills from the HBO television series, but rather Eurocomic-style caricatures of the Westeros characters. An overview:

The king has called for a lavish feast and tourney, the likes of which have not been seen in the Seven Kingdoms since the days of Aegon the Conquerer. What's more, the king has declared that at this feast, he will choose his new Hand — and you have a chance of rising to this lofty position. Of course, you're not the only one with eyes set on becoming the power behind the Iron Throne. In Hand of the King, you need to scheme and backstab to outwit your opponents, and you need the help of Varys, the Master of Whispers, to do it.

Hand of the King is a fast-paced card game of conspiracies and sudden twists of fate for two to four players, challenging each of you to gain the most support among the twisted intrigues of the King's Landing court. Each turn, you send Varys to do your bidding, moving through the court and inciting iconic characters from A Song of Ice and Fire to support your cause. With the help of some companions and crafty alliances with other players, you just might rise to become the king's new Hand!

In more detail, this Bruno Cathala

design has players moving Varys in orthogonal lines in a 6x6 grid, stopping it on a character token, then collecting that token and any other character from that House that you passed over. Possess as many characters from a House as someone else, and you claim the banner from that person. Collect the final character from a House, and you immediately use the power of one of six companions; since the game contains fourteen companions, the mix of powers will differ each game.

As with the title above, A Game of Thrones: Hand of the King

is due out Q4 2016 and will be available for demo at Gen Con 2016.

Will this be the final title FFG announces prior to Gen Con 2016? What else could be left?!

Say Hello to the SPIEL 2016 Preview

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/566…-hello-spiel-2016-preview

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic1068166_t.png]Gen Con 2016 has ended, so let's move on to what's next with the launching of the SPIEL 2016 Preview

. Yes, already!

While I'm happy to kick off this preview, I regret to say that it contains barely more than one hundred titles at this point. Why the regrets? Because I wrote to dozens of publishers two weeks prior to Gen Con 2016 and I had anticipated being able to add all of the information that they sent me to the SPIEL 2016 Preview before it went live. Alas, info on Gen Con kept pouring in, too, so I focused on that (as well as regular BGG News posts) instead and filtered everything related to SPIEL into an increasingly jam-packed inbox folder.

Now I've switched gears, though, and other than a few Gen Con round-ups and the publication of individual game overview videos once Aldie edits the four days of livestream game demonstrations

that we recorded in Indianapolis, I'll be kicking out SPIEL 2016 info right and left until I hit my final update deadline of Friday, October 7.

If you have info about new games being released or demoed at SPIEL — and yes, the convention's name is spelled in all caps, as confirmed by the event organizer — and that info isn't already on the SPIEL 2016 Preview, feel free to email me at the address in the BGG News header at the top of the page. We hit 774 listings in the SPIEL 2015 Preview

, and I'm excited/terrified to see what the final tally will be this year.

With that said, dig in!

Say Hello to the SPIEL 2016 Preview

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/566…-hello-spiel-2016-preview

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic1068166_t.png]Gen Con 2016 has ended, so let's move on to what's next with the launching of the SPIEL 2016 Preview

. Yes, already!

While I'm happy to kick off this preview, I regret to say that it contains barely more than one hundred titles at this point. Why the regrets? Because I wrote to dozens of publishers two weeks prior to Gen Con 2016 and I had anticipated being able to add all of the information that they sent me to the SPIEL 2016 Preview before it went live. Alas, info on Gen Con kept pouring in, too, so I focused on that (as well as regular BGG News posts) instead and filtered everything related to SPIEL into an increasingly jam-packed inbox folder.

Now I've switched gears, though, and other than a few Gen Con round-ups and the publication of individual game overview videos once Aldie edits the four days of livestream game demonstrations

that we recorded in Indianapolis, I'll be kicking out SPIEL 2016 info right and left until I hit my final update deadline of Friday, October 7.

If you have info about new games being released or demoed at SPIEL — and yes, the convention's name is spelled in all caps, as confirmed by the event organizer — and that info isn't already on the SPIEL 2016 Preview, feel free to email me at the address in the BGG News header at the top of the page. We hit 774 listings in the SPIEL 2015 Preview

, and I'm excited/terrified to see what the final tally will be this year.

With that said, dig in!

New Game Round-up: Deceiving in One Night Ultimate Alien, Drafting in Ethnos, and Drinking in Raise Your Goblets

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/568…-one-night-ultimate-alien

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3138320_t.jpg]Wow, a week has passed since my last post

! This is the longest I've gone without writing anything for BGG News, but this absence is not without reason. The final two weeks of preparation before Gen Con 2016 involved far more work than anticipated, what with publishers announcing titles up until the last minute before the show and the unexpected gift of the BGG Hot Games room

(which worked out far better than I had anticipated).

With all that going on, I had barely made progress on the SPIEL 2016 Preview

, which I pushed live on the Monday following Gen Con and have been working on ever since. The preview now holds 230 listings, and I still

have a mountain of information to sift through. That said, let's check out a few other games that may or may not be available at SPIEL 2016, starting with:

• One Night Ultimate Alien

is the next title from Bézier Games

in its One Night Ultimate...

series of hidden role games. Little has been announced about this Ted Alspach

and Akihisa Okui

title other than that the roles involve aliens, the game can be combined with other ONU

titles, and a Kickstarter for this title launches on August 29, 2016. This teaser trailer

includes teasers, as promised.

• To follow up on that, at Gen Con 2016 Bézier Games announced Ultimate Werewolf Legacy

, a project designed by Alspach and (yes) Rob Daviau

that sounds exactly like what you'd expect those words to mean:

In Ultimate Werewolf Legacy, players and the village itself have attributes that are retained between games, with events taking place in the first games having effects that ripple through remaining games. Make a bad decision early on, and it can haunt the village for years to come! Players can earn titles, which provides them with special abilities in future games, regardless of their role.

The full campaign is divided into chapters of about three games each, with each chapter designed to be played in a single night with the same group of players. Each chapter is standalone so that different players can play different chapters, but since early chapters affect successive ones, it's an even richer experience to play through more than one chapter. Even better, the chapters are designed so that you can switch moderators between games.

Ultimate Werewolf Legacy uses the basic gameplay found in Ultimate Werewolf and adds a number of twists and Legacy-style mechanisms to give the game a richer, more immersive experience than werewolf players will find any other way.

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3126414_t.jpg]• In addition to unveiling a new logo at Gen Con 2016, Cool Mini Or Not

previewed at least a dozen upcoming titles, some in fairly extensive detail during press events and some with little more than a box in a display case.

One of the more detailed presentations was for Paolo Mori

's Ethnos

, which features artwork by John Howe and which is due out Q4 2016/Q1 2017. Here's an overview of gameplay:

In Ethnos, players call upon the support of giants, merfolk, halfings, minotaurs, and other fantasy tribes to help them gain control of the land. After three ages of play, whoever has collected the most glory wins!

In more detail, the land of Ethnos contains twelve tribes of fantasy creatures, and in each game you choose six of them (five in a 2/3-player game), then create a deck with only the creatures in those tribes. The cards come in six colors, which match the six regions of Ethnos. Place three glory tokens in each region, arranging them from low to high.

