Indie Boards & Cards
Fans of the hidden identity game The Resistance will love this Kickstarter campaign. Two expansions in one campaign, and each includes three modules that you can mix and match. You probably don’t want them all at once, though. Hostile Intent introduces the Inquisitor, who can check the allegiance of a player but doesn’t have to say the truth about what he finds, the Reverser can change the success of a mission and with the Hunter module both sides must identify the other sides leader to win. In Hidden Agenda you get the Trapper with his ability to observe one member of a mission team, the Defector who may switch sides in the middle of the game and the additional roles from fantasy re-theme Avalon, transported into The Resistance.
Fantasy Flight Games
Manor of Ravens, the next expansion for Descent: Journeys in the Dark must be drawing near because Fantasy Flight Games will run out of things to preview soon. This week, they show us the two new Heroes and new Hero Classes. The Marshal class, represented by Alys Raine, is all about justice of the eye-for-an-eye flavor, with neat abilities like dealing damage to monsters when they deal damage. Thaiden Mistpeak, the Bounty Hunter, is a real killer. He singles out one monster that he deals increased damage against every time he attacks.
Argentum Verlag
German publisher Argentum Verlag will have two new releases for Essen this year. One is an expansion to Andreas Steding’s Hansa Teutonica with a new game board showing Britannia, for now simply titled the Britannia Expansion. The other is a new game called El Gaucho by Arve Fühler, designer of Pagoda, but that’s all we know for now.
Days of Wonder
This week’s preview djinn from Bruno Cathala’s Five Tribes is a tad more violent than previous previews. And by “a tad more violent” I mean he makes your assassins work double time and kill two people for the price of one.
Numbskull Games
Almost a year ago, in August 2013, we talked about California Gold by Numbskull Games for the first time.
California Gold is another new release from Numbskull, to be released next year. The game by Patrick Stevens has nothing all to do with the Gold Rush like the title might suggest. It’s a game about growing oranges. No, really, I’m serious. The game seems quite strategic from the description: you’ll collect cards representing orange ranches, build support buildings like schools and nurseries, advertise your produce and close contracts with railroad companies. All that while the weather and even politics are messing with your plans.
Now, almost a year later, California Gold is on Kickstarter and while the project description is unusually short and, to be quite honest here, I do hope they put some more work into that project page, because projects with bad pages have a surprising history of not being funded, and I would like to see it funded.
Matagot
Because war with gods and mythological monsters is more fun the more people join in, Cyclades: Titans will do one thing before all others: add another player to the game. Playing Cyclades in six people is only possible in teams of two, but team play is always fun, so getting actual team rules is cool. The expansion will also give each player three titans, new units that can apparently attack without calling on Mars, and will add Kronos as a new god.
Alderac
The Mad Scientists in Smash Up: Monster Smash, the next four-faction expansion to Smash Up, will be able to create Frankenminions. Well, they don’t use that word. I hope they actually do use that word. But for this preview card, they don’t use that word. It still creates a Frankenminion.
Trains: Rising Sun expands the Trains deck-building game not only with new cards, the usual thing to do with deck builders, but also with three new game boards, two designed specifically for two players and one for up to four. On top of that, the expansion also contains route cards – bonus points for connecting pairs of cities, much like Ticket to Ride – for the new boards and all old boards available so far.
The photo of the week, taken by Dennis Jarvis, shows the Red Square in Moscow: the walls of the Kremlin on the left, Lenin’s Mausoleum in the center and the State Historical Museum on the right. Thank you for sharing this beautiful photo, Dennis! (Photo license: CC-BY-SA)