Fantasy Flight Games
Warhammer: Diskwars hasn’t been out long, and already there are two expansions coming. And they are big ones, too. Hammer and Hold offers new options to the forces of Order, with enough disks to build a full dwarf army plus some regiments of Wood Elves and Lizardmen. Those units come with new mechanics and can poison their enemies, damage enemies that pin them and use their special abilities even while they are pinned. On the Chaos side, Legions of Darkness has the Undead under the command of their Vampire Counts, supported by Dark Elves and the rat-like Skaven. With their new abilities they fear their enemies, making their counterattacks ineffective, and they reanimate the undead. Re-reanimate, I suppose. Both packs will contain 50 new disks or more.
Stronghold Games
There’s a lot of Space Cadets going on at Stronghold Games this year. The original Space Cadets will be expanded with new missions, enemies and technology in Space Cadets: Resistance is Mostly Futile. The team game Space Cadets: Dice Duel will receive its own expansion with Die Fighter. And finally, Space Cadets: Away Mission will be a new cooperative game for up to six players. That’s a lot of space.
Small Box Games
Here’s the rulebook for Small Box Games’ The Nile Ran Red. It’s actually not one game but a collection of three Egypt themed card games. In Lord of the Sand up to four gods create obelisks and units to cement their rule over Egypt before humans even enter the scene. Unit cards can be played in different ways with different benefits. Crimson Sun pits two more human leaders against each other, competing to control the four temples with their armies. Finally, Rise of the First Dynasty has three to five players fighting over territory with an action selection mechanic. They are three small games, but together they make a nice package – and they all use their own components, so you can play all three at the same time and entertain up eleven people.
SchilMil Games
The New Zealand based publisher SchilMil Games is looking for funding for what they call their most ambitious project yet: Manifest, a game by company founders Amanda Milne and Julia Schiller. Manifest is a “pick up and deliver” style game, each player controls two cargo ships that pick up good around the world and deliver them somewhere else to complete contracts and score points. You control your sea empire with multifunctional cards that can be used as money, movement points or special events, but you have to decide what you do with each card. The basic version of the game has all players draw cards from a common supply, but the expert game adds some deck-building to the mix and lets you buy the action cards you want instead.
The amphitheatre of El Jem, Tunisia, shown in this week’s photo of the week, was the largest amphitheatre in North Africa with space for 35.000 people. It was build in the 3rd century – do you think your local football stadium will still be around in 1800 years? The photo was taken by Arian Zwegers and kindly shared with a CC-BY license.
Cryptozoic
If you are somewhat interested in video games, or know someone that is, you have heard of the game Portal, a first person puzzle game in which a crazy AI drives you through a series of testing chamber that you must escape from using your Portal Gun, a piece of equipment that, basically, places the two ends of a wormhole on any flat surface for you to jump through. Even if you haven’t heard of the game, you have probably come across the phase “The cake is a lie” somewhere on the Internet. Portal is the origin of that quote. That game’s publisher, Valve, have spent some quality time around the big design table and came up with a boardgame based on the video game that will be published later this year in cooperation with Cryptozoic. Your goal: to eliminate the other test subjects and capture the cake. The title, for now: Portal: Uncooperative Cake Acquisition Game. Game includes meeples, tiny Companion Cubes and slices of cake. (via Polygon)