Alderac Entertainment
Alderac’s Facebook team are major league expert teases. The newest preview for the coming Smash Up expansion has a bearded guy with glasses looking at a geometrically questionable crystal. The heading is “For Pseudoscience”. What can this faction be? What!? They reveal in one of the comments that the faction will be “a particular type of fringe science. How does that help ,there are millions of those! If you have a good guess, let us know!
Minion Games
We mentioned Battle Merchants by Minion Games a few months ago, an economic game where you are an arms dealer in a fantasy kingdom, selling weapons to all sides of the conflict in the best tradition of arms dealers everywhere. The game is now on Kickstarter, and it looks pretty for such a grisly theme.
Fantasy Flight Games
The Trollfens are going to be so much fun for everyone who likes to play Overlord in Descent. Not so much for the heroes, I guess, because the new Infector Overlord class is going to make their life tough. His speciality is spreading Infection Tokens, and he has many different ways to do so while the heroes basically have none to get rid of them. And once a hero is infected, the Overlord can use the tokens for further mayhem. Good times ahead!
Successful games receive expansions, that’s a basic truth about the universe now. It’s even more true for Fantasy Flight Games. The latest game to receive an expansion is the wizard dungeon death match Wiz-War. Malefic Curses, the expansion, packs material for a fifth player and a new board, but most interesting are the three new schools of magic coming with it. Wizards will now be able to harness the powers of Hexcraft to place traps around the dungeons, Necromancy for – well, I guess you got that one – and Chaos with its powerful effects that always include a vexing random element.
Cranio Creations
Together with the announcement for Dungeon Fighter: Fire at Will came the tease that there would be three more expansions this year, based on the classic four elements of killing things in roleplaying games. Here’s the next one now, Dungeon Fighter: The Big Wave. Maybe one of the new monsters will force you to roll while balancing a glass of water on your head, it wouldn’t be the worst thing this game made me do.
Quined Games
In Fabrice Vandenbogaerde’s first game Warlock the players have been magically (and involuntarily) transported to the magic realm of Lord Maldorf. The only way back home: please Maldorf by building the biggest empire for him. You do that by playing creature cards that can be used in four different ways to grow your empire. (via BGG News)
Hans im Glück
It’s a bit of a special occasion when a new game from the line that made our mascot famous is announced. Carcassone: Südsee (Southsea) is a new game with meeples, from the line of games that made meeples big, and from the designer that created the original: Klaus-Jürgen Wrede. Südsee will be an entirely new game, not an expansion, and starts off the series Carcassone Around The World. The basics from Carcassone are still there, you place a landscape tile and may claim whatever is on it with a meeple (YAY, MEEPLE!), but in the south sea you score points by selling the fish and bananas that you claimed to a traded. Let’s see how exactly that will work and how different it will be from the original Carcasson.
Spieltrieb
The current crowdfunding project on Spieleschmiede is Willkommen auf Allofall (Welcome to Allofall). But Planet Allofall is anything but welcoming and the only thing you want to do is get the hell out of there. With up to four people in a mining vehicle, you try to get to the shuttle landing site. There are many dangers to avoid on Allofall, from aliens to the dreadful venus hippotrap (you can tell this game doesn’t take itself seriously) and cooperation seems like your best option. But it’s not the only one, you can play a competitive Rollator trip around beautiful Allofall if you don’t value your life. There’s no mention of language on the project page, but Boardgamegeek lists the game as German and English, so international backers are in luck with this one.
Asmodee
A new variant of the action game Jungle Speed will be available this month. Jungle Speed Safari sticks with the basics from Jungle Speed, but does its own thing with them: in turns, players turn cards and must the perform the action associated with that card, in many cases grabbing one of the totems. The first player to do so scores the card and, as a bonus, the possibility of bruised fingers. Jungle Speed Safari has new cards, cards are turned in turn now and there are four totems to grab instead of one.
From out photo series about UNESCO World Heritage sites, this week’s was definitely the toughest to pick one for. Not because it’s difficult to find good photos of architect Antoni Gaudi’s works but because there are too many to choose from. In the end, I decided on this HDR shot by Craig Cormack (CC-BY, thanks a lot, Craig!). Casa Milà, also known as La Pedrera (The Quarry) in Barcelona is not what most would consider a typical Gaudi building, it lacks the bright, multicoloured mosaics. But it does have the rounded, organic form, and the HDR makes the photo beautiful.