Well, this is definitely one of our shorter news posts. But after Essen, it’s always slow news time, so I’m happy we have anything to report at all. Enjoy what little news we have, next week there’ll more again. If not, I’ll start making things up.
Fantasy Flight Games / Albe Pavo
It’s been quiet around the Fantasy Flight version of Albe Pavo’s Winter Tales since it was first announced. You remember, Winter Tales is a story telling game with two competing factions, the Winter Court and the Spring Court of fairies in Wintertown, competing with each other to complete quests. Just how that is done you can find out in this week’s new preview. Quests are resolved by playing story cards – cards with ambiguous line drawings that could mean anything – and create a story using those cards and your imagination how your character completes that quest. But it’s not quite so easy, because other characters, can help you in your quest or stand in your way by playing their own story cards and adding to your story.
MAGE Company
The Amityville Project: Phobos is back on Kickstarter. After the first campaign for the horror game was cancelled, it’s back now looking as creepy as ever and already getting close to its funding goal. Here’s what we had to say about the game then, and it’s just as true now:
Without any prior knowledge of the game, just looking at the Kickstarter page for The Amityville Project: Phobos, you can immediately tell one thing: CREEPY! Those ghost minis are creepy beyond anything I’ve seen in boardgames. And it gets worse from there, here’s the story: Detective Ed Sullivan was investigating the Syndicate, a criminal organization that messes with the minds of people to bow them to their will. Of course, Sullivan is discovered and stuffed into the mindrape machine, and that’s where it gets really freaky: the experience destroys his mind and leaves him with four personalities that now struggle for control. Those personalities are the players. You fight the other personalities by discovering their fears, guessing them from the player’s actions on the central board. It’s been a long time since I saw a horror movie with that creepy a story, in boardgames it’s a first.
Catalyst Game Labs
In Shadowrun: Crossfire, the deck-building game based on Shadowrun, card colors correspond to classes from the RPG. Green cards, for example are Decker cards. If you don’t know Shadowrun, Deckers are people that basically plug a network cable right into their brain to access the Internet. The ones that don’t go insane from an overdose of cat pictures are actually highly useful experts at retrieving information and circumventing security systems. In Shadowrun: Crossfire their green cards specialize in combination cards and playing cards from places other than their hand – their discard pile, other players’ discard piles, the Black Market without paying …
12SP Entertainment
It’s not a big secret that there is something I like almost as much as meeples: zeppelins! There was no way I’d miss the Kickstarter campaign for Zeppeldrome: The Hazardous Dirigible Rally. It’s a racing game for zeppelins (on a track that, according to the game board, is inside another zeppelin) with a good dose of take-that. Play is driven by cards that can be used in two different ways, either to set your course for the turn or for the special action that has a good chance to screw at least one of your opponents. The track is just one long straight, but different obstacles give you something to crash into while you’re not paying attention.
The fortress-city of Fasil Ghebbi in Ethipia, one building of which is shown in this weeks photo, was the residence of Ethiopian emperor Fasilides. The photo was taken by Martijn Munneke and shared with a CC-BY license. Thank you very much, Martijn.