Each player starts the game with one card in hand, then 4-12 cards are placed face up on the table. On a turn, a player either recruits an ally or plays a band of allies. In the former case, you take a face-up card (without replacing it from the deck) or the top card of the deck and add it to your hand. In the latter case, you choose a set of cards in your hand that match either in tribe or in color, play them in front of you on the table, then discard all other cards in hand. You then place one or more tokens in the region that matches the color of the top card just played, and you use the power of the tribe member on the top card just played.

At the end of the first age, whoever has the most tokens in a region scores the glory shown on the first token. After the second age, the players with the most and secondmost tokens score glory equal to the values shown on the first and second tokens. Players score again after the third age, then whoever has the most glory wins. (Games with two and three players last only two ages.)

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3132188_t.jpg]• Another CMON title shown to the press — and one that we played, too — was Tim Page

's Raise Your Goblets

, a co-publication with Italian publisher Horrible Games

. Let's start with a short description:

Have you felt the thrill of the struggle between life and death, sitting at the same table with your worst enemy and an unreasonable amount of poison? Don’t forget to bring some antidote when playing Raise Your Goblets!

In Raise Your Goblets, players take the roles of nobles at a banquet, each one with their own agenda of personal vendetta. Each player has wine, poison and antidote tokens they can pour into the goblets, trying to poison their enemies while staying alive themselves! Each noble also has a special ability that allows them to bend or even break a rule.

Use all of your actions to become the most influent noble at the table!

I have not felt the thrill of the struggle between life and death, but I did enjoy the simulacrum of same presented in this design. In more detail, each character has a plastic goblet, and each goblet is primed in secret at the start of the round with either wine, poison or antidote. On a turn, you take two actions, with actions being to peek inside your goblet, rotate all goblets left or right, swap your goblet with someone else's, or secretly add one of your wine, poison or antidote tokens to any goblet. Once someone has "served" all of their wine, they can call a toast on their turn instead of doing anything else. Each player, including the toaster, takes one more action, then everyone drinks. If you have more poison than antidote, you die.

What's your goal in doing all of this? Well, at the start of a round you are given a target to kill, and everyone knows who is targeting whom. If at the end of a round, your target is dead, you score 1 point; if you're alive, you score 1 point; if both of these things are true, you score a bonus point (3 total). Also, whoever has the most wine in their cup scores 1 point. If someone has died, they receive a new noble card, and at the end of three rounds, whoever has scored the most points wins.

The noble cards provide all the twists that you can imagine, with players being able to peek into any goblet, or remove two tokens from a goblet then return one of them, or call for a vote on a final goblet rotation before drinking, and so on.

In the end, I tied with Brittanie Boe for the most points, so we had a drink-off to determine the winner, and I ended up with poison in my cup. All hail Queen Bebo!

New Game Round-up: Stealing from Giants, Escorting a Princess, and Carrying a Parasite Back to Earth

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/568…giants-escorting-princess

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3138767_t.png]

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3138763_t.png]• In February 2016, WizKids

announced

that Zev Shlasinger — formerly of Z-Man Games

— would lead its "expanded Board Game operations", and the first titles chosen by Shlasinger have been announced, starting with Jonathan Leistiko

's Blank White Dice

, which will debut in October 2016 and which works as follows:

In Blank White Dice, players roll the game dice to activate the icons on them and gain enough points to win the game!

But not everything is as straightforward as that! If a player rolls a blank face, they draw their own icons on the faces of their dice. Some icons give players points, others may cause opponents to lose points, force competitors to re-roll and more! The first player to reach 13 points at the end of a round wins.

Following in December 2016 is Burke's Gambit

from Rob Yates

, which takes a minimalist approach (in terms of components) to the "traitor in space" genre:

Speeding through space, Burke's Gambit is a rugged company freighter on an extremely important mission, with its seasoned crew being tasked with finding powerful alien technology. What the crew finds instead is something they never expected: a dangerous parasitic organism has somehow made its way into the ship and inside the body of one of the crew members!

Just as the bio-organism contamination alarm goes off, one of the crew members seizes the chaotic moment and sabotages the freighter's engines. The ship, its crew, and the parasitic organism are all on a collision course with planet Earth, where further contamination of the world's population awaits.

Which of the crew are dedicated company personnel wanting the alien organism to reach Earth? Which are just crew wanting to identify the infected crew member? Most importantly, which member of the crew is infected?! Join the crew of Burke's Gambit on a wild space adventure with hidden affiliations and a hidden infected player.

In Burke's Gambit, players take on specific roles of Captain, Marine, Comms Officer and more as they take turns and roll a die. The possibilities of the die include damaging another player, healing themselves, looking at a crew affiliation card, or even scanning a player's diagnostic card. But if you roll an engine power up, you hasten the ship's arrival to Earth. When Burke's Gambit reaches Earth, a vote must be held to eject someone from the airlock (assuming anyone's left)!

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3107308_t.png]• Japon Brand

has announced two dozen games

that it will have available at SPIEL 2016 — and yes, I know that I still need to add them to BGG's SPIEL 2016 Preview

— with one of those titles being Unicornus Knights

, a 2-6 player co-op from Seiji Kanai

and Kuro

that bears this description:

Unicornus Knights is a cooperative board game where the players are generals who must assist the Princess of a Kingdom to reach her capital. Chased away from the capital by a sudden attack from the Empire, the Princess is set on returning, and will stop at nothing. The players must pave way for the princess so that she does not run into enemy hands.

The game is played on a modular board, where each board contains an enemy general. When a player closes in upon an enemy general, random "fate" cards are drawn that will represent the connection between the enemy general and the player, adding to the narrative and available tactics.

Should you not be attending SPIEL 2016 (which is true of most of people in the world) you can take comfort perhaps in Alderac Entertainment Group

stating

that it will release the game in 2017.

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic2360653_t.png]• Renegade Game Studios

has announced

a November 2016 release for The Blood of an Englishman

from Dan Cassar

, designer of the masterful Arboretum

. Here's the lowdown on this two-player game:

"Fee Fi Fo Fum! I smell the blood of an Englishman!" roared the giant as he crashed through the vines. Jack, with one arm around his precious stolen harp and the other grasping the beanstalk, felt the rush of danger. Will he make it to the bottom in time to chop down the leafy ladder, or will the giant successfully catch the thieving beggar?

In The Blood of an Englishman, players take on the role of either Jack or the Giant. The Giant must maneuver the Fee Fi Fo and Fum cards while Jack tries to create three beanstalks to steal the bag of gold, the Golden Goose, and the Singing Harp. Each player has different available actions and must carefully arrange the cards to achieve their goal. Are you brave enough to face your fate?

