Days of Wonder
I’m sure this one will make many people happy: Days of Wonder announced a reprint of Mystery of the Abbey, the Bruno Faidutti and Serge Laget 1995 deduction game. A monk has fallen to his death at the abbey, and it might not have been out of clumsiness. Go and investigate: who pushed Brother Adelmo?
Fantasy Flight Games
Finally, more information on a Fantasy Flight Game I’m really looking forward to. Android: Netrunner. This entry talks about the positive impact of going from Collectible Card Game to Living Card Game, and while I’m not a big fan of LCGs I still prefer them to CCGs, for pretty much the same reasons given here: CCGs require a huge investment to play at all – LCGs are still way to expand-y for my taste, but at least you can play after buying the game – and you end up with dozens of different cards doing the same thing. The original’s designer Richard Garfield also seems very pleased with the treatment of his game.
Alderac Entertainment
Who went and demanded even bigger, nastier monsters for Thunderstone? Whoever it was, thanks a lot for getting us killed. Here come the Thunderstone Bearers, a new class of monsters that you have to defeat in Caverns of Bane to get the Thunderstone – just picking it up from the ground was too easy.
And this Xobmokt is really not someone I’d like to meet in my games …
Cranio Creations
This gorgeous picture is from Cranio Creations’ Steam Park (Aureliano Buonfino, Lorenzo Silva, Lorenzo Tucci Sorrentino), a game that lets your build your own amusement park. Steam powered. With steam powered automatons taking care of park maintenance. You’re responsible of building the park, supplying it with coal from the mine and making the guests happy. A steam punk roller coaster board game? Hell yeah!
Tasty Minstrel Games
Have you been trying to get this year’s Kennerspiel des Jahres on the other side of the Atlantic? Then things are about to get a whole lot easier for you: you can get Village very soon from Tasty Minstrel Games.
Dangermoose Entertainment
Serpent Stones is an Aztec themed card game – although you do play the cards on a board, it’s still more of a card game. Two clans of warriors are trying to capture each other’s Temple Stone by building an unbroken chain of warriors from their own Stone. Warriors wouldn’t be much fun if they didn’t, well, war, and so you can kill enemies or even convert them to your side. If you have the right cards. Sacrificing cards adds some more strategic depth because you can gain double moves, but at the cost of losing hand cards, and running out is obviously A Bad Thing(tm). Serpent Stones is currently on Kickstarter. Serpent Stones is – at least allegedly, it’s hard to verify online – based on an original Aztec game called Itzcoatl.
Portal Publishing
Portal Publishing are currently working to bring you a French edition of the Neuroshima Hex expansion Dancer. They’re also talking to Z-Man Games to bring it to the US soon. Even more news: a 51st State expansion (code?)named Winter is coming, more news soon.
Bonus points if you caught the Game of Thrones reference ;-)
Game-o-Gami
The Kickstarter campaign for Goblins Drool, Fairies Rule is just over when Game-o-Gami are already announcing a new game to come: Legends at War by David Luis Sanhueza. In this card game – the text calls it a deck-building game, but from the rules description I’d say it’s more of a drafting mechanic – the gods, heroes and monsters from four different parts of the world are at war. After drafting cards, you play them on a grid where you may capture other player’s cards by virtue of higher numbers, but also with more complex abilities to complicate everyone life.
Toy Vault
Toy Vault are currently running a Kickstarer campaign for a steampunk auction game by Rob Bartel: Apparatus. The auctioning mechanism is not so different from similar games, you bid on rows of researcher card, when you’re outbid you immediately get to place a new bid. But with each bid, the price for contraptions in the same row goes up. And that’s a good thing for someone because in the second phase of the game you will build these contraptions to win the game. Building them is done by playing sets of researchers, with different sets needed to build different contraptions. It’s not a big honking complex game, but an auction game with a clever mechanic to determine the value of things while you’re bidding.
eggertspiele
German online boardgame shop spiele-offensive.de is joining indiegogo and Kickstarter as a crowdfunding portal, but specialised on boardgames. The first and currently only game in the Spieleschmiede (“game forge”) is Express 01 by designer Jörg von Rüden and publisher eggertspiele. Express 01 takes the idea of the 18xx series or train games – build tracks and stations, trade in stocks of railway companies – but packages it as a card game with a much shorter playing time. Probably not for train game purists, but a great idea for everyone else. eggertspiele have taken the step towards crowdfunding, by the way, because the estimated target audience for Express 01 is smaller than for their other games – like Village – but they liked the game so much they still wanted to make it. Crowdfunding minimizes their economic risk. I’m very curious about the game they like so much, and also about what other titles the Spieleschmiede will fund in future.
This week’s banner photo shows the Ellora Caves in India. The Ellora complex has 34 temples and monasteries shaped out of the basalt cliffs of the region. There are holy places of three different religions – Buddhism, Hinduism and Jainism – at Ellora without any sign of violence attached to them. Yeah, looking around today you’d think that violates some law of nature, but it’s possible. The photo was taken by Arian Zwegers and shared with CC-BY license.