Fantasy Flight Game
Wiz-War is going to the beasts with its next expansion. Fantasy Flight Games announced Wiz-War: Bestial Forces this week, the second expansion for the Wiz-War remake. The three new schools of magic, Mythology, Totem and Draconic, all summon minions to help you get rid of your enemies, so prepare to see genies, minotaurs and more on the board – all with plastic miniatures, of course. While all three new schools involve summoning things somehow, the short description makes it clear that they will nevertheless be very different from one another.
The main goal on Winter Tales, even before winning, is to tell an epic story of faeries at war. This latest preview for the Fantasy Flight Games edition shows how the quests are made into one story line through the Memory Track. The most important element of how one quest was resolved goes on the track, and it has to come up again in the next quest. That way, you get one story unfolding during your game. But it will take some inventive storytelling to make that happen. How the game is won also comes up in this preview post, but really, it’s about the story.
When, as a game designer, your fans like your game enough to make their own expansion, that’s high praise. When you then make an official expansion from those fan made ones, that is good business sense on the one hand, but on the other hand it’s also giving praise back to your players. That’s how the newest Cosmic Encounter expansion came to be. Cosmic Dominion has 30 new aliens, most of them of the wacky kind, new ship tokens to use with variant rules and an all new reward deck that will create yet more chaos in the cosmos.
Ares Games / Gremlin Project
Even before the Kickstarter campaign started – that will be next week – Ares Games are posting previews for Galaxy Defenders: Extinction Protocol. After defending Earth in Galaxy Defenders and cleaning the moon from alien invaders in Operation Strikeback, the third part of the cooperative tactical takes you to the source of all your troubles: the Xenos’ home planet. There you will face your hardest challenge yet, because Humanity are not the first to strike back, and the defenses are strong. But fear not, your side hasn’t been slacking, Extinction Protocol makes the agents deadlier than ever before. And that’s before you consider the new power armor that turns its wearer into a walking tank.
Kraken Games
Honestly, who needs more than two colors to design a game? Not Kraken games with their Kickstarter project Asking for Trobils, that looks great in just orange and white. At first glance, Asking for Trobils looks like it belongs on the easier side of worker placement. Your actions are, mostly, picking up resources and using those to catch the verminous Trobils. But there is more to it than that, you can improve the effect of the various actions by building up your connections and you can purchase help from the Riffraff of the galaxy, a collection of scum and villainy that would feel right at home in Mos Eisley. They are also, unsurprisingly, orange.
Hurrican Games
Hearing the title Madame Ching, piracy was not my first guess at what the games theme would be. But according to Wikipedia Ching Shih was one of the most feared pirate leaders in the whole world, commanding somewhere from 20.000 to 40.000 pirates. It’s like I keep saying, you learn the most interesting things from boardgames. In the game Madame Ching by Hurrican Games you are a captain under Ching Shih’s command, taking your ship around the Chinese Sea and completing missions for your commander. While the main mechanic for that is simply playing cards in a line, with the right colors and values to keep moving there are also skills to acquire and encounters to put in other players’ ways. The competition is tough, and only one player will get to command the China Pearl.
This week’s featured photo shows one of the few World Heritage sites that I know personally: the Wadden Sea, a natural heritage site at the North Sea – or in the North Sea, half the time – shared between the Netherlands and Germany. It’s a huge area of sand and mud flats that are flooded during high tide – the largest such system in the world, as I just learned – home to a staggering amount of species and also, as this photo proves, a beautiful place. Thanks to Dirk Ingo Franke for taking this beautiful photo and sharing it under a CC-BY-SA license.