And this cover deserves to shown at larger-than-thumbnail size, so here it is:

Gen Con 2016: Video Round-Up 1 — SeaFall, Vast: The Crystal Caverns, Clank!, Terraforming Mars, and Ice Cool

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/569…1-seafall-vast-crystal-ca

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3107569_t.png]We're ten days past Gen Con 2016, and by this point Aldie has processed most of the game overview videos that we recorded over the four days of the convention, and we've been posting them regularly on the BGG YouTube channel. (Brad and Dave at iOS News have long since posted everything they recorded off-site, making us look like pikers, but that's mostly my fault for working on nothing other than the SPIEL 2016 Preview last week.)

In any case, here are a few highlight videos of games demoed and sold at Gen Con 2016, starting with the fastest sellout of the convention: Rob Daviau

's SeaFall

from Plaid Hat Games

. The line of VIP buyers on Thursday morning wrapped clear around the PHG booth, leaving copies available for only two "normal" people at the end of the line, so if you want to know what the price of a VIP ticket gets you, it gets you access to buy SeaFall

. If you missed out on SeaFall

— as most people did — you have the consolation of listening to Daviau sum up several years of design work in less than eight minutes.

• We didn't feature SeaFall

in the BGG Hot Games room — partly because we didn't have a copy and mostly because it wouldn't make sense to have a legacy game in that environment — but we did have two copies of Vast: The Crystal Caverns

from Leder Games

, and those copies were in constant use, thanks in part to co-designer Patrick Leder

pretty much always having someone on hand to teach the game to newcomers. Given the nature of the game — that is, five asymmetric roles — a teacher seems like a great thing to have on hand to get you started, and Leder takes on that role in this overview.

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3056966_t.jpg]• Dungeon delve meets deck-builder in Paul Dennen's Clank!

, which Renegade Game Studios plans to release in October 2016 and which snuck through our "no preview" filter that largely worked to keep us focused on games debuting at Gen Con 2016 or newly released prior to the show.

• Stronghold Games

donated one of everything new to Gen Con 2016 to the BGG Hot Games room, and while prepping Terraforming Mars

on Wednesday night before the start of the con, I kept saying to myself, "Self, who's really going to dive into Terraforming Mars

on their own from the rulebook? Stephen was a sweetheart to donate this along with his other titles, but maybe he just needed the tax write-off because no one's going to play this." So of course when I visited the Hot Games room on Thursday night practically the first game that I see on the table is four players in the midst of Terraforming Mars

. Shows what I know about con behavior...

• Ice Cool

from Brain Games

was one of the three games that I played at Gen Con 2016, mostly because I wanted to teach others in the Hot Games room. The overview video doesn't really capture the joy of flicking the penguins all over the place, with one person trying to catch the others before they can shoot through the doorways and grab their fish. I've played with kids as young as three — although it was "played" more than played — and it's been a blast each time.

• Let's close this post with our wrap-up video for day 1 of Gen Con 2016, which mostly consists of me being really tired, yet simultaneously energetic enough to talk over Stephanie as she tries to lead me to more fertile areas of conversation. Watching yourself on video can be quite educational!

Gen Con 2016: Video Round-Up II — Captain Sonar, Covert, The Goonies, Eight Epics, Love Letter: Premium Edition & Thunderstone: Third Edition

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/569…ii-captain-sonar-covert-g

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3107569_t.png]• Let's start another round-up of game overview videos from Gen Con 2016 with one title that might be the definition of "convention game", by which I mean a game that excels in a public environment because the crowd around you can pick up on the game immediately and follow along while you play.

I've now taught Captain Sonar

from Fraga and Lemonnier more times than I've played, yet I'm still not sure that I'm teaching the game optimally as each of four players on a team have individual roles that all need to be taught separately, yet everyone plays at the same time and the roles themselves are simple. Let's see whether Fabien from Matagot

can give me any teaching advice...

• Let's transition on the color palette from blue to orange, this being for good or ill a fairly popular color combination

. Kane Klenko's Covert

was one of many titles debuting from Renegade Game Studios

at Gen Con 2016.

Youtube Video

• And we'll roll from blue and orange to orange and blue with The Goonies: Adventure Card Game

from Riddle and Pinchback. I'm amused by how Erik Dahlman from Albino Dragon

opens with "I guess I don't have to say anything about The Goonies

..." while of course my knowledge of The Goonies

begins and ends with it being a 1980s movie that features kids. I'm probably not missing anything, right?

• Designer Seiji Kanai

was a guest of honor at the AEG

booth at Gen Con 2016 as the publisher had multiple titles from him debuting or available for purchase, with one in the former category being Love Letter: Premium Edition

. I'm continually stunned (in a good way) by how influential this game has been, and it makes me think about all of the other hundreds of tiny games that have appeared at places like Tokyo Game Market, then vanished from public view. What treasures have we missed amongst those titles?

• AEG also featured its version of Kanai's Eight Epics

, which he originally self-published through his own Kanai Factory, then expanded

, then licensed

to another designer who wanted to create his own version. As with Love Letter

, Eight Epics

is a simple concept that can be reinterpreted in any number of settings and times.

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic544780_t.jpg]

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic1196537_t.jpg]• Todd Rowland of AEG also talked briefly about the third edition of Thunderstone

that the publisher plans to bring to Kickstarter in late 2016. Rowland focused mostly on their plans to incorporate retailers into the KS rather than any changes to the game design itself, but this talk is a starting point for what's to come.

Gen Con 2016: Video Round-Up III — Rising Sun, Bloodborne: The Card Game, Mansions of Madness, Hit Z Road and Joking Hazard

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/569…iii-rising-sun-bloodborne

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3107569_t.png]• The most talked about game at Gen Con 2016 wasn't even known publicly before the fair opened, this being Eric M. Lang

's Rising Sun

, which Cool Mini Or Not

announced on Friday during the fair. I knew that CMON was announcing something by Lang as the publisher had asked whether they could reserve a spot in the BGG booth late on Friday, but beyond "something" I knew nothing. Now we know a little more thanks to Lang himself...

• One of the first day sellouts at Gen Con 2016 was Lang's Bloodborne: The Card Game

, most likely because publisher Cool Mini Or Not had shipped in advance copies for the show to create buzz in advance of the game's September 2016 release date. Buzz buzz buzz!

• One of the biggest splashes of Gen Con 2016 took place a few days before the fair opened, when Fantasy Flight Games

announced that the second edition of Mansions of Madness

would debut both at the convention and at retail stores on August 4. Retailers complain about being shut out of titles that debut at Gen Con, or of having their customers poached by publishers for the aforementioned buzz, but at least in this one case they could buzz along just like everyone else.

• Gen Con 2016 a high percentage of Australian publishers in attendance, including honorary potential Australian designer Martin Wallace

, who had traveled a long way to see two of his releases from Space Cowboys

on sale during the show: Via Nebula

and (the title shown here) Hit Z Road

.

• The fastest turnaround time from knowing that someone would be available for a demo in the BGG booth to said demo taking place might belong to Noel and Rob from Cyanide & Happiness

as Scott and I ran into them and Shari Spiro from Breaking Games

in the aisle behind the B.G. booth, heard they were available, walked back to the BGG booth, then found out we were ahead on schedule, so *boom* your time on camera has arrived. Sometimes things just work out that way...

