After a long weekend – Whitmonday is a public holiday in Germany – with copious amounts of gaming, we’re back on air. Among other things we played more Ghost Stories and two long games of Dominant Species – we’ll tell you more about that one soon. Our luck in Ghost Stories didn’t hold and we’ve been getting slaughtered in all our four player games. But we’re getting there. For now, have some news:
Libellud
A preview for Libellud’s new game Et Toque has popped up on famous game designer (not of this game though, that’s Emmanuelle Piard and Barbara Turquier) Bruno Faidutti’s website. Et Toque brings together three of my favourite things – food, board games and creative use of language – into a game that looks like it will please many that loved Dixit while having nothing in common with it at all. I really hope that, contrary to Bruno’s prediction, an English edition will be available because my French can be described in many ways, but none of them include the word “adequate”.
Z-Man Games
In the Z-Man’s newest newsletter, we find two new boardgames waiting for us:
Matt Tolman’s Undermining is a game of mining on an alien planet – but not the build a space station and manage workers. You’re taking a more direct approach here, driving around in your mining vehicle, gathering resources to fulfil contracts. Your mining vehicle – lovingly called an UmVee – can be upgraded in different ways and most of your actions will influence the other players as well.
The other announcement is The Ares Project by Geoff and Brian Engelstein. The Ares Project tries to capture real-time strategy games like Starcraft or Command & Conquer into a card game. Every card can be played in various different ways and every player controls a faction that follows their own rules, each different from the other three factions. RTS games have always been a favourite of mine, so I’m curious how this will turn out.
Atlas Games
The rules for Atlas Games’ Cthulhu Gloom (Keith Baker) are now available. Like the original Gloom, Cthulhu Gloom is a truly depressing game by design where the player with the most horrible death wins. Now with added squamous tentacled horrors.
Fantasy Flight Games
There must have been free caffeine at FFG’s office this week, they surpassed even their own high news output.
The revised edition of the classic Giganten, Wilko Manz’s Black Gold is now on sale.
Two new posts take us deeper into The Pyramid of Horus. We’re taking a look at the scorpion pit – at least it’s not snakes, right? – and at the amazing set of adventurer and mummy miniatures which are unfortunately sold separate from the game. But they do look worth having.
The Arkham Horror meta-expansion Miskatonic Horror (Richard Launius, Kevin Wilson) reveals more of it’s mind-bending new features, and these new additions to Innsmouth Horror are a true danger to the players’ sanity as well – your investigator might just turn out to be a descendent of the Deep Ones and turn into one of them as soon as he realises that truth. Knowledge is a dangerous thing. Also included is new location cards that relate to locations from other expansions and are only used when both expansions are in play, making sure that everywhere is equally cursed.
A new game by the same designers taking us back to the same places: Elder Sign is another cooperative Lovecraft-themed game by Richard Launius and Kevin Wilson and will be available later this year. I have no clue how exactly this will differ from Arkham Horror, but the keyword here could be “fast-paced”.
The first details about Gears of War: The Board Game (Corey Konieczka) are coming in. The basic turn structure does not hold many surprises for the experienced cooperative gamer: first you go, then the bad guys go. Having your card hand double as health indicator seems like a very clever idea: the more you use the options you have, the closer to death you get. A simple way to weigh the benefits of playing your cards against the safety of keeping them.
Stratus Games
Chris James’ Eruption will be published by Stratus Games this October. Eruption, as you may be shocked to find out, deals with an active volcano that threatens two to six villages on an otherwise peaceful tropical island. It’s a tile-laying game in which you try to direct lava-flows from the central volcano away from your village, but the other players sure as hell won’t cooperate because burning your village gives them valuable action cards to protect their own. Instead of the much-beloved victory point track around the game board Eruption features the temperature track, showing when you’re villagers will be well done.
Treefrog Games
The rules for Treefrog Games’ Essen release Ankh-Morpork are now available together with a preview of the cards. If I hadn’t fallen in love with the game already just because of its existence, looking at the art and components would make me.
Meeple Mania
John Garcia of Meeple Mania asked if we would mind spreading the word about his Kickstarter project Knock Out Boxing. How could we resist helping a fellow meeple lover? Knock Out Boxing is going to be a very quick, light game that is played with two cleverly cut-out beer coasters. Just check John’s explanation on the Kickstarter page, he does it way better than I could.
The photo of the beautiful Helsinki Cathedral in Helsinki, Finland was taken by Tony Bowden and shared on Flickr with a CC-BY-SA license. Thank you, Tony.