Alderac / Artipia Games
The tour through Dice City, the coming game by Alderac and Artipia Games, continues with a simple card. Militia adds some power to your army, pretty much like you’d expect. Another preview introduces the Cathedral, the first building that scores points. From its ability, you can see that where you place cards in your grid will be important.
Split Second Games
I know a number of people that are obsessed with so-called Match 3 games. You know the kind? Video games, often for tablets, where you swap things around to make a line of three of the same kind, then they disappear, you score points and more things appear. Similar mechanics haven’t really found use in boardgames yet. Paradox, a Kickstarter project by Split Second Games, isn’t quite a Match 3 game, but it comes close. Instead of lines of three tiles of the same type, you need lines of four, and you can swap any two tiles on your player board, not just adjacent ones. You’re also not doing it just for the fun, you’re doing it… TO SAVE THE MULTIVERSE! After The Quake has shattered the timelines of all the worlds, you must form lines to collect energy that you can then use to reassemble timelines and save all the worlds.
Fantasy Flight Games
Fantasy Flight Games continue their Euro Classics Line with a new edition of another Reiner Knizia game. After Tigris & Euphrates, the second game to make a big comeback is Samurai, one of those games that look simple at first but then turn out not to be. To win supremacy over Japan, all you have to do is place your tiles around settlements to take control of their caste pieces. But obviously your opponents try to do the same thing, the pieces go to the player with the most influence on that caste when all spots around a settlement are taken. But there’s not a lot of space, all spots border two settlements, and tiles with special abilities don’t make things easier, either. The rules are quick to learn, playing well takes a bit more.
With Strange Remnants, the next expansion for Eldritch Horror, new investigators join the struggle to save Earth from the Great Old Ones and the coming alignment of the stars. A blues singer, an ex-convict and a fighter against evil in the name of god, they all join the fight. And besides these new characters, the latest preview post introduces Glamours, a new kind of magic that gives its owner a passive bonus for as long as he holds it.
Lion Games
It’s pretty cool to see games in early prototype stadium, and then how they turn out later. How it turns out is still a bit away for Nemesis, but Lion Games have posted a prototype photo on their Facebook page. I’m not going to share it here, you’ll have to head over there. Nemesis will be a science fiction horror survival game, each player will take the role of one member of a spaceship crew exploring the mysterious vessel Nemesis. They all share one goal, to get back to Earth alive, but they also have their own secret missions to complete. And any crew member that dies is not out of the game, he’ll join the aliens and help hunt down his former colleagues. You just knew there’d be aliens hunting people, didn’t you?
Horrible Games
Rock and Roll by Horrible Games completes the cycle of elemental expansions for dexterity dice game Dungeon Fighter. The earth-themed expansion brings everything you would want from a Dungeon Fighter expansion: a new hero with … ground-breaking abilities, two new dungeon end bosses and new impossible feats to master when throwing your dice. For example, you’ll have to throw your dice through a wall in order to do damage – come on guys, I still don’t hit the target without any obstacles. Through a wall???
Spielworxx
Next week you’ll be able to preorder Haithabu, a new worker-placement game by Spielworxx. In Haithabu, you work and trade in the viking settlement and have to deal with market fluctuation, event dice and stiff competition, because each action can only be picked exactly one per round. Also making your life difficult is the day-night-cycle: the action wheel turns through day and night, and actions that are currently in the night carry additional risks.
Sierra Mardre Games / Ares Magazine
One look at the game board makes it perfectly clear that Phil Eklund’s High Frontier is anything but a simple game. But complexity is to be expected from a game called “the most realistic simulation of rocket travel ever published”. In rockets of your own design, your mission is not only to explore the solar system but to industrialize it. Water is key to that, water and the will to get into a game this complex. It’s definitely not for everyone, but if you’re into really deep games you’ll probably love it. Currently on Kickstarter is High Frontier 3rd Edition, so you can be sure that many people do already love it.
MAGE Company
Reiner Knizia goes to space. New editions of his games are going well at the moment, and Mage Company will join that party later this month with a Kickstarter for Res Publica: 2230 AD, a remake of Knizia’s Res Publica in space. The mechanics look unchanged from the original: through clever trading with the other players, every tries to assemble sets of five cards that she then uses to build cities, giving her more cards on later turns, or to erect monuments for victory points. Only now cities will be spacestations, and of course the art is all new.
It’s very easy to get the scale wrong on this week’s featured photo: it doesn’t show a cave painting or an interesting pattern on someone’s leather jacket but is, in fact, an aerial shot. What you see are the Nazca Lines, giant images made in the sand of the Nazca Desert of Peru. Shown here is the spider, and in real life it’s about 47 meters long. Those figures were made in the sand about 1500 years ago and are still perfectly intact in Nazca windless, waterless environment, and we’re still not really sure why they were made. The photo was taken by Christian Haugen, who shared it with a CC-BY license. Thanks a lot, Christian!