New Game Round-up: Nominating Cthulhu for King, Fighting Wizards with Rocks, and Exploring Key to the City

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/570…-cthulhu-king-fighting-wi

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3043734_t.jpg]• IELLO

has announced a new line of Monster Packs that will serve as mini-expansions for both King of Tokyo

and King of New York

with the first pack due out Q1 2017, and who else are you going to launch a monster-based line with other than Cthulhu? Here's an overview of what's inside King of Tokyo: Monster Pack – Cthulhu

:

King of Tokyo: Monster Pack – Cthulhu includes a new monster — Cthulhu, in case you couldn't guess — as well as eight evolution cards for use with King of Tokyo and eight evolution cards for King of New York. Fifteen cultist tokens are also included for card effects.

These packs will retail for $10-15 depending on their contents.

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3147701_t.jpg]

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3148756_t.png]• Uwe Rosenberg's At the Gates of Loyang

is returning to print, with Pegasus Spiele

planning to have German-language copies on hand at SPIEL 2016 in October and with Tasty Minstrel Games

bringing the English-language version to market at a later date.

• WizKids

has announced another D&D

-related title in its board game line-up, but this design from Cappel

, Lim

and Cormier

is a far different beast than its Temple of Elemental Evil Board Game

. Here's a rundown of Dungeons & Dragons: Rock Paper Wizard

, due out January 2017 but possibly showing up in time for advance sales at SPIEL 2016:

In Dungeons & Dragons: Rock Paper Wizard, the dragon has been slain, leaving behind a treasure over which to fight, and the players are wizards who are fighting to claim the most gold from the dragon's pile.

The players have cards depicting various well-known D&D spells, and each card shows a Rock-Paper-Scissors gesture that the player must make to cast, while pointing at another player as the target of the spell. All players choose their spells simultaneously, and the spells can move the wizards closer or farther away from the treasure or affect the game state in other ways as well.

The first player to collect 25 gold wins.

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3145313_t.jpg]• As is his custom, designer/publisher Richard Breese

of R&D Games

has created an explanatory Geeklist for the titles that he plans to debut at SPIEL, those titles being Key to the City – London

( GL

) and the Keyflower

mini-expansion Keymelequin

( GL

). Complete rules for both items are linked to on their respective BGG game pages.

• I realize that BGG News posts have been sporadic of late, which is odd since this is the time of year in which I see more info on new games than any other. I've just been pouring all of that information onto BGG's SPIEL 2016 Preview

— now up to four hundred listings! — and forgetting to post about them in this spot. I keep thinking about posting this or that, but then I see another five games and forget about the earlier ones. I'll try to keep y'all more up-to-date in the days and weeks ahead...

New Game Round-up: Boarding Nautilion, Paddling Up the Amazon, and Riding Ohley and Orgler's Railroads

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/571…nautilion-paddling-amazon

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3130865_t.png]• To follow up on my note from the other day

, let's sample some of the new titles that I've dropped on the SPIEL 2016 Preview

, such as Shadi Torbey

's Nautilion

, the next title in his Oniverse series and one that Z-Man Games

will debut at SPIEL 2016 in October. Here's an overview:

Nautilion is a dice game in the Oniverse series!

Take the helm of a Nautilion submarine and recruit a heroic crew to vanquish the treacherous Darkhouse that lurks in the oceanic depths. You must get to the Abyss, lair of the Darkhouse, before the Phantom Submarine (his henchman) reaches your homeland, the Happy Isles — but to defeat the Darkhouse, not only must you be faster than the Phantom Submarine, you must also assemble the submarine's crew along the way.

Each turn, you roll three dice and give one to each of these figures: the Nautilion, the Phantom Submarine, and the Darkhouse. The dice of the Nautilion and the Phantom Submarine move those figures along a path formed by Crew tokens: the Nautilion from the Happy Isles towards the Abyss; the Phantom Submarine in the opposite direction. The crew token on which your Nautilion ends its move joins your submarine, the one the Phantom Submarine reaches is lost!

Only four copies exist of each of the nine different tokens, so you have to decide carefully which die you need and which you can leave to your enemies. (The Darkhouse doesn't move, but inflicts damage to you each time he gets a die with a high value.) To win, you need to reach the Abyss with a full crew of nine different tokens.

Five expansions are included with the game, adding new crew members, powers, treacheries and challenges.

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3147391_t.png]• Z-Man Games has a few other SPIEL 2016 releases as well, such as Klaus-Jürgen Wrede

's Carcassonne: Amazonas

, which original publisher Hans im Glück

will release in German at the same show. How are we laying down tiles this time, in what is the third title in the "Carcassonne Around the World" series?

In Carcassonne: Amazonas, players sail their boats to the Amazon to discover abundant wildlife. Players score points not only for discovering animals, but for visiting native villages, and whoever reaches the end of the Amazon first — which ends the game as well — receives a bonus reward.

• Hans im Glück has two other items due to debut at SPIEL 2016, neither of which has an announced English version yet, but let's give it time. Helmut Ohley

and Leonhard Orgler

expand Russian Railroads

with American Railroads

— a mini-expansion with new player boards and various new elements — while also presenting what HiG's Moritz Brunnhofer describes as an evolution of Russian Railroads

, "a card game of about sixty minutes with the feeling of a board game". Here's a short description of First Class: Unterwegs im Orient Express

:

In First Class: Unterwegs im Orient Express, players try to score as many fame points as possible by building a rich network of rails, by building luxurious train cars, or by serving well-paying passengers.

First Class is a card game that feels more like a board game, and since each game is played with the base cards and two of five modules, the game offers lots of variety as not all elements are used in each playing.

Gen Con 2016: Video Round-Up IV — Thornwatch overview and playthrough

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/571…iv-thornwatch-overview-an

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic2776662_t.jpg]We scheduled dozens of game overview demos in the BGG booth at Gen Con 2016, but I also scheduled some in other locations, including one with Lone Shark Games

— and unbeknownst to me LSG had scheduled a full playthrough of Thornwatch

with co-designers Mike Selinker

, Chad Brown

and Penny Arcade's Mike Krahulik

, from whom the game idea had originated.

Thus, we ended up recording a 56-minute video that starts with an overview of the game's origin and ongoing development process — ongoing in that the game design isn't final and no publication date has been announced as of yet — then we play through a scenario. For those who prefer words, let's start with the game description in the database, after which we can move to our poorly-lit, recorded-on-site video:

Thornwatch is an adventure-based card game for 2-4 players and a Game Master. Players are Icons of the Thornwatch: scarred veterans of the Eyrewood who now live as ghosts that are summoned by the ancient ritual of tying a knot of thorns around a birch tree. The Icons summoned to a particular tree do not necessarily know each other or the true nature of the problem they've been called to resolve; all they know is that they've answered the call, and they're bound to see it through.

In game terms, through the play of Attack, Ability, Tactic, and Synergy cards, the Icons engage foes to resolve the "knot" that summoned them, with the knot giving players clues as to what their mission might be. Each player represents a character who fits in one of four classes — Guard, Blade, Sage, Greenheart — and each character has a deck that features moves and abilities specific to your character.

