Z-Man Games
Z-Man Games shows another preview for the coming Pandemic: State of Emergency. One of the three new expansion modules is the Superbug Challenge, and it will be super annoying. The Superbug, a fifth color of disease cubes, can not be cured by conventional means. The only way to get those cubes of the board again is to develop the vaccine and then use its limited doses to stop the Superbug. This might be the hardest Pandemic challenge yet.
Phil Walker-Harding’s Cacao, a tile-laying game published by ABACUSSPIELE in Germany, will be available in the US from Z-Man Games later this year. A brief reminder what we previously said about Cacao:
There are two different types of tiles, terrain tiles from a common supply and each players own worker tiles. On their turn, a player places one of each, and the workers on the worker tile go doing their job: placed next to a cocoa tile, they harvest cocoa, that they can sell for gold at a market tile. From a well tile they bring home water and next to a temple they just hang around, hoping to be the largest crowd there at the end. The winner is decided by gold earned, water supply and majorities at the temples.
The newest game in the dream world of Onirim is coming in the second quarter of the year. This time, a mad fire elemental is out to burn down your forest of dreams. In Sylvion, one or two player pick cards through a drafting mechanism and place those cards in the four columns of the forest to fight of the fire minions. The animals of the forest can be recruited to help briefly before they flee – animal cards have instant effects – but like all other cards, they must be paid for by discarding yet more cards from your hand. Managing your resources is going to be a problem.
Eagle-Gryphon Games
Empires: Age of Discovery, the remake of highly popular worker placement game Age of Empires III – we talked about it last week – is now also available on German crowdfunding site Spieleschmiede.
Space Cowboys
“Take on the role of a demigod” is a great introduction to a game, that’s something I always like to do. In Space Cowboy’s Elysium, that’s exactly what players do. As a newborn demigod of Greek myth, the players set out to create their own legend. They do that by placing sets of cards to the Elysium, but there’s a drawback to that: the same cards are used for their effects while you still have them, once they go to Elysium they have no use any more. You’ll have to balance carefully. Each card belong to one of eight Greek gods, and each god’s cards have very different abilities. But you only have five gods in each game, so you’ll always have new combinations of cards to figure out.
This week’s featured photo, taken by Dennis Jarvis, shows the audience court, one of the monuments of Hué, Viet Nam. (CC-BY-SA)