Meople News: Gloomy Coffee

This has been a pretty good week for news, there is quite a bit going on. Lets see if you like some of this:

German publisher Pegasus Spiele is shipping Michael Schacht’s new game MONDO – all caps intentional – since this week. MONDO is a tile-laying game where all players try to place their tiles at the same time, building a world against the clock.

From nestorgames, Coffee is available now. For a caffeine addict like me, it was a bit disappointing that there is nothing more than the name taken from the queen of hot beverages, but a two player abstract game is not a bad thing, either.

Fantasy Flight posted the rules for Lord of the Rings – The Card Game in their ever-active blog.

Antoine Bauza’s Dojo is a card game about building your own martial arts training hall with beautiful cartoon animal cards and shipped in a pretty cool metalbox. It will be available  from Hazgaard éditions, probably in June.

Some of you may know the 2004 Atlas Games release Gloom. In Gloom, your goal is to have your own characters – an unhappy little family – suffer terribly while keeping everyone else’s alive and cheery. Yeah, it’s that kind of game. Mechanically, it’s very interesting in it’s use of transparent plastic cards: you place modifier cards on top of other cards, the transparent bits show some parts of the original while other parts are obscured and replaced by new text from the modifier. Why am I telling you this? Because Cthulhu Gloom is coming, mixing the cheer and happyness of the original Gloom with the sanity and optimism of Lovecraft’s mythos.

Tenno’s Court and New York are the march releases from Queen Games, both by Dirk Henn. The former is an expansion to the strategy game Shogun (the one by Queen Games, obviously, not the 1976 abstract game or the german version of Samurai Swords), the latter a new game based on the mechanics of Henn’s own classic Alhambra.

Asmodee announced this week that they are launching a new studio – Studio Descartes – that will be dedicated to vintage games: new editions of old classics, maybe with slightly updated rules. I’m curious to see what games will be available again soon. Is there anything you guys would love to see again?

And in another game related news – or maybe it’s not news to you and I’m just late to the party – Lorien Green is currently creating a documentary about board gaming, and the material on the website looks very very promising.

This week’s photo of Budapest was taken by Fernando Hidalgo Marchione and shared on Flickr with a CC-BY-SA license. Thank you Fernando!