Fantasy Flight Games
The city of Nerekhall, the stage for the next Descent expansion Shadow of Nerekhall, is a place full of danger, mystery, unexpected monsters and, well, shadows. The world needs new heroes to face the dangers here, and fortunately new heroes is exactly what the world is getting. To go to Nerekhall, hero players get two new Heroes to pick – one of which is finally a gnome – and two new Class Specializations. Both new specializations, Shadow Walker for Scouts and Conjurer for Mages, juggle tokens on the board, but they both sound powerful when played right and fun to try out.
Kosmos
Kosmos, the German publisher making everything including boardgames, has some new things in their 2014 catalog. Of course, the two games here are not everything new by Kosmos this year, only the two most interesting new games for the gamer crowd.
First, Lauge Luchau, creator of Uluru, strikes again. In Uluru you had to arrange cards around the sacred Australian rock in a way that satisfies the conditions given by a set of cards. Dimension takes the same concept and lifts it into the third dimension: you have to stack a set of balls in a way that satisfies the six condition cards, for example without two given colours touching. I like the idea, the rules are very simple but the game will give you a nice brain workout.
Second, we have a new game by Klaus Teuber that has absolutely nothing to do with Catan. In Norderwind you set sail on your own ship to fight pirates and supply the cities suffering from said pirates working on their trade routes. You’ll get your own large cardboard ship where you put your crew meeples to work on different jobs, arrange your cargo on the deck and arm the expedition with expensive cannons to defend yourself against the pirates.
Iello
A new real time game has come to Kickstarter, and it’s surfing on the recent wave of zombie miniature games. Zombie 15′ really says everything you need to know: it’s a zombie game and takes exactly 15 minutes. In those 15 minutes your game characters – all 15 year-olds – run through the city in search for scenario tokens, search abandoned houses for weapons and mow down lots and lots of zombies. Every minute, a zombie growl on the soundtrack CD marks the arrival of more zombies, and if you kill them too noisily the zombie mob grows as well. We tried this game in Essen last year, and I enjoyed it, it’s hectic but fun.
Zoch
Touko Tahkokallio is mostly known for his space exploration and exploitation game Eclipse, but that’s not his only published game. But you can be forgiven if you have never heard of his Enigma because, until now, it was very hard to find outside of Finland and Scandinavia. But no more, the multilingual Zoch edition will help this game to a wider audience. Enigma is an archaeological puzzle game: you are exploring a temple by solving puzzles, for instance tangram puzzles or balance problems, to discover new rooms in the temple. In each new room discovered you can place one of your three archaeologists, he will score points when that wing of the temple is fully explored. It has absolutely nothing in common with Eclipse, but it sounds fun in a lighter way. (via BGG News)
The photo of the week was taken by George Dorn, he shared it with a CC-BY-SA license. It shows a detail of the Buddhist Bulguksa Temple in the Republic of Korea. Thank you for sharing this photo, George.