Plaid Hat Games
Wow, that’s a real beauty, a boardgame to go with the third part of the popular and awesome BioShock series of computer games. BioShock Infinte: The Siege of Columbia has great miniatures, gorgeous artwork, and it comes from a publisher whom I trust to make an awesome game from it instead of just collecting the easy money from a tie-in game, I can’t wait to find out more.
Alderac Entertainment
Deduction games are usually light on the rules, but even for that genre Agent Hunter gets by with a remarkably short set. Both players have three safe houses where some of their agents are hiding. Your goal is to eliminate those safe houses by playing agent cards with the same value as the hidden card in the house. With every card played, you also reveal that that card is not in your safe houses, giving your opponent valuable information. Managing what your opponent knows is even more important than gaining information yourself. For a game this light and simple, Agent Hunter sounds like it can be very tense.
Fantasy Flight Games
It sounds so good to start with: the entrance area of the museum has been rebuild for Elder Sign: Unseen Forces and now contains a First-Aid Station where you can receive much-needed healing, the Souvenir Shop to trade in your trophies for many useful items, a Chapel that grants blessings to it’s visitors and the Lost & Found that works like the old entrance area, only more so. But whenever the Old Gods open a door, they also kick you in the balls – or however that saying went – and now Adventures come with entry effects that do bad stuff when you try to complete the adventure, before you even roll the dice. They can also contain the dreaded Clock symbol that advances the clock one extra step when it’s resolved, bringing the nasty midnight effects one step closer.
Rio Grande Games
Two new products are coming from the general direction of Race for the Galaxy; we’ve talked about both of them before, but that was a while ago, and now they have release dates in late April/early May. First is Roll for the Galaxy, a dice version of the card game – I’m really curious how Wei-Hwa Huang and Tom Lehmann pulled that of. Second, the first new expansion for Race for the Galaxy, first mention here exactly one year ago, is finally on its way. I call Alien Artifacts the first new expansion because it will be incompatible with all previous expansions and build on only the base game with the declared goal to avoid the power creep that plagued the previous expansions.
Looney Labs
The next game in the Fluxx series is not yet another new card set with the same rules. The next game extends Fluxx into a completely new dimension. Two dimensions, even, as that’s the usual number of dimensions for game boards. In Fluxx, adding a game board obviously means adding more chaos: the board, on which you move around with your pawns to claim Keepers, will change during the whole game. Fluxx: The Board Game is announced for July and I’m quite looking forward to a new Fluxx experience. (via ICv2)
Flatlined Games
After a not so successful first run on Kickstarter, Philipe Keyaerts’ Twin Tin Bots is now back there for a rematch. I still don’t know what went wrong the first time, because we tried the game in Essen last year and really enjoyed it. You are the programmer of two robots that, under your control, must collect crystals around the board and bring them to your factory. Each turn, you can only change one instruction of your robots’ program, but they still execute the whole thing. To get where you want to be, you need some serious planning skills. Although it sounds similar, the feeling of Twin Tin Bots is very different from Robo Rally: different goal, different mechanic, two robots to take care of, my first impression was that you have to think much harder in Twin Tin Bots.
The lady at the top of the page hardly needs an introduction. It is, of course, the Statue of Liberty in New York, USA. The photo was taken by Celso Flores and shared with a CC-BY license. Thanks a lot!