Gameworks
Gameworks has recently revealed their upcoming releases for this year’s Essen and next year’s Nuremberg fair. The first game at Essen this year is Tschak! by Dominique Ehrhard, a trick-taking game to venture into the dungeon to find treasures and avoid monsters wherever possible. The new idea behind this game is that hands are not dealt after the first round, they are passed on: everyone plays once with each hand and then you see who made the better play of it. The second release for Essen is Marc André’s Bonbon, described as a cute, candy-themed memory game.
The new games for Nuremberg are Crazy Circus and pix. Gameworks isn’t telling anything about Crazy Circus yet; pix (David Franck, Laurent Escoffier), on the other hand, is a classic draw-and-guess party game only with pixels instead of drawing: you create a picture from pixels and the less pixels you need the more points you take.
Moonster Games
Coming in from Japan is Moonster Games’ October release hattari (originally titled Yabunonaka) by Jun Sasaki, a deduction and bluffing game. As in many games before, you try to find the killer in a murder case – but unlike any other of those games I’m aware of, bluffing is the investigators most important tool: when an innocent is wrongly accused, only the last person to do so loses victory points, so you really, really want to fool everyone into misreading what information you have.
Schmidt Spiele
I’ll admit it, Ligretto is one of my guilty pleasures: when I don’t have the brain power for a long game with deep thought any more, but just had a final coffee at two o’clock in the morning, that’s when I tend to suggest Ligretto. So, I may finally procure my own copy now that Schmidt Spiele released Ligretto with a new twist. Literally. Ligretto Twist plays almost like the original, but you use both hands: when you put down a card, you leave the hand there until you put down a card somewhere else with your other hand, and then you leave that there and so on. Ligretto meets Twister.
Fantasy Flight Games
Fantasy Flight has a whole lot of “selling now” news this week, after a long series of previews for each game: Elder Sign, Talisman: The Dragon and The Adventurers: The Pyramid of Horus.
All these releases mean one thing, of course: a lot of space for new previews, so lets see. Sid Meier’ Civilization: The Board Game (Kevin Wilson) has an expansion coming. In Fame and Fortune you get new map pieces, material for a fifth player and more. The second new item is also an expansion: the investigators of Mansion of Madness now have to deal with Forbidden Alchemy and other other sanity-threatening outgrowths of science.
Portal Publishing
Cryptozoic
Food Fight, Cryptozoic’s first original release after they’ve been vastly successful with the World of Warcraft Tradinc Card Game for some time already, is now available. In Food Fight, the big food mascots – like Crun-Che Taco, Grilled Cheesus and others – are finally deciding who has the total food supremacy, the dominion over breakfast, lunch and dinner. With a wacky theme, easily accessible rules and a lot of unique artwork, Food Fight looks like a good first step towards more independent games from Cryptozoic.
Mindwarrior Games
The Finnish publisher Mindwarrior Games will be in Essen this year with Terra Evolution, a deck-building game about populating continents with your own evolving animal species.
This weeks photo of a red fox was taken by Rob Lee and shared with a CC-BY license. Thanks, Rob!