This week’s news are, unfortunately and disappointingly, incomplete because of technical difficulties. Feedly, the online RSS reader of my choice, is suffering from denial-of-service attacks for the last few days, and that means I cannot access many of my news feeds. But I won’t keep those news from you forever, I hope whatever asshat is responsibly will leave Feedly alone soon, and then I can deliver the remaining news of the week. Fortunately, a lot of our news also reach us through Facebook, Kickstarter or directly via mail, so you needn’t fear game news withdrawal, and next week I hope all will be back to normal.
Fantasy Flight Games
The Legions of Darkness are advancing on Warhammer: Diskwars, and they are not only vicious Vampires. This newest preview post introduces the other new races: Dark Elves and Skaven. The Dark Elves, like their less evil but equally arrogant High Elf counterparts, are fragile in melee, but they get a bunch of abilities to slow and hinder their opponents and thus control when to do battle. The Skaven, mutant rat people with an addiction to Chaos, join the fight in their capacity as ranged spellcasters. That’s a bid sad, I was hoping for them in their more common role of overrunning the enemy with hordes of small, squishy units. But maybe that’s coming in another expansion.
Z-Man Games
What, would you say, is the exact opposite of Pandemic? To start with, it’s not cooperative. Furthermore, you’re not trying to heal people, you’re trying to get them sick and kill them. This unlikely sounding reversal of roles is exactly what Z-Man Games has announced with Pandemic: Contagion. In this game, you are the disease, and your goal is to exterminate humanity before anyone else does. As you probably guessed, Contagion is not an expansion to Pandemic but a stand-alone game.
FryxGames
This year’s release by small Swedish publisher Fryx Games, Fleets – The Pleiad Conflict, is now on Kickstarter. Fleets is a space conflict game, but it doesn’t focus on large military campaigns, building reinforcements and bringing war to the galaxy like many others in that genre do. Instead, you play the game with one fleet, consisting of a mothership, its individual upgrades and a small number of escort ships. With those, you try to control solar systems at the end of a round to score points. And you don’t even have to do that with laser cannons blazing, you have diplomatic options as well.
Golden Egg Games
The newest Kickstarter project / Spieleschmiede project by Golden Egg Games is a two-player miniature battle titled Athlas – Duel for Divinity. And they are serious about the divinity part. Very serious. You don’t just start the game with a few dudes on the board, waiting to bash the other guy’s dudes in the head. First, you have to create life. You don’t just pick units from the box to play in this one, you create your own people from a basic Genus by adding spells, abilities and artifacts and maybe picking a Divine Intervention to support them. There’s a total of 170 cards to pick from, and as you can see by the example cards on the project pages, those cards are way more diverse than “hit one dude for two damage” vs. “hit two dudes for one damage”. They even include things like changing the terrain, raising hills or flooding the battlefield. So if you’re looking for a very customizable battle game, this is probably it.
Pearl Games
The first we see of the newest Pearl Games game Bloody Inn is this card preview they posted on their Facebook page. That inn has to be rather bloody, how else would you explain it having a crypt? The game is still work in progress, but the art is beautiful already, I’m always happy about games with their own distinctive, non-mainstream style.
Asmadi Games
Publisher Asmadi Games has launched a Kickstarter project about the other type of publishing: newspapers. Penny Press is set in the golden age and place of newspaper sensationalism: New York, beginning of last century. Up to five players compete as newspaper publishers, sending out reporters to cover stories and fill their paper’s front page. Stories are exclusive, so you have to watch your competition, and the public interest is fickle as ever, with a system to dynamically adjust the interest in different stories, affecting your circulation. The mechanics sound cool, the art looks great and fits the theme – and it’s a very neat and underused theme as well.
Plaid Hat Games
The next Mice & Mystics expansion will take your adorable and heroic rodents to the great outdoors. Specifically, to the Downwood. Downwood Tales adds a new storybook, new heroes and villains, all new adventures and your first ally for hire: Jakobe the gecko, a Downwood native who’s help will be invaluable. But he’s not the only new critter you will encounter, be ready to meet rabbits and frogs, blind wise mice and more.
This week’s featured photo shows Kinkaku-ji (the Golden Pavillion) in Kyoto, Japan. I had heard of it, of course, but I never realized that it’s actually all golden. It’s very impressive. Thank you for the great photo, Luke Ma. (License: CC-BY)