During the game, which lasts 2-4 hours depending on whether you're playing a single adventure or a campaign, you'll move characters on a map specific to the adventure and (most likely) encounter others that you must defeat in combat. When you suffer damage, you shuffle wound cards into your deck. Those cards stay in your hand once you draw them, and if you hold more wounds than your character's wound threshold, you die. You're a ghost, though, so death isn't permanent; instead you add a random Scar card to your deck, with each Scar having some negative effect on you.

New Game Round-up: Building High, Digging Deep, and Floating on Water

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/572…igh-digging-deep-and-floa

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3150098_t.png]• Jeffrey D. Allers

' Skyways

, coming from Eagle-Gryphon Games

in 2017, is an evolution of sorts from his 2009 design Heartland

:

The cities of the future continue to expand…upward! As buildings get taller, skyways are constructed to connect buildings above street level to allow for easier foot traffic between them.

In Skyways, you and your opponents are building the city, floor by floor and skyway by skyway. By placing tiles of the same color, you can score large numbers of points. By placing a building capital on top, you finish a building and claim a colored area for yourself for bonus points at the end of the game. Do you want to score more now and risk giving your opponent a larger area connected to their capital, or do you want to get your capitals out as quickly as you can and enlarge your own areas for the end game?

The player with the most points when the tiles have been placed wins!

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3132462_t.jpg]• Lanterns: The Emperor's Gifts

from Jason D. Kingsley

and Renegade Game Studios

is a small expansion for Christopher Chung's Lanterns: The Harvest Festival

due out January 2017 that gives each player a supply of pavilions. What do these add to the game?

When you place a tile, you may choose to build a pavilion on that tile. When you make a color match on a pavilion, you earn a gift from the emperor, a new currency that can be redeemed on new actions defined by emperor cards.

Each game, two Emperor cards are revealed from a small deck. Each turn, each player can redeem two gifts to activate one card and perform the special action associated with it: make an extra dedication at the end of your turn, convert favor tokens into victory points, etc. These actions increase the variety and the puzzliness of the base game.

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic2965951_t.png]• Following the demise of 5th Street Games, game designer Grant Rodiek

took back the English-language rights to Farmageddon

, after which he overhauled the graphic design, tweaked the crop balance, and otherwise tweaked and improved the design

for a new edition from his own Hyperbole Games

. Those copies are available for purchase from the publisher

now ahead of their official October 2016 release date. Here's an overview of the old and new:

Farmageddon is a game of skillful hand management for 2-4 players that takes 30 minutes to play. Choose when to plant, what to fertilize, and with a little luck, you'll be the master of the farmers' markets when the dust settles.

The Farm Fresh Edition of Farmageddon brings several changes to the farm and is the best way yet to get your hands dirty. In addition to beautiful new illustrations and a brand-new layout for the cards, we've used our years of experience to make this the best looking and playing version of Farmageddon ever. For veteran Farmageddon players, the gameplay updates include removing fields, which allows players to stay involved in every turn, and allows for more planting strategies. The FrankenCrops and Farmer cards have been revised or completely re-imagined to be more to be more balanced, more interesting, and to allow for more creative play.

There's never been a better time to have a weird day at the farm.

• IELLO

has shown off artwork for a new game in the works from Maxime Rambourg

, designer of The Big Book of Madness

. Here's an overview of what Arena

is all about:

Arena has two phases. First, players bid for the best equipment, mounts, and weapons. Second, they fight!

All cards in the game have a mythological theme, featuring some of the most famous members of various cultures' myths and histories, such as Mjölnir, Osiris, and Quetzalcoatl.

Sail to New Waters in Small World: River World

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/572…s-small-world-river-world

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3157889_t.jpg] Days of Wonder

has announced a SPIEL 2016 debut for Small World: River World

, a new expansion for Philippe Keyaerts

' Small World

that sets the familiar races squabbling over territories in a new small world. Here's an overview:

In Small World: River World, players discover new maps full of water regions haunted by merciless pirates. Players need to defend their precious harbors against them, fight them on the river, and still keep an eye on their opponents! Some regions such as the shipyard or the temple of the seer may help them to have the upper hand, but in River World, there is still not enough room for everybody. And random events that trigger on each turn add to the chaos!

Small World: River World includes two double-sided game boards.

The press release includes this quote from Keyaerts about the expansion: "The maps of River World change the game dynamics. The river allows you to move faster throughout the board, attacking regions that seemed out of reach. These new maps that will force players to re­think their conquest strategies. The events that appear on every turn considerably affect river regions: these can be safe havens as well as deadly traps!"

Small World: River World

, which carries a $25/€25 MSRP, will be available in Europe by the end of October 2016 and in the U.S. by the end of November.

New Game Round-up: More Fields to Explore, Monuments to Build, and Castles Upon Which to Panic

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/573…s-explore-monuments-build

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic2225968_t.png]Time to clean house — my inbox house, that is — with many short announcements:

• In mid-August 2016, Frank Heeren from Feuerland Spiele

announced

that a three-player expansion for Uwe Rosenberg

's Fields of Arle

will be released in 2017. My edited description:

This expansion introduces ships and tea as new resources as the people from East Frisia are very fond of their black tea, a special blend that is mixed only in that region. Players will be able to dig ditches as an alternative way to dry the bog and to speed up agriculture and sheep breeding. Also new buildings will be introduced.

The game for three players lasts seven half-years, and players each start with two crafting developments/improvements. This expansion also works with the two-player game!

• Designer Alexander Pfister

tweeted

on August 25, 2016 that in two months, Longsdale in Revolt

— the first expansion to Oh My Goods!

— will be available for playing. No other details right now.

• Steve Jackson Games

has delayed the release of the sixth edition of Car Wars

until 2017, but it has given an update on what's different in this edition

.

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3161240_t.jpg]• Publishing partners IDW Games

and Pandasaurus Games

have a new Kevin Wilson

title in the works for release in Q4 2016 or Q1 2017. Here's an overview of Escape from 100 Million BC

:

In Escape from 100 Million BC, players take the roles of stranded time travelers who are hurrying to reassemble their ship because a nearby volcano is about to blow. There are also dinosaurs to dodge, time rifts to close, and historical figures to round up who got caught in the wake of the passing time ship. Each player has unique abilities and stats which will aid in repairing the time ship. Players must be careful not to disrupt the timeline too much or the volcano will detonate, wiping out proof of the expedition altogether.

• Pandasaurus Games has also released a short description of Scott Almes

' StarFall

, due out in November 2016 and previously described as having a Knizia-like bidding system:

The night is still, cloudless and dark. An oasis of interstellar magic lies beyond the stratosphere: countless stars, burning comets, planets, ivory moons, nebulae and perhaps even a beastly black hole or two. It's all up there for the finding. At the Royal Hinterland Observatory, endless elaborate sky formations are within reach of discovery—but you have to lay claim before your fellow astronomers nab the glory for themselves. StarFall is a clever game of wits, bidding and quick thinking in which the aim is to obtain the most impressive portfolio of cosmic curiosities.

