eggertspiele / Stronghold Games
Stronghold Games and eggertspiele have announced a strategic partnership. That will mean that all eggertspiele games will be available in North America through Stronghold Games. At the same time, they announced the first set of games that will we be released this year and benefit from this new partnership.
Animals on Board by Wolfgang Sentker and Rald zur Linde is about filling an ark with animals. They’ll take those animals from a collective on the table, but they can only ever take all animals that are connected, and for those they have to pay food. To make animals affordable, the other option besides taking animals is to split the collective, creating two new collectives that will be cheaper to get on board on account of being smaller. But you only take one action on your turn, so the other players benefit from your split first. At the end of the game, single animals will earn the number of points printed on (1-5), groups of three or more animals score 5 points per animal. But animal pairs are discarded, some guy called Noah has a monopoly on them.
The second joint project will bring joy to all the Stefan Feld fans (including me). Jorvik will be re-design of Die Speicherstadt, a beloved Feld game that has been hard to get for a while already. Instead of merchants in Hamburg players will be viking jarls in the city that later become York, but the bidding mechanic remains the same. First, players take turns placing workers on cards they may wish to buy. When all workers are placed, the earliest workers get to choose first if they really want to buy the card, but the more workers were placed after the current one, the more they’ll have to pay for the card. Many important decisions in that one, I can tell you. For even more happiness, Jorvik will also have an advanced variant that re-imagines the Speicherstadt expansion Kaispeicher, which was always even harder to find.
The final game announced for now is Great Western Trail, a new Alexander Pfister game. This one will be a game about driving cattle around Texas in a circle, selling some for money and victory points every time you pass through Houston. To do well, you’ll have to hire staff, including cowboys to improve your herd, engineers to work on the railroad, and other specialists. I can’t tell from the announcement how this one is going to work exactly, in the end, but I’m curious to find out.
Queen Games
Queen Games have presented new games at the Nuremberg Toy Fair, the first of which is Mighty Monsters. But the monsters are not to fight against this time, they are the players troops to steal the King’s treasure. Each player has cards with values one to five in their chosen monster species that they play into the castle halls to defeat the guards and get to the treasure. They have to work together to get there, but there can be only one winner in the end.
Risky Adventure, another new Queen Games release, is a dice game where you have to take some risks. Each player controls three adventurers out searching for mythical places and valuable artifacts. They do that by rolling the right icons on their dice to take the necessary actions. Here’s the risky part, though: they have to choose where to send their people first, then they roll the dice and find out if they roll what they need. They also collect equipment that will help manage the luck of the roll.
In World Monuments, the third new Queen Games game, players build one of four monuments – the Capitol, Notre Dame, San Pietro Basilica and Taj Mahal – from different colors of wooden blocks. That’s pretty much all we know for now. From the photos, World Monuments looks to be the most complex of the three new Queen games, but it’s still classified as a family game for ages eight and up.
Kickstarter
One thing I love about Kickstarter is that you find projects from parts of the world where you would never find them otherwise. Like Mi Tierra Nueva Era, a game from and about Chile that I most likely wouldn’t know about if if wasn’t for Kickstarter. Mi Tierra is a worker placement game in which players run a Chilean farm. They grow crops, raise cattle, produce food and sell it at the market. Even breeding horses to present them at the rodeo is an option. That was the first thing that stood out to me when looking at the rulebook, you have many options what to do with your workers, and consequently many decisions to make. Mi Tierra is a traditional worker placement game with no big, new twists, but it seems very well tuned. And I can always have another good worker placement game.
Ravensburger
Stefan Feld is not a designer whose games lend themselves to a quick fix, you want to bring some time to enjoy them. A new Ravensburger release may help those looking for some Feld on a tight time budget, however. The Castles of Burgundy – The Card Game, to exactly no one’s surprise, recreates The Castles of Burgundy as a card game. You still do the same things: you build castles, settlements and silver mines to win the most victory points, but the card game is lighter than the original and you can play it in about half the time.
Pompeii may be the most famous city to be buried under volcanic ash, but it’s not the only one. For instance, at the Joya de Cerén archaeological site in El Salvador an unnamed pre-Hispanic farming community was buried under ash just like Pompeii was. Thanks to that, it offers unique insights into the daily life of the people who lived there. The photo of the site that tops this week’s news post was taken by JoAnn Miller and shared with a CC-BY license. Thank you, JoAnn!