Stronghold Games
Space Cadets: Away Missions is the third game in Stronghold Games’ Space Cadets series. It’s a standalone game, not an expansion, and different from its predecessors. In Away Missions, you won’t be flying around the universe in your cool spaceship shooting things. You’ll be walking around on someone else’s cool spaceship shooting them. It’s a cooperative, tactical miniatures game where players take the role of the crew members boarding a UFO to shoot aliens and steal their technology. The Kickstarter campaign is already far beyond its funding goal, but there are still stretch goals to unlock for more minis and missions.
Spieltrieb GbR
The latest small game in the Little’n’nice series on Spieleschmiede is Moly Diggins, a game about moles. The rodents, not the secret agents. In this short, quick tile laying game you create tunnels from cards, then let your mole race through them and collect as many earthworms as he can. That’s all there is to it, really. You can play with up to four players and will be done in 10 to 15 minutes. Just don’t ask me about the German title, I have no idea what Winnewupp means, or even might mean.
In The Laz
Four mighty houses compete for ownership of The Kingswood: the Manatees, the Llamas, the Ostriches and the Sloths. Yes, really. The Kingswood, currently kickstarting, is a role selection and tile placement game. Each round, players pick one of the members of their house – which are actual llamas, manatees, etc. – for a special action and then places a road tile on the board. Roads take treasure out of the central city to a player’s gate where it goes into his treasury, so the point is to bring roads to your gates, diverting opponents’ roads where possible. Some pieces of roads even come with mercenaries to defend them, or fairies to increase the gold flow.
Historical Games Factory / Petersen Games
We’ve talked about Theomachy before, it’s a poker style game about the war between gods of different pantheons. The stakes in this game are the souls of believers, and the war is fought with disease, fire and brimstone. Why am I mentioning this? Because Theomachy is now on Kickstarter for an international edition, finally available outside of Europe. And this new Theomachy is bigger than ever before: where previous editions had gods from Celtic, Norse, Greek and Babylonian mythology, now there are Egyptian and Slavonic gods as well, plus two different pantheons from Lovecraft’s Mythos. Yes, you can now play as Cthulhu. The total of eight pantheons is split between two boxes, Theomachy: Warrior Gods and Theomachy: The Ancients, both available through the Kickstarter. One thing is annoying, however: the old pantheons are split between the two boxes, so if you already own a Theomachy, you can’t avoid redundancy.
MAGE Company
A few days after the Kickstarter campaign, you can now back the Höyük expansion Anatolia on Spieleschmiede as well. So if you want more options to enhance your neolithic village and live in or around Germany, this might be the best way for you to get it.
IDW Games / Pandasaurus Games
IDW Games and Pandasaurus Games will release a new deluxe edition of Fire & Axe: A Viking Saga, last released in 2007 and in great demand as a second hand game ever since. With your own longboat, you’ll take a crew of vikings around northern Europe and gain a reputation as either a great trader and diplomat or a feared conqueror and plunderer, the choice is all yours. The first print run of the new edition will contain a whole lot of great miniatures, thereafter there’ll be fewer minis, but they’ll still be great.
Mindclash Games
We’ve been waiting for this Kickstarter campaign to start ever since we saw the game in Essen last year: Trickerion – Legends of Illusion. It’s a game about magic, not of the fireball and demon summoning variety but about the less commonly seen in board games stage magic. Four great magicians of Magoria are in a contest to be even greater than the others, with more astonishing tricks more flamboyantly performed. No magician can do that alone, they all rely on their teams to pull of the tricks. Each team member can walk around the city, doing different jobs to make sure your show goes on. It’s a worker placement game, but with some interesting ideas. For one, your workers are not all the same, and hiring Specialists gives you access to special options on top of the worker you gain. For another, players pick where to send their workers at the same time using cards. When we sat Trickerion in Essen, it seemed complete, and all I can say is that it seemed like a very good medium-to-heavy game, and it already looked great.
This week’s featured photo shows a place with a very sad claim to fame. The Island of Gorée, of the coast of Senegal, was the largest center of slave trade on the African coast for 4 centuries, under the rule of four different colonial powers. The photo was taken by Jeff Attaway and shared with a CC-BY license. Thank you, Jeff.