Iello
In a first announcement that doesn’t reveal much, Iello have presented a new game scheduled for end of 2017: Mountains of Madness by Rob Daviau. Many of you will recognize the title from H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness, and that’s exactly where it comes from: this will be another game that sets you against otherworldly horrors and the Great Old Ones. That’s all we learn for now, together with a teaser illustration by the game’s artist, the amazing Miguel Coimbra. While that is all the information given, we can of course speculate. Rob Daviau is famous for Legacy style games like Pandemic Legacy. It’s not too far-fetched that this one, too, might be a game that reveals its secret over a campaign of many plays.
Ancient Egypt is a favorite place to quarry for boardgames, and it’s about to produce another one with Pyramids by Matthew Dunstan and Brett Gilbert, designers of Kennerspiel des Jahres nominee Elysium. Published by Iello, Pyramids will be a card game where each player builds a necropolis for their dynasty. To build pyramids, tombs and obelisks they’ll select combinations of stones from the quarry and put them into a layout that will hopefully last for millennia. That description is a bit light on the game mechanics, all we know is that it will be a lighter game with about half an hour of playing time. We’ll let you know as soon as we learn more, of course!
Devil Pig Games / Asmodee
Many war stories revolve around some unnamed, unimportant bit of landscape that both sides continuously fight over. Those bits of landscape may have some sort of strategic relevance in reality, but in Devil Pig Games’s Kharnage it’s really just an unnamed hill, and the armies of Orcs, Goblins Dwarves and Humans fight over it just because it’s there. And for your entertainment, because you win this game by bringing the most carnage to your enemies. In each quick round players pick a strategy for their army, a tile that tells them the turn order, how many reinforcements they receive and what attacks they may perform. After the reinforcements arrive they attack whichever target is in range and earn points for killing enemy units. Kharnage is a quick and light game, just like you’d expect when carnage is the goal.
Fantasy Flight Games
For me, one of the most creepy things in haunted house movies is when the layout of the house starts changing. Houses don’t just suddenly change, that’s such a fundamental bit of knowledge that violating it is more horrifying than any monster that might break through a wall. That’s exactly the kind of terror that Fantasy Flight Games add to Mansions of Madness Second Edition – that’s the one with the app – with Beyond the Threshold, the first big expansion for the new Mansions of Madness. There will be new characters and creatures, new items to discover, but the big new thing is that some rooms can now move around the house, or may disappear completely while you investigate the mansion. I wasn’t even all that interested in the second edition, but this expansion makes me reconsider.
Bézier Games
Since we’re talking about games with pizza this week it seems relevant that preorders for New York Slice by Bézier Games are open. This new game by Jeffrey D. Allers is a revised version of his Piece o’Cake, so just like that game New York Slice is a split-and-pick game: one player splits a pizza, then all other players pick a piece and he himself takes the last. That makes for interesting decisions when the goal is to collect majorities of pizza flavors. For added flavor – haha – one piece of pizza gets a Special to go along with it. The player taking that piece can later use the Special for a variety of special actions. New York Slice sounds like a great evolution of Piece o’Cake, the only thing I dislike is the unreasonable hatred for anchovies. What does everyone have against anchovies?
This week’s featured photo shows the inside of the Cathedral of Brasilia, a building design by famous Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer for the construction of Brasilia, capital of Brazil. The photo was taken by Luigi Guarino, who kindly shared it with a CC-BY-SA license. Thank you, Luigi!