Fantasy Flight Games
Forget space battles and AT-AT Walkers, most wars aren’t really won on the battlefields but in dark alleys and secret meetings. Intelligence and espionage is where things really happen. With The Bespin Gambit, a new expansion to Fantasy Flight’s Imperial Assault, that is now true for the Star Wars universe as well. A new campaign takes you to all the dark corners of Lando Calrissian’s Cloud City, complete with a pile of new map tiles for this new environment that will also be used in the new Skirmish scenarios. New in this expansion, matching the spy theme, is the Hidden mechanic that lets you wait in the shadows, hard to hit with blaster fire and with a surprise bonus when they attack from hiding. This will open some interesting new strategies.
In the next Talisman expansion The Cataclysm we return to the world of Talisman after world-shaking disasters have transformed everything. You won’t recognize the central game board. We already knew that was coming. The new preview post reveals some more details how the world has changed – and how brave heroes can continue to change it.
Iello
Whenever I heard about Iello’s new Richard Garfield game Bunny Kingdom so far, my impression was it would be a fun but light game, to go with the cute design. The new description and the 14+ age recommendation tell me I may have been wrong. Bunny Kingdom is a card drafting game where you use your cards to build rabbit warrens on the 100 squares of the game board. They will provide different resources to your cities, which are what scores points after every round. You will also try to secretly get Rabbit Lords and Masters on your side, they will make you score more points for some of your possessions when the game ends. I was interested in this game when I thought it was light and cute, now I’m excited.
Bézier Games
Bézier Games have announced their first Essen release for this year with Colony by Ted Alspach, Toryo Hojo and Yoshihisa Nakatsu. Colony is a tableau building game where you add building cards to your colony to win victory points as well as use their special abilities to better manage your resources. For resources you use dice, but the number they show doesn’t represent how much of something you have but what type of resource this dice represent. So if you turn the dice, you suddenly have something else. Some types of resources can be stored for later rounds, others are volatile and have to be used at once. Managing all of them right is what the game will be about.
Indie Boards and Cards
Light, quick card games are always in demand, and Indie Boards and Cards’s new Kickstarter project Grifters falls squarely into that category. In a dystopian future, you control a small gang of criminals to steal from the corrupt government, the evil corporations, and sometimes the other players. Your gang consists of your hand cards and each gang member can further your plans in two different ways, through their special ability or their skill. Special abilities are printed text on the card, different for every character, skills are represented by icons and can be Speed, Brawn and the like. Each night (round) you either play one card for its special ability or you play three cards with skills matching an available job to complete that job and take its rewards. But cards take three turns to return to your hand, so you’ll have to do some clever management to always have useful cards ready to play.
Minion Games
With Manhattan Project Minion Games made a game about the darkest side of nuclear energy, the creation of the first atomic bomb. But blowing shit up is not the only use splitting the atom can be put to, and in Manhattan Project: Energy Empire you set your sights to the peaceful generation of electricity. Energy Empire, a standalone game currently on Kickstarter, shares mechanics with its predecessor – it is a worker placement and tableau building game – but has fewer options to mess with the other players. That’s understandable, given the different settings.
We’re staying local with this week’s featured photo: the castles Augustusburg and Falkenlust in Brühl, Germany are right around the corner from here. The photo was taken by Rachel Titiriga who shared it with a CC-BY license. Thank you, Rachel!