Small Box Games
Shattered Aegis is the first expansion for John Clowdus’ card game Omen: Reign of War and packs 16 new units and rules for four new game variants. It’s now available for preorder.
Moonster Games
Moonster Games is showing off a few cards of the upcoming Gosu expansion Kamakor. The texts are only in French for now, but even if you don’t read French you can still enjoy the outstanding art.
Lookout Games
We talked about The Gnomes of Zavandor (Torsten Lansdvogt) a while ago: it’s going to be in shops by the end of the week. The German rules are available for download already.
Portal Publishing
It’s a new era at Portal Publishing! No, wait. It’s The New Era by Portal Publishing, that makes more sense. Ignacy Trzewiczek’s The New Era is a standalone expansion for 51st State, meaning it can be played either together with 51st State or on its own. I’ll assume the gameplay will remain without major changes, but with The Hegemony a new faction joins the post-apocalyptic fray.
Asmadi Games
Innovation: Echoes of the Past is out. The Innovation expansion by Carl Chudyk and Chris Cieslik brings more than 100 new cards, a new mechanic and some minor rule changes – the smallest but nevertheless significant one being that the number of card in each age is now tied to the number of players, fixing a problem with the base game that felt very different with two or four people.
Fantasy Flight Games
Fantasy Flight Games made a rather big announcement this week: they entered a partnership with Lucasfilm and do now hold the rights to publish card. miniature and role-playing games in the Star Wars universe. Not surprisingly, the first two games to spring from that partnership were announced almost in the same sentence.
Star Wars – The Card Game is the next of Fantasy Flight’s cooperative card games, a concept that proved popular with the Lord of the Rings card game. In this game, by Nate French and once again Corey Konieczka, players take the role of the Rebels fighting off imperial attacks, with everything important in the three movies – there is only three Star Wars movies, period – making an appearance.
The other Star Wars release is X-Wing, a miniature space combat game by Jason Little. All actions are selected simultaneously before they are executed, predicting your opponents actions is as important as in a real dogfight. I’m curious about this one, and the miniatures in the photos from GenCon look awesome already.
Outside of Star Wars, there will be a second edition of the classic dungeoncrawl Descent: Journeys in the Dark. With new monsters, new heroes and simplified rules, the promise is to have you playing much faster, without an hour of rule-study before, but with all the same excitement. Seems like you still need a big table to unpack this one, though.
And no week would be complete without some sort of Cthulhu news, so here goes: the rules for Elder Sign are available for download.
Quined Games
Quined Games’ release for this year’s fair in Essen is Graeme Jahn’s Alba Longa. Little is known about this game just yet, but the bullet points are worker placement, city management, dice selection and city combat. Sign me up, please.
Kickstarter
On Kickstarter this week, you might want to have a luck at Oh My God! There’s an Axe in my Head – The Game of International Diplomacy. I’m not making the subtitle up, the game is actually about axe-swinging diplomats deciding the fate of the world. Best you head on over and find out yourself, everything I can say would only sound less believable.
This weeks photo model hardly needs an introduction, the loveable expression on the face clearly marks it as a camel. The photo was taken by Angel Morales Rizo and shared as CC-BY-SA.