Meople News: Snake God on a Plane

Hans im Glück

One of the most popular, classic eurogames is coming back. Hans im Glück are currently looking for funding for a new release of Sankt Petersburg, their popular card game by “Michael Tummelhofer” (a pseudonym for Hans im Glück-boss Bernd Brunnhofer). The point of the game is to get as many cards into play as you can. The four card types correspond with the four game phases, for example you buy Craftsmen in phase one, a great foundation as they give you money. Buildings and Nobles follow, and finally there are upgrade cards that you can only build on top of other cards. But the Spieleschmiede project is not just for a reprint, the new edition of Sankt Petersburg will have a fifth type of cards and a fifth phase, the Market Phase. The resource cards available there score points every round for having the majority in a resource. Thanks to those new cards, you can also add a fifth player to the game now. On top of all that, the new edition will include all the old expansions and have entirely new art. All in all a very nice package, even if you already own Sankt Petersburg.

eggertspiele / Pegasus Spiele

The newest game by eggertspiele might not make it into the selection for Kennerspiel des Jahres, but Camel Up, a family game where you bet on racing camels, sure sounds like a lot of fun. What you have to understand is that camel races are entirely different from horse races: camels can be distracted by fata morganas (morganae?) and even carry other camels for a part of the way. That makes betting more challenging, you can’t rely on anything. Now, I saw a camel race on TV once, and I’m pretty sure that they didn’t carry each other. But I’m not an expert, maybe the one I saw was particularly boring. Camel Up certainly doesn’t sound boring.

Alderac

Planes, the newly announced Alderac game by David Short, has nothing to do with Alderac’s Trains, although you could be forgiven for thinking so, with a joke about the next game being Automobiles already in the Facebook announcement. (Alluding to the Steve Martin and John Candy movie “Trains, Planes and Automobiles”, in case you’re not into 80s movies.) Planes is not a game about flying planes around, instead your problem is getting your plane in the first place: you have to get your people through the crowded airport terminal and through the gate before the plane leaves, while everyone else tries the same.

Fantasy Flight Games

Manor of Ravens, the next expansion for Fantasy Flight’s dungeon crawler Descent: Journeys in the Dark, only has six quests in its all new mini campaign, but it has everything else you can have in a Descent expansion: two new heroes, two new hero classes, two new overlord classes, new monsters, new map tiles, new lieutenant. I’m especially excited about the new Unkindness overlord class that hassles heroes with flocks of ravens. That will be a challenge for the brave heroes who are exploring the titular manor, formerly home to a long dead wizard and slowly coming alive.

The next expansion for Blood Bowl: Team Manager will be called Foul Play, and the name tells you everything about the contents. The new teams are completely and utterly foul, new in the stadium are Goblins, Chaos Dwarves and the creatures of Nurgle, chaos god of disease. Speaking of stadiums, you will compete in different arenas now, each with its own changes to the basic rules. And going with that, games now have Referees, too. They obviously don’t care at all about fairness, but if it’s you bribing them you probably won’t mind. And where there’s Referees there’s Penalties, only they are mainly handed out to trainers who didn’t pay up. Foul Play indeed.

Fantasy Flight Games will publish an English language edition of The Last Banquet later this year, a social game for up to 25 players where each player takes a role in court and tries to help his faction triumph. Depending on the scenario, that can be by killing the King, identifying a courier, or some more. The mode of play is for every player to take exactly one action per round, most of which shuffle people’s position, in the hopes of ending up next to their objective. Not sure yet how different this new edition will be, but the basics will certainly stay the same. If you want the details, we have a review of the German edition.

One more Fantasy Flight preview for this week. This one is for the first Eldritch Horror expansion Forsaken Lore, the one with the snake-god Yig as a new adversary. Scaly Yig has some particularly nasty mysteries for your investigators to solve, the trickiest of which might be chasing the Children of Yig around the globe, because unlike other monsters, the Children are experts at slipping away in the shadows. But going to the ancient underground city K’n-yan is not for the weak of heart, either. Why did it have to be snakes…?

Harmony Lameche is the photographer who shot this week’s photo of the week. It shows the ruins of the Roman town Cuicul, today known as Djémila, in the mountains of Algeria. Harmony shared the photo with a CC-BY-SA license. Thank you, Harmony.

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