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3133460_t.png]• Cyclades: Monuments

, an expansion for Cathala

and Maublanc

's Cyclades

due out Q4 2016 from Matagot

, consists of ten monument miniatures and ten associated monument cards that will allow you to "build temples dedicated to Zeus or Poseidon's glory, a great university to Athena, or a citadel from which Ares will watch down, with each of these new buildings giving you a unique power to achieve victory".

• Fireside Games

will release Castle Panic: Engines of War

, a third expansion for Castle Panic

, in November 2016, with this expansion adding a helpful engineer who can build catapults, ballistas, and barricades to help defend against monsters now using a siege tower, a war wagon, and a battering ram while recruiting help from a shaman, a breathtaker, and goblin saboteurs.

• This tweet stands on its own:

New Game Round-up: Final Fantasy and The Reckoners Come to the Tabletop; Deputies Do Their Job in OutLawed!

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/573…asy-and-reckoners-come-ta

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3162261_t.png]Let's dig out some more recent and not-necessarily-recent game announcements from the inbox:

• Square Enix

is a Japanese video game publisher best known for the Final Fantasy

franchise, and in 2011 the company worked with Hobby Japan

to release the Final Fantasy Trading Card Game

, which used characters from various FF

titles in a two-player duel.

Now Square Enix plans to release Mr. Kageyama

's Final Fantasy Trading Card Game

in both Europe and North America, with the game appearing in English, German, French, Spanish and Italian. As with most trading card games, the game will be released in starter sets — three of them: Fire & Earth, Ice & Lightning, Wind & Water — and booster packs, with twelve cards in the latter and fifty cards in the former, thirty of them being unique to starter sets. Opus 1

of the Final Fantasy Trading Card Game

, as this initial launch is dubbed, debuts in September in Europe and in October in North America.

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3162272_t.png]Square Enix also plans the far lighter Chocobo's Crystal Hunt

in the U.S. in October 2016, with this game being for 3-5 players aged five and up, with a playing time of 10-20 minutes. Not much has been announced yet about the game:

In Chocobo's Crystal Hunt, you send your cute Chocobos on a journey to steal your opponents' crystals...before they can steal yours! Use your intuition and observation skills in this fast-paced, fun and addictive game.

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3160652_t.jpg]• Green Couch Games

has announced its next release for Q1 2017, another title from JurassAttack!

's Ryan Cowler

with the similarly CamelCased title OutLawed!

Here's an overview:

OutLawed! is a social game of bluffing, truth-telling, and out-thinking your opponents. Each player has an identical set of eleven outlaw cards imagined as animals escaped from the zoo somewhere in the wild, wild west. Over a series of rounds, players take turns playing a card face down and making a claim about which character card they played. Players are free to tell the truth about the character played or to make a bold-faced lie! After players have played cards and made their claims, all the characters are revealed and each player assesses whether or not they have met their outlaw's "apprehend if" condition. Players who were successful add their outlaws to their jail pile while all other players place the card back in their hand. Lionel Manesworth, for example, can be captured only if you tell the truth. The Vixen Twins get nabbed when others are convinced to play the same card during the round. Lawman Croc Holliday will catch anybody who isn't on the up and up.

Once a player fills up their jail, everyone compares their total reward value of apprehended cards to see who has earned the most rewards and gets to fill the vacant position as deputy of Bandit Bluff.

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic2147954_t.png]• Nauvoo Games

has acquired a license to create games based on Brandon Sanderson's young adult fantasy series "The Reckoners", and the publisher has released this overview of what The Reckoners

game from Brett Sobol

and Seth Van Orden

will be like:

The Reckoners, a game based on the young adult fantasy novels by Brandon Sanderson, allows players to take on the roles of the novels' protagonists and work together to save the world.

In the game, players must overcome multiple ruthless and power-hungry "Epics" – the equivalent of supervillains – that each have unique, game-impacting abilities. Players must decide how to resolve these competing priorities together to eliminate epics and ultimately win the game. How, when, and where you act will determine your victory or failure.

Links: CMON and Ultra PRO Acquire, Portal Expands, and Hanjin Stops

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/574…acquire-portal-expands-an

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3126414_t.jpg]• A lot of announcements (and other things) piled up in the inbox during Gen Con, and I'm only now clearing them out, such as the news that Cool Mini Or Not

(technically CMON Limited) "acquired all branding and intellectual property rights for the successful Zombicide

franchise from Guillotine Games

". David Preti, Director of Guillotine Games, has become Creative Director of CMON Limited, and Guillotine Games will continue to work exclusively with CMON.

• CMON also signed a deal with Good Games Publishing

to "co-brand, market and distribute the new Australian publisher's board games in all French and English territories outside of Australia and New Zealand", with GGP's Monstrous

due out in Q3 2016 and Unfair

planned for release in Q4 2016.

• Similarly, CMON announced that it would co-publish John Hawkins and Michelle Menard's Gateway: Uprising

with FishWizard Press

, which had developed the game and run an unsuccessful Kickstarter for it in 2015. Here's an overview of the game, now due out in Q1 2017:

Players of the deck-building card game Gateway: Uprising take on the roles of insurgent wizards determined to reclaim the Great City of Gateway.

Each player begins with the game with the same starter resources of basic insurgent wizards, merchants, and a magical Runestone — but from there the similarities end. Players will draft new wizards, heroes, and magical creatures into their ranks, building up an army to defeat and defend the different districts of Gateway.

After successfully liberating a district, the player gains access to its unusual power, such as cheaper resources, additional defenses, or even the ability to magically damage foes from afar. Be warned: Not only will other rebel insurgents attempt to steal your districts away from you, but you'll also have to battle against the forces of Chancellor Gideon and an invading onslaught of terrible monsters called the Drueggar.

To aid you in this are Runestones: powerful one-time-use spells that can turn the tide of battle instantly or provide the player with a temporary boost to his coffers. However, once used, Runestones become empty shells and are discarded for the remainder of the game.

To win the game, players must collect victory points by defeating the city guard and Drueggar Horde, controlling important districts, or through special insurgent abilities they draft into their ranks. Don't delay and play the waiting game; if the Drueggar manage to take all the city districts, it’s game over for both the insurgents and the innocent citizens of Gateway!

Perhaps Cool Mini Or Not needs a new tagline to go with its hew logo: "We Try Harder".

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3163571_t.jpg]• Ultra PRO

announced a deal in which it will "acquire the rights to Stone Blade Entertainment

's tabletop games portfolio", which primarily consists of the Ascension

deck-building games. To quote from the press release:

Under the completion of the transition, Ultra PRO will handle tabletop publishing, marketing and promotion, engaging its extensive presence in the gaming market to bring Stone Blade Entertainment games to new audiences, while allowing Stone Blade Entertainment to focus on designing new quality games.

I asked Stone Blade for clarification about this statement and was told that "SBE will still exist as a separate company, and Justin Gary will still design future Ascension

releases that will be handled by Ultra PRO."

