Portal Publishing
Are you curious about Winter, the next 51st State expansion? Some card pictures are up on the game’s page for your viewing pleasure now. (Please be proud of me for not making yet another “winter is coming” joke.)
Z-Man Games / Pearl Games
News about Ginkgopolis, finally, and from an unexpected direction, to. Actually the direction it’s coming from is the first part of the news: Z-Man Games will publish it in the US. They also reveal a bit about how it will be played, with the promise of more to come: you will all be building the city of Gingkopolis, a city of the future constructed to be in balance with nature. At least so far, because you’ll be doing the future constructions. How? Your guess is as good as mine for the moment. What we do know is that Gingkopolis will use a drafting mechanic similar to 7 Wonders, everyone choses one card to play simultaneously, the rest goes on to the next player.
Fantasy Flight Games
Rune Age: Oath and Anvil has been announced in April, and since then there was nada about it. That just changed with this interview with expansion designer James Kniffen talking details from Oath and Anvil. Especially the different feel of the two new races, dwarves and orcs, sounds cool. You can do pretty fun things with a deck of cards these days, right?
Another expansion we haven’t heard much about since its initial announcement is City of Thieves: The King of Ashes, and now we get a better impression how much this expansions changes City of Thieves. Now there are equipment cards for your people to carry, missions to be fulfilled that will cost you if you fail them and experience to collect from fighting. Sounds almost like a new game.
Pegasus Spiele
The German boardgaming website cliquenabend.de has a first look at Noblemen, the first published game by Dwight Sullivan. The goal of the game is to build the most impressive estate, gain the most impressive title and generally earn victory points. One thing to consider for your strategy in Noblemen is the very variable game length, players have a lot of influence over how fast the round marker meeple walks around his little circuit. If you want to buy it in Essen you might want to bring a cart, apparently there are 14 punchout sheets in the box, so it comes under the heading “heavy game”.
Black Tea Studios
The new project by Black Tea Studios comes under the heading of wacky, in big, bold neon letters. Scrapyard Warriors is a card game of creativity – or maybe a creativity game that just happens to play with cards. Because your goal is to build a device – any device – from the scrap cards you are dealt or can grab from the table. Whichever device you want to build is fine, as long as you can make it plausible that you can build it from those cards. Take, for example, a rocket-powered unicycle. That would even be worth a bunch of points. Have a look at the Kickstarter video, this game is better explained with visual support.
2F-Spiele
Fremde Federn is going to be a deck-building game. At least, parts of it are. And mostly you still need cards to play them, so that’s what we get a preview on this week.
Wizkids
Few games have received as much positive buzz last year as Mage Knight Board Game by Vlaada Chvátil. And it’s a deck-building game, so guess what: expansion! I’m not complaining, though, good games deserve expansions. It looks like The Lost Legion will pack more of everything: new hero, new foe, new monsters, spells, location, artifacts, everything Mage Knight Board Game had, but more of it. It’s best not to mess with a winning formula.
The Lord of the Rings Dice Building Game is the second dice building game in the world, and it will have a hard time to compete with the success of Quarriors, the first one. On the other hand, there is a huge, unexplored possibility space for the genre, TLotRDBG (I’m not gonna type a name that takes up half a line every time) can find a whole lot of things that haven’t been done before.
Czech Games Edition
CGE are going back to their roots with a new expansion to Galaxy Trucker, the first game they produced. After Galaxy Trucker: The Big Expansion this new add-on reaches new levels in the art of expansion naming: Galaxy Trucker: Another Big Expansion. Well, it’s what’s inside the box that counts.
At the same time, the 5th Anniversary Edition edition of Galaxy Trucker will be available, containing the base game as well as both expansions and some extras. Since I don’t have a Galaxy Trucker yet, that one is tempting …
Alderac Entertainment
The newest Nightfall expansion is coming soon and the previews are starting now. The big new mechanic for Nightfall: Crimson Siege is called Summoning and as of right now, I have no idea what it will do. We’ll find out soon.
Sit Down!
Henri Kemarrec‘s Wiraqocha was in Essen last year, a game of epxloration and control in a lost valley next to the Amazon, where the discovery of the mysterious new mineral Somnium might change the course of history. We explored the Valley and mined the Somnium, or maybe discovered the lost treasure of Wiraqocha. This year, again in Essen, we’ll return to the valley with Wiraqocha: The Way of the Feathered Serpent, a mini-expansion containing new terrain tiles, cards, tokens and the rules to play with them.
Cranio Creations
A social network parody game – I’m not sure if that’s what the world has been waiting for, but lets see how it turns out, shall we? In Like: the Social Game (Marco Almini,Michele Pierangeli) you play as a user of Status, the world’s biggest social network, and it’s all about the Likes. To be the first to have four friends and win the game, you troll people, defeat them in discussions and use the superpowers of your profile as an Emo, Cheerleader or other social network cliché. This is going to be a silly one.
The photo of Brimstone Hill Fortress on Saint Kitts (of Saint Kitts and Nevis) was shared with a CC-BY license by Jeremy T. Hetzel. Thanks a lot, Jeremy.