Meople News: Villain’s Legacy

Z-Man Games

It will be hard to top this announcement by Z-Man Games for this week. They got Matt Leacock, designer of the great cooperative game Pandemic, and Rob Daviau, designer of Risk Legacy, together on a project. That project is Pandemic Legacy, and it does exactly what we would all want it to do: it takes the classic Pandemic, a cooperative fight against diseases ravaging the world, and applies the Legacy idea to it. So after every game, there will be some permanent change to the game itself. We don’t know yet what changes those will be, but turning some countries into permanent wasteland sounds just as likely as giving one of the four diseases a permanent upgrade, and I’m sure that Matt and Rob came up with some crazier ideas, too. I thought that Legacy was a great concept already, but applied to Pandemic it makes me giddy.

Say Bye to the Villains (Image by Alderac)
Say Bye to the Villains (Image by Alderac)

Alderac

On Alderac’s Facebook page there is a first preview card from Say Bye to the Villains, Seiji Kanai’s cooperative samurai card game. Heiji is one of the playable characters and, if I understand his ability correctly, can see the future: his ability allows him to look at a villain’s “situation card” and mark some of them by turning them sideways. He mustn’t tell what exactly he saw, but he can mark cards that are especially dangerous for a certain type of player and say so.

Surprised Stare Games

A new scenario for the popular train building game Snowdonia is under development by a certain Sebastian Bleasdale, famous for games like Keyflower. Him developing a scenario for Tony Boydell’s great Snowdonia, I can see no way this wouldn’t be good. The setting for this scenario is promising as well, the preview card on Facebook shows the Bockerlbahn, a little known and short-lived train line in Bavaria with the sole purpose of transporting huge amounts of windthrown trees. According to the German Wikipedia, the train had to traverse very difficult terrain, with two switchbacks and an external winch to pull the train up one particularly steep hill. If all that makes it into the game, this will be a tough scenario to play.

Czech Games Edition

One Essen 2014 release by Czech Games Edition will be a game that I really, really hope they do well, because my experience with that particular idea so far were less than stellar. Alchemists by Matúš Kotry will require a smart phone app to play. I’m as addicted to my smart phone as the next guy working in IT, I just haven’t seen this done well with a boardgame yet. Well, if anyone can do it, then the publisher of the first game with a CD that is utterly amazing … Space Alert. Alchemists is a deduction game where players compete to be the first to publish alchemical theories. The phone app randomizes the rules and recipes for each game, so your deductions can’t be thrown of by other players making a mistake.

X-Files: The Board Game (Image by IDW Games)
X-Files: The Board Game (Image by IDW Games)

IDW Games

Just to remind everyone that IDW Games is working on X-Files: The Board Game – better late than never is all I can say – they showed an art preview on their Twitter feed. Meet Agent Dana Scully. If this is the style of the whole game, then it’s going to be pretty.

This week’s photo by John Hume (CC-BY) shows the outstanding mesoamerican monuments of Xochicalco, Mexico. Thanks a lot for sharing, John!

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