Hello everyone, it’s time for another weekly news! We spent some time this weekend playing MONDO and got Junkyard Races on the table again with one of the closest photo finishes we’ve had in a while. That’s it, nothing else to see here.
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Okay, not quite true, there is some news to report. It’s a bit slow in the board game news business though. Isn’t it time the for the Essen announcements to start yet?
Mayfair Games
The Struggle for Catan is now ready for shipping. The newest addition to the Catanverse is a card game for two to four players designed by Klaus Teuber himself that includes all your favourite things about Catan: you’ll improve your cities, build roads, recruit knights and gather victory points. Everything a dedicated Catan player would want except boats – but there has to be space for an expansion.
Fantasy Flight Games
Damien Desnous’ Arcana is barely two years old and Fantasy Flight is already announcing a revised edition, extending the original deck-building game with two new guilds and six new rules options to increase replayability. I’m sure more details will be in the news soon.
Deck-building games are still considered the must-have of the season for any game publisher, so Fantasy Flight didn’t feel comfortable with only one in the race. The third scenario for Rune Age blends the mechanic with our favourite genre of games: cooperatives. In the Cataclysm scenario, all players work together to survive until the event deck is depleted. Instead of competing for cards, you’re suddenly planning out who would benefit most of them. And if you find all that cooperation too boring, the “Brother against Brother” card leaves you the option for a sudden coup d’etat near the end of the game and win alone.
The rules for Wilko Manz’s Black Gold, Fantasy Flight’s remake of Manz’s own Giganten, are now available for download. I never had a chance to play Giganten, so I cannot say anything about the differences between the two games. If you know anything, please enlighten us in a comment.
MESAboardgames
Finally, an Essen announcement! I was worrying the fair might have been cancelled already. Continuing a trend from last year, Gil d’Orey will bring us a winery game this year. Continuing Gil’s own tradition, Vintage is a game about Portugal, specifically about producing Port in the valley of the Douro River. Players acquire estates, plant wine and try to produce an especially good wine, ship it down the river and sell it. The rules are now available on BoardGameGeek. From quickly leafing through them, it looks like our criticism on Caravelas won’t apply here and the game will be less luck-dependent and better explained in the rules. I’m looking forward to try it in Essen.
The picture of the week shows the Palace of the Shirvanshahs in Baku, Azerbaijan. It looks almost modern, all straight lines and small windows, but was in fact built between 1400 and 1600 when Baku was the capital of the Shirvanshah dynasty. The photo was taken by Nick Taylor and shared as CC-BY on Flickr. Thanks, Nick!