This is the last news post before Essen, and compared to the last two weeks it’s somewhat short again. Most publishers will be on their way already and most of the big announcements have been made. However, there is still some cool stuff left for this week. But before we get to that, here’s a teaser for Lorien Green’s boardgame documentary Going Cardboard:
Gry Leonardo
Gry Leonardo will have Filip Milunski’s Mare Balticum in Essen. In this not-too-heavy game players get to be captains of a fishing boat in the Baltic Sea, collecting fish and amber tokens and selling them at the ports. However, the profits from that are only counted at the end of the game, when players reveal the prices they assigned to each kind of fish.
Kosmos
The Catan card game The Rivals of Catan is due for an expansion, and like all good expansion nowadays it comes in three parts: Age of Darkness consist of the three thematic card sets The Era of Intrigue, The Era of Merchant Princes and The Era of Barbarians that will all add their own unique twist to Rivals.It’s safe to assume that Mayfair Games will be selling this expansion as well very soon.
Fantasy Flight Games
A few months back, Fantasy Flight Games announced they were working on Banners of War, a Runewars expansion. For the last few weeks it’s been quiet around that one, but fear not, it’s back in a new preview: have a look at the new units you might recruit.
Lookout Games
Just in time before Essen, Lookout posted the rules for Walnut Grove (Paul Laane, Touko Tahkokallio). Walnut Grove is a Wild West game with little wild and a lot of west. You build your little farm on the prairie from land tiles – not unfamiliar territory to veterans of Carcassone or Mondo – but you also manage your workers to take resources from the land and do business in the idyllic town around the corner.
eggertspiele / Pegasus Spiele
Village by Inka and Markus Brand gives you control over a family in a (medieval?) village that you try to bring to success and prosperity. If they don’t die first. Not much is said about the game mechanics, but there seem to be some copies available for testing at Essen.
Kaispeicher is the expansion to Die Speicherstadt from the original author (Stefan Feld). Apparently, there will be many, many more options what to do in the game but with very little details. The same goes for Cuba which is announced as a new version of eggertspiele’s Cuba, but with no mention if there are any changes compared to the original.
Treefrog Games
In a slightly surprising announcement, Treefrog Games came up with another Essen release: Old Men of the Forest. A surprise announcement of a surprisingly light game by Martin Wallace’s standards? Wonder not how that came to pass: all profits from Old Men of the Forest will go to the Orangutan Foundation UK, a foundation that has Terry Pratchett on the board of trustees. So now you have the why Treefrog Games made the game (they are working with Pterry) together with the why you should buy it (because you help the monkeys *ducks*) in one sentence.
Kickstarter
We’re always happy to announce fun new project on Kickstarter, and this one sure looks like it belongs in that corner: Kevin Nunn’s Zong Shi is the new crowdfunded project from Gryphon Games. Zong Shi has some worker placement, some resource management and Chinese masters – alas, not of martial arts, but I guess we can’t have everything.
The beautiful jellyfish have been photographed by Flickr user liakapelke and shared with a CC-BY license. Thanks, liakapelke