Meople News: The Sphere of Babel

Repos Production

A new expansion for 7 Wonders is coming in the second quarter of this year. 7 Wonders: Babel will come with many new components, as seen on this photo on Asmodee’s Facebook page. The big round thing, if you were to force me to guess, looks like the infamous Tower of Babel to me, and if I were to guess more I’d say it’s a communal building project for all players. That goes with the theme, at least. But I have no idea what the new board/card components could be used for.

Globefarers of Catan (Image by PenfoldPlant on Instructables)
Globefarers of Catan (Image by PenfoldPlant on Instructables)

Other Awesome News

Okay, so maybe it’s not going to be the next official Catan expansion, but this Catanosphere on Instructables is one of the most awesome fan-made game expansions ever. You can now play Settlers of Catan on a globe! I don’t even care about having to glue a few dozen magnets to all roads and buildings, this is just awesome. (via Nerd Approved)

Pegasus Spiele

Two new games are coming in March from German publisher Pegasus Spiele. The first one, Pagoda, is a lighter game for two players building, surprise, pagodas. Each floor of a pagoda consists of four pillars and the floor tile on top of them, building anything by playing the right color cards gives you points and, for floor tiles, special abilities.

The second new game is Rüdiger Dorn’s Istanbul that we talked about before, now scheduled for a March release:

With Istanbul Pegasus is going to publish at least one new Rüdiger Dorn (Goa, Las Vegas, …) design next year. Istanbul will be a worker placement game of sorts: you walk the bazaar or Istanbul as a wealthy merchant, visiting 16 different locations to do business. But to take an action at a location, you have to leave one of your four assistants behind to hash out the details while you move on and take care of further business. Your assistants, young and lazy as they are, will not try to catch up with you, the only way to get them back is to return to the place you left them and pick them up again. You need to plan your way across the bazaar well as you fill your wheelbarrow with goods to transport and sell and try to be the first player to collect five diamonds through your trading

Both games will also be available through international partners, of course.

Z-Man Games

Akrotiri sounds like a very engaging new two-player game by designers Jay Cormier and Sen-Foong Lim. Players are excavating temples on the island of Akrotiri, shown on ancient maps both players hold. Their goal is to play landscape tiles so the island resembles their maps and they can start digging. To keep the dig going, they also have to bring in resources from surrounding islands.

Evil Hat Productions

Zeppelin combat deck-building game. I don’t really have to say more about the Zeppelin Attack! Kickstarter project, that’s an amazing combination. I will still say more, though. Four zeppelin fleets under the command of illustrious characters like Gorilla Khan fight it out to determine the greatest villain. No good characters in this game, sorry. The focus is on zeppelin combat and not on buying new cards for your deck every turn, unlike most other deck-builders. Buying cards is supposed to be a strategic decision and require collecting resources for multiple turns first.

 maverick:muse

It’s a good week for zeppelin games on Kickstarter. In oddball Aeronauts: Pirates vs the Pendragon, two players square of against each other in aeronaval combat. Each round, one player tries to shoot, board or outsail the other by playing up to three cards and then comparing skills. Depending on the skill, the winner may take cards back from his discard pile or the loser must discard, first player without cards loses. It’s a very light game, but it does have zeppelins.

This week’s featured photo was taken by Ingo Ronner who shared it with a CC-BY license. It was taken in the Beemster Polder, an early reclaimed land area in the Netherlands that was, at the time, the biggest such project ever undertaken with an area of more than 7,000 hectares. Thanks for sharing, Ingo!

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