Meople News: Shockingly Emerald

Sometimes it’s just everything that goes wrong. With all our test players being quite busy recently – doing university, being pregnant, writing books … – we were happy to get people together last weekend. And then two of them had their cat run to the hills and only come back in the middle of the night, after they were searching all afternoon. We still had a great time with the other testers, but it’s sad when this happens when it’s difficult already to find people with spare time. At least four weeks from now things will clear up for some of us. Not the pregnant ones, though, that will be another 18 years or so ;-).

The cat returned fine and healthy, by the way, nothing happened to her, she just went for a stroll. If you were worried about the cat, then you deserve some news, even if it’s not much this week.

Plaid Hat Games

The rulebook for BioShock Infinite: The Siege of Columbia is online now, and … I cannot read it because it may contain spoilers for the computer game. But here are some of the highlights: two opposing player factions, the ruling Founders and the revolutionary Vox Populi. Cards have four different functions, as an action or three different currencies. Non-player characters move around the board to upset your plans or help them, if you planned properly. And while the game focuses on conflict, battles are resolved quickly and easily by playing cards.

Alderac Entertainment

After Love Letter (already available) and Trains (coming this summer) Alderac just announced two more games by Japanese designers they will make available outside Japan. Card of the Dead by Motohiro Nakamura is a card game about getting away from zombies, sometimes killing zombies, and apparently a whole lot of throwing your friends to the zombies so you can get away. Cheaty Mages (Seiji Kanai, already successful with Love Letter) deals with the problem of allowing mages in your monster battle arena: they cheat, doing pretty much anything to make their favourite win the battle and their bet.

Libellud / Asmodee

Seasons: Enchanted Kingdom will mix up the base game quite a bit: enchantments, one of which is picked at the start of the game, change one rule of the base game, forcing you to adapt your strategies every time you play.

Treefrog Games

A Study in Emerald, Martin Wallace’s Game based on Neil Gaiman’s story of the same title, is now live on Kickstarter. If you missed the news last week, A Study in Emerald is a Sherlock Holmes / Cthulhu Mythos crossover. The game will feature two factions, loyalists and revolutionaries, competing for control over key locations with a mix of deck building and auctioning. The description sounds like this will be one of Wallace’s more complex design, which should make his fans happy as well as Gaiman’s.

The gorgeous photo of the Mausoleum of Al-Dai-al-Ajal Syedna Idris Imaduddin in Shibam, Yemen was taken by Batul Shk Husain Merchant and shared with a CC-BY license. Thank you!

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