This week has been crazy busy again – at least some of that was gaming, so I’m not complaining much – and I’m seriously lacking sleep lately. Actually, I get sleep, I just don’t rest properly. But I’ll let the doctors figure that one out: I don’t guess at my health and in return they don’t write about games. Long story short, there is no review this weekend. Maybe I manage one early next week, if not we’ll resume our normal schedule next weekend. At least we have a list news this week that is longer than some reviews have been, so here goes:
dV Giochi
La Vendetta della Lupa Manara (The Revenge of the Werewolf Woman), the expansion to Lupus in Tabula (Domenico Di Giorgio) will be available in Italian stores starting July 29 – if my Italian, which is mostly guesswork, is not misleading me. There’s no word on international release dates, but we can hope for ‘soon’.
Days of Wonder
The stand-alone successor to Small World, Small World Underground by the original game’s author Philippe Keyaerts , is now in stores as well. Small World Underground is not only a new map for the original game, it also includes all new races and special abilities that you can or can not mix with Small World‘s, monster-occupied regions, relics and more. Veterans of Small World will have to adapt or, appropriately to the game, go into decline.
Fantasy Flight Games
Completing out trilogy of release announcements, Miskatonic Horror, the expansion to Arkham Horror and all previous expansions, is also on the shelves.
We’re getting to the really evil parts of the previews of The Pyramid of Horus, Guillaume Blossier and Frédéric Henry’s second part of The Adventurers: mummies and falling rocks. Mummies are bad enough, they roam the place like it was theirs, and if your adventurer is already weakened from the other hazards they can even make him into one of their own – wrapping yourself in toilet paper is not optional at this point. Falling rocks are possibly even worse because, from the beginning of the game, they slowly but inevitably block the pyramid’s exit. If you’re still inside when the exit is completely blocked then … well, let’s just say you didn’t win.
Elder Sign is starting to reveal the real horror that lurks inside this week. Not only will you have to survive adventures inside the museum, you will also travel through dimensional gates to otherworldly adventures which yield a great reward, but also the great risk of being devoured. Never forget: Cthulhu wants you for his sandwich! And when you don’t go see the monsters, the monsters will still come to see you, making your adventures in the museum and beyond that much harder.
Lookout Games
Lookout Games is returning to Zavandor once more. In last year’s Mines of Zavandor, it was dwarves mining for gems. This year, the bad-tempered beard-wearers can have a break and leave the same job to the gnomes. In Torsten Landsvogt’s Die Gnome von Zavandor – I’m going to go out on a limb here and predect the English title The Gnomes of Zavandor – the even shorter and more bearded people take over the mining operation. And where there’s gnomes there’s usually engineering: Die Gnome von Zavandor lets you use awesome and perfectly safe machinery like the Gnomunculus and the Alchematic to improve your mining operations. For those reading German – or desperate enough to babelfish the text – the rules are now available for download.
Ludonaute
The French publisher is not resting on their laurels for the previous games Offrandes and Yggdrasil, the third game is already coming. After the Norse adventure that is Yggdrasil, Cédric Lefebvre’s Shitenno takes you to the far east: 16th century Japan. Although named after the Shogun’s four generals, Shitenno will not deal with the military campaign of the time. Instead, you’ll be dealing with intrigues and machinations at the court of Edo.
Portal Publishing
Portal is coming to Essen this year with quite a different luggage than last year. Then it was the post-apocalyptic card game 51 State, this year it will be Prêt-à-Porter (Ignacy Trzewiczek), an economic strategy game in the world of international fashion. What didn’t change between then and now seems to be the quality of Portal’s games: Prêt-à-Porter is available in Poland for a while already and was nominated for the Polish Game of the Year. In Essen we will see the international version – to my great benefit because my Polish is even worse than my Italian: I can’t even guess. I regret not being able to go on the student exchange to Poland when my school was offering it.
Iello
Bruno Faidutti has posted the rules for his new game The Dwarf King on his homepage. The Dwarf King is a quick and light trick-taking card game about the legendary conflict between knights, dwarves and goblins. The trick-taking is pretty straightforward, but each hand includes one special card to spice things up and the scoring rules change from round to round. On top of that, the illustrations by Christophe Swal range from adorable to hilarious.
Kickstarter
If you happen to be in the area of Kickstarter this week, check George Peralta’s Town of Misfortune. He’s a bit shy about the rules still, but so far Town of Misfortune features a dice-rolling and push-your-luck bidding/bluffing mechanism combined with a party-game with the goal to make people laugh.
This weeks photo by Flickr user joiseyshowaa shows the skyline of New York City. Because it’s the city that doesn’t sleep, like me. I made a funny! The photo comes with a CC-BY-SA license. Thanks for sharing, joiseyshowaa.