After a truly horrendous trip back from Brazil – the only two good things I can say about the flight is that we actually survived it and that the airport of Amsterdam has very comfy chairs – I finally have a bit of time to post again. When I’m not busy exercising away all the calories that attacked me there. This weeks news has a lot of Essen already, and I’ll just give them to you in no particular order.
The Essen News
Ystari will release Mousquetaires du Roy at Essen. You can see the rules already and pre-order the game with some nice goodies. It’s a musketeer-themed semi-cooperate game that pits one player as Milady against all the others as Musketeers.
Treefrog Games will let you rebuild the city of London after the fire of 1666 in their Essen release, and if you’re lucky you can still get one of the 1000 limited edition copies on pre-order. The game lets you experience 250 years of London’s history and is “relatively simple”, but we can only wait to find out how simple it can be.
eggertspiele announced Merchants of the Middle Ages and Funfair for this fall (presumably Essen). While the first lets you gather social status as a merchant in the middle ages (that must come as a surprise now), the second one lets you play mini games for points at the titular funfair. They also made the rules for Grand Cru available for download – that’s the game about wine with the wooden box limited edition you might still be able to order.
In Other News
White Wolf is letting Vampire: The Eternal Struggle die after 10 years. Actually, the game evaded me till a few months ago, so I was a bit late to the party.
Portal Publishing is continuing their series of post about the post-apocalyptic game of conquest (or maybe diplomacy) 51st State with two more posts, one on player interaction and one on the 4 different factions in the game.
Mayfair Games is now selling Wacky Wacky West, a retheming of Klaus Teuber’s 1991 Spiel des Jahres Drunter und Drüber, a game I only played once so far but quite enjoyed.
The Austrian game award Spiel der Spiele for 2010 goes to Atlantis, the bigger (and longer) brother of good old Cartagena.
Fantasy Flight Games announced Mansions of Madness, a lovecraftian horror story-focused board game, in good american board game tradition with more components than you can shake a Shoggoth at and monstrously lovely plastic miniatures. Kevin Wilson also posted a new and mouth-watering instalment of the Civilization designer diary, going into details about technology.
Days of wonder denies that their games are addictive enough to cause parents to neglect their children.
Dausend Dode Drolle anounced 1655 – Habemus Papam (sorry, German), a game about the conclave of 1655. Not easy material, to be sure. The drolls don’t say anything about the release date, it doesn’t sound like this year’s Essen to me though. Please correct me if i’m wrong.
Bruno Faidutti is going to have a bit of a break from game design in order to – wait for it – prepare for his exams that he needs to take in order to teach a subject that he has a PhD in at high school level. I kid you not. Crossing fingers for you to pass on first try, Bruno. And if it’s any comfort: the bureaucrats are no better here, either. Wait, that’s not comforting at all …
If your news are not included here, please be kind and keep in mind that I’m still building up my news sources. If you know a good blog, website or mailing list with news that should be included here in future, please let me know in the comments. Help our news grow!
This weeks featured image was put on Flickr under a CC license by Marcos Leal and shows Sao Paulo by night. For the original photo go here. Thanks for putting photos in CC, Marcos!