• In May 2016, GTS Distribution announced that it had agreed to purchase New York-based distributor Global Enterprises, with all existing staff of Global Enterprises coming to work for GTS Distribution.

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic2876350_t.jpg]• Portal Games

has opened a new division in Germany — Portal Games Deutschland — that will debut in October 2016 at SPIEL 2016. This division is being run by Benjamin Schönheiter, who used to work for Pegasus Spiele on the localization of games such as Portal's own Robinson Crusoe

. At SPIEL 2016, Portal Games plans to debut the new version of 51st State

, the third edition of Neuroshima Hex!

, and an as yet unannounced new army for that game. Cry Havoc

will debut in Germany shortly afterwards.

• Finally, in a bit of news not about acquisition or expansion, the Korean-based Hanjin Shipping Co. has filed for bankruptcy. From an article in The Wall Street Journal

:

Hanjin, one of the world’s largest shipping lines, stopped taking new shipments in the wake of the filing, according to a customer advisory sent to freight brokers in Asia. The carrier faced the possible detention of its ships under threats of seizure by creditors.

The filing with the Seoul Central District Court came just a day after the company’s creditors cut off a lifeline, as financial assistance of more than 1 trillion won ($896 million) failed to keep it afloat. It is the latest domino to fall as shipping companies world-wide grapple with overcapacity amid a slump in global trade.

The news sent freight brokers and shippers scrambling to find space with other carriers as Hanjin was immobilized in the midst of the busiest season for exports out of Asia. Asia-based freight brokers estimate Hanjin’s daily capacity at 25,000 shipping containers.

The article notes that Hanjin vessels are being denied entry into ports since it's not clear whether they can pay the necessary fees. An additional worry is that ships in port might have legal claims filed against them, which would prohibit them from moving, thereby tying up the space and not allowing it to be used by others.

While this news isn't related to games directly, if publishers are moving games out of China, there's a good chance that their shipping plans will be disrupted due to this development, whether directly or indirectly.

Designer Diary: Jolly & Roger, or Make a Friend, Make a Game

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/570…r-or-make-friend-make-gam

by Scott Huntington

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3138572_t.jpg] By Shaun Graham and Scott Huntington

Scott:

It's a frosty Sunday morning in Hamburg, Germany. I emerge, bleary-eyed, out of bed with the blanket still wrapped around me, my breath condensing in front of my face like some sort of hungover dragon.

I shuffle over to my computer, where I plop myself down, ready to do a few hours of nothing until my stomach tells me it's safe to eat — the usual routine for an Australian working as a DJ in a country that's demonstrably too cold.

But this time, instead of the usual fare of videos of cats sneezing or dogs falling over to prod my brain into a semi-functioning state, I look over to my small but burgeoning collection of board games and make a decision, a decision to find someone in this town who would actually want to play them with me.

You see, being a DJ makes you nightlife friends: party people, the kind of folk who spend the early hours of the evening (or rather, what we would just call "the evening") preparing for later, which involves a whole lot of food, music and movement — these things being three sworn enemies of sitting down and having some nice organized fun. They weren't interested in connecting Cadiz to Stockholm for a sweet 21 points.

Typing a message on BGG looking for a game buddy feels a bit like delving into the world of online dating. What if they're weird? What if I'm weird? Not long after posting, I get a private message from a half-American, half-German guy named Shaun. He's keen to meet and play some games.

Now before this completely devolves into a blow-by-blow biography of how I slowly mutated into my final form of Full Geek, know that Shaun and I hit it off and started playing games regularly, and my collection began getting the lovin' it deserved. Fast forward a number of months, when after a nice night of games and dinner, the pair of us simultaneously divulge a dirty little secret we had been busting to tell each other.

"I've been… designing a game… really? Me too!" We both stutter at about the same time. It feels a bit like coming out, a huge rush of relief and endorphins fills the room. My ideas, resigned to being trapped in a notebook, could finally possibly see the light of day and be fabulous. "What's your idea? Let's try it out!" I had designed a game about the mob. He had designed a game about golf.

Turns out my game is pretty crap. His game is pretty crap, too.

But it is the start of a constant, never-ending, at times deafeningly distracting partnership of game designers. We make a pact: No matter who comes up with an idea, we share it, work on it together, try to get it polished, and perhaps even published — unless of course the idea is crap, which it often is. We get better at spotting that. Our big dream is to have a game come out at Essen. (Spoiler alert: This story has a happy ending.)

One day, Shaun calls me up with two ideas, one is about toy soldiers conquering bases, the other a dry mechanism with no theme yet, something about "I split, you choose". I like the idea of the mechanism but am a bit lukewarm on the toy soldier thing. We chat for a bit, then hang up. Later on, I call him back because I think I've had a bit of a brainwave regarding his idea.

"Hey, Shaun, I've had an idea for your toy soldier game, you know, the 'I split, you choose' game."

Shaun

: "No, those were two different games."

Scott

: "Oh, were they? I must have gotten confused. Anyway…"

Shaun

: "Wait though… that's a great idea!"

Scott

: "But I didn’t tell you my…"

Shaun

: I hang up. Everything is falling into place as I almost fall out of my chair — that's how awesome the vague ideas forming in my head seem to me at this point. They are not quite wonderful yet — but we are getting there. We still have to make pirates out of fruit. Keep reading, you'll understand.

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3147948_t.png]

One of the two under-ripe game ideas that Scott has so magically meshed in my head is a card game I call "Revoltoy – Rise of the Toy Soldier". (Wow, writing this today, I realize how dorky that name sounds.) In the game, you have to conquer bases, like the living room carpet and the toy chest, with your different toy soldiers.

It's a simple area-majority hodge-podge I somehow manage to cramp into a normal deck of playing cards. I'm sort of tickled by the theme but not getting anywhere with it.

The other idea firmly planted into my brain is due to games like Piece o' Cake

by Jeffrey Allers and San Marco

by Alan Moon and Aaron Weissblum. The "I-split-you-chose"-mechanism I first encountered in those games was something that held my designer brain in a sweaty headlock and just wouldn't let go. The bittersweet decisions always kept me at the edge of my seat and to this day give me the right kind of gut-wrenching play-pain.

I want to put my spin on this wonderful mechanism. But how? Having an older brother, he always split and chose at the same time, so no experience there. The only thing I have is the idea that the things you split and chose can be used in-game and to score. Not a lot to work with.

But when Scott accidentally/intentionally marries these two ideas on the phone, mechanisms click and interlock into a marvelous little clockwork of a card game: Players split and choose a set of cards which are used to reinforce troops in an area-majority game and the exact same cards can be used to score rather than to reinforce. You can score when you have majority at a base and strive to collect those ever-elusive victory points that way.

There it is. A game idea I fall in love with immediately and have to talk about with Scott again. We do this a lot. Our partners get jealous.

We get together, we test and tinker and more quickly than we expect, we have something in our hands that we consider "done". It's not though. We need a theme. Badly. After trying many things, we come up with fruits — mainly because I think of a great German pun for a name and persist on using it. Scott dislikes the name so much that he yells at me.

