Backspindle Games
There is a second edition of Backspindle Games’ Luchador! on Kickstarter (see our review here), and it’s not only all new and shiny, it also addresses the one point where we found the first edition lacking: variety. In this new edition, each fighter has a specific strength and weakness, as well as a killer combo move that triggers a lot of pain for your opponents when it’s rolled. Not to forget the new 3D boxing ring, complete with ropes and everything. If you don’t own Luchador yet, here’s your chance.
Pegasus Spiele
After Stefan Feld has a very productive 2013, it’s been a bit more quiet around him this year. But fear not, he’s still making games, and at least one of them will be published this year by Pegasus Spiele. With AquaSphere, Feld leaves his accustomed waters of historical settings and enters the field of high tech (maybe even bit science fiction) deep sea research. Your team of researchers consists of real flesh-and-blood scientists, a horde of helpful robots and an engineer who can program the bots. Together, they collect crystals, examine octopodes, zoom around in submarines and upgrade your laboratory – as is typical for Feld’s games, there is absolutely no lack of things to do, the problem is deciding. (via BGG News)
Gremlin Project / Ares Games
The Kickstarter project for two Galaxy Defenders expansions is now live. After you defended the Earth against alien invaders in the base game by Gremlin Project and Ares Games, the two expansions take the battle to the enemy. In Operation Strikeback you’ll assault the aliens’ moon base while Extinction Protocol lets you attack their home planet, an operation other alien species have failed to pull of so far.
Fantasy Flight Games
Nothing involving fairies is ever simple or straight-forward. Ask Harry Dresden if you don’t believe me. And so it’s no surprise that Winter Tales, a storytelling game about the struggle between Winter and Spring fae, comes with some optional advanced rules that may not make anyone’s life easier but will certainly make it more interesting. The optional Powers grant a special reward for every quest you complete, giving your faction a significant boost. Objectives, on the other hand, are personal quests that each character receives and that can go to the Memory Track and change the games outcome.
Sierra Madre Games
Greenland, designed by Phil Eklund and Philipp Klarmann and this year’s Sierra Madre Games release, is a complex, interesting and apparently cut-throat game of survival in medieval Greenland. Up to three players let their tribes compete for scarce resources in the frigid north and try to keep their elders and children alive through hunting, gathering, raiding other tribes, marrying daughters into other tribes and more. Inventing and employing new technologies also plays an important role in the north and apparently you even can hold a good, old-fashioned witch-burning if you feel like it. In an interesting twist, your endgame scoring changes depending on your tribes religious views: monotheists (presumably Christians) score differently from polytheists. It should give you an idea how merciless Greenland is that, historically, only one of the tribes, the ancestors of today’s Inuit, survived.
This week’s featured photo, kindly shared by Maurice under a CC-BY license, shows the banks of the Danube in Budapest, Hungary. Thanks a lot, Maurice!