Scott

: I do!

Shaun

: In the game you now want to harvest the most fruit. You either plant or harvest the fruit and try to control the orchards. That works. I make some anthropomorphic cherries and lemons in Powerpoint and after printing out several decks of cards we go out into the world to present our game to defenseless playtesters.

Amazingly, they don't rip our game apart but are enjoying themselves — quite a bit. Even my brother and father (who don't game) play it and have a ball. (Thanks for the feedback, guys!) We add the last zest to the game with three special cards and call it quits. We're happy, and the testers are, too.

Skip to August 2014. The big Essen game fair is coming up in October and we book a budget train with hard seats and a budget hotel with harder mattresses so that we can enter the magical halls filled with boxes of cardboard. Why not show our game there? We make business cards and a sell sheet for the game, then with a big cheesy smile and a hummingbird's heart rate, meet with several publishers. I sit in a secluded room at the ABACUSSPIELE

booth and feel like a VIP, tucked away in a hidden corner in a noisy club. I give the elevator pitch and hear what I've heard a few times before: "Yeah, that sounds cool. We'll give it a go and let you know!"

They do. On December 18, 2014, I receive an email, letting me know that ABACUSSPIELE wants to sign the game and release it in 2016. I wake my one-year-old daughter and my sleep-deprived wife from their nap with squeals of joy. We celebrate with cookies and a diaper-change.

Then we wait. A long time. Forever. 2016 can't come fast enough. The months crawl by and we play the game here and there — even a few rounds with Jeffrey Allers, who planted one of the initial ideas in my brain with Piece o' Cake

. He digs it. Motivated, we delve into the design of numerous other games and I spend SPIEL 2015 mostly pitching our ideas (stay tuned!). Scott accidentally double books and gets a tropical disease in Ethiopia.

Scott

: I'm OK!

Shaun

: Finally, things get rolling in early 2016 with a theme change for the game. ABACUSSPIELE wants to change the fruits into something else, although they like how the mechanisms and theme are tied together — and they even like my super cool name. Problem: Fruits don't sell. Pirates do, though, so we decide on the name Jolly & Roger

.

In May 2016, we get the first illustrations by none other than Michael Menzel, and we are humbled and amazed by what he has created to breathe life into our game. Such a strange and wonderful moment seeing your creation and ideas being worked on by professionals.

ABACUSSPIELE keeps us posted on the production process, and we are really thankful how much time they take to keep us first-timers in the loop. August comes along and we see everything come together: rules, components, box art. On August 23rd, everything is finalized and sent off to the printer — the point of no return.

We are speechless and giddy as all get out about the upcoming months. We are releasing a game at SPIEL and people will be playing it. We will hopefully create many hours of gaming fun and tense play for couples and friends all over the globe.

Thinking about how much joy games have brought us, we are humbled by the thought that other people will find joy in our game that started as two half-baked ideas and has accompanied us over the last two years. Thanks to everybody who helped make us make this game, and thanks to BGG for kicking off this designer duo in the first place.

Thanks for reading this, and happy gaming!

Crowdfunding Round-up: Roam Fields of Green for Herbs, Nectar, Cake, and Malia, the Lady of Disease

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/574…fields-green-herbs-nectar

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3048690_t.jpg]Man, I haven't put together one of these c.f. round-ups since Dustin Schwartz posted his send-off column

at the end of July 2016. (My thanks to Dustin for his fine writing, and I hope to lure him back for more at some point.) I've been so swamped with Gen Con, post-Gen Con, and pre-SPIEL activities that I haven't been following the c.f. trends. Are publishers still doing that? Is anyone still backing games on Kickstarter? Oh, thousands upon thousands of people?

I guess that I should keep looking at these projects then, so let's start with Pencil First Games

' Herbaceous

, a set-collection card game from Eduardo Baraf and Steve Finn, with solitaire rules from Keith Matejka. By chance my family and I visited the North Carolina Botanical Garden

at UNC at Chapel Hill this weekend, and we spent a fair amount of time checking out the herbs on display. The delectable art by Beth Sobel captures these herbs beautifully in print; all that's missing are the bottle trees

that demonstrate the various ways in which leaves meet on a stem. Perhaps as a stretch goal... ( KS link

)

• Another game from the garden is Malte Kühle's Carrotia

from MAGE Company

, with the players hopping through a maze to collect carrots while avoiding predators. ( KS link

)

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3129829_t.jpg]• If we're talking herbs and carrots, let's expand our vision to Artipia Games

' Fields of Green

, which transports the action of Vangelis Bagiartakis' Among the Stars

to late 20th century farming, with players competing to prepare their lands for harvest season when they try to cultivate green stuff in their wallet. ( KS link

)

• Even tinier fields of green await in Scott Almes' Island Hopper

from Eagle-Gryphon Games

, with players either taking bribes in the Captain role that flies the plane or giving bribes to influence where the plane goes in the hope of making deliveries to a dozen islands. ( KS link

)

• If that's not too many islands to consider, you can find many more in Tiki Island

from Matt Hyzer, Christian Miedel, and Great Wight Games

. The main island's volcano is exploding (of course), and you need to skedaddle to safety by hopping from one island to another across the ocean. You just need to find those islands first... ( KS link

)

• Natural disasters of another sort are at play in Sharknado: The Board Game!

, a cooperative scenario-based game Eric Cesare, Anthony Rando, and Devious Devices

in which players must face the (unnaturally) combined forces of sharks and tornadoes. The Kickstarter is only half funded as it nears completion, but if we've learned anything about sharknadoes over the past few years, we know that they always return

— sometimes more than once

. ( KS link

)

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3079886_t.jpg]• If you thought that "Sharknado" was a creature in Sandy Petersen's Glorantha: The Gods War

from his own Petersen Games

, you wouldn't be far from the truth given that the game already includes Orlanth the Storm King, Ragnaglar the Mad God, Kyger Litor the Hellmother, and Malia, the Lady of Disease among other beasties. As for the gameplay, you're summoning minions, heroes, and gods; constructing shrines, temples, and ziggurats; and clashing in mortal combat — you know, the usual world domination type of stuff. ( KS link

)

• By contrast, Jeff Beck's Word Domination

has you use the power of letters and spelling to construct artifacts, claim areas, and not clash in any type of combat whatsoever. ( KS link

)

• "Nectar" is a normal word that you might spell in Word Domination

, but the word's been upsized for Xīn Mào's NECTAR

due to the importance of that substance in the world as a resurrection potion. Maybe you're simply screaming "NECTAR!" so loudly at the person that they arise from the dead? Anyway, in the game you attempt to put together various sets of ingredients so that you can yell a lot on your way to victory. ( KS link

)

• If you need to nosh on something more substantial than nectar, Li, Liu, Mao and Sizigi Studios

want you to consider cake, specifically Cake Duel

, a two-player bluffing-based card game in which you use sheep to steal cakes from one another. Two advanced sheep are shuffled among the other cards each game to provide for surprise plays and help you practice shuffling sheep, should you ever need to call upon this skill in the future. ( 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