Iello
Admit it, most of you still hope that letter telling you to attend magic school is still coming. Maybe playing Iello’s The Big Book of Madness will convince you that’s not such a great idea, those schools can be very dangerous. As in the game: you open a magic book and monsters pop up all over the place that you, the students, must now defeat. Where are the professors to take care of these problems??? Fortunately, you are not all defenseless, you know some handy spells and can learn more of them during the game by adding them to your deck. The Big Book of Madness is a cooperative deck-building game, and you better cooperate well, because those monsters have some nasty surprises for you.
Osprey Publishing
Osprey Publishing is a publisher known for all things military, like books on military history and wargames. Now they’re trying their hands on non-war tabletop games, starting with The King is Dead by Peer Sylvester. After King Arthur’s death, Britain is in chaos and the Saxons are approaching. The country needs a strong leader to unite under, and that might be you. But uniting the country with the power of your armies is not an option, influence and diplomacy are the way. So you strengthen your influence on the various factions of medieval Britain and manipulate matters so that a faction you control comes out on top and you may rule through them. All that while your opponents are trying the same thing, and without causing too much unrest the Saxons can abuse for their invasion.
Fantasy Flight Games
Strange Remnants hasn’t settled on the store shelves yet and Fantasy Flight Games have already announced the next expansion for Eldritch Horror. Under the Pyramids expands the game into the ancient sands of Egypt, where mysteries have been written on the pyramid walls before the rest of the world learned to write. Eight new investigators will join the fight and use new Glamour spells and Relics to fight an new Old One: The Black Pharaoh. Maybe he was a worshiper of Nyarlathotep, maybe he was an avatar of the Old One. What we know is, his reign over Egypt was terrible. We also know we’re gonna need a larger table yet again, because all this new action will be on a new Egypt side board.
Golden Egg Games
Playing board games we have managed many different types of businesses. As far as I can recall, a TV station hasn’t been among them yet. That’s going to change with Prime Time, a game currently on Kickstarter by Golden Egg Games. As the guy responsible for your stations prime time program, you have only six weeks to launch your new shows, attract an audience and sell advertising. You don’t only pick the shows to produce, you also get to hire the talents doing the actual work on the production, all to create the best show you possibly can. Because that’s how you sell advertising.
Hans im Glück
News that we have all been waiting for: there will be an expansion for Hans im Glück’s popular worker placement game Russian Railroads this October. Or maybe it’s more like a new game using the base game’s material, because German Railroads will replace some central components. New player boards show German train tracks instead of the familiar Russian ones. Those tracks will have variable distances which should make games more variable and force you to come up with new, different strategies. While that is the central change in the expansion, it’s not all. When you play with the Coal Age option and add coal as a new resource. That stuff is useful for almost everything, it can improve your locomotives and factories, it can enhance their effects, or you can burn it in the new foundries to generate income. Furthermore, German Railroads will contain new engineers and extra tokens, and a solo variant of the game.
2F-Spiele
Friedemann Friese’s big new release this year is the modular game 504 that lets you mix its nine components in that many different ways for a new game every time. But that’s not all that’s new from 2F-Spiele, they will also have a new Power Grid expansion that is different from the usual new maps to play on. Power Grid: The Stock Companies changes the way you play, your power companies now emit stock to be traded by the other players. Interestingly, this expansion is based on the Shares module of 504, so you get a a little insight into how that game works, too. Just like the 504 module, The Stock Companies will have three different ways to be included in the game, bringing different levels of change to the game. The main variant is said to change the game completely, while the smallest variant just adds a bit of stock trading to regular Power Grid.
Argentum Verlag
Argentum will be present in Essen with Antarctica, a new game by Charles Chevallier. In the near future, thanks to global warming and increased energy consumption, the nations of the world have increased their research in Antarctica. And if those research missions just happen to bring a lot of resources home, all the better. Because expeditions to gather resources would violate the Antarctic Treaty, but no one can say can complain about legitimate research. Commanding one such research mission, you recruit scientists, build research stations and bring in more ships. An interesting turn order system activates ships in counter-clockwise order, the order in which the sun hits them, so positioning yourself to move at the right time becomes another priority.
Bombyx
In Abyss, last year popular Bombyx release, players were competing for the throne of the underwater kingdom Abyss by working with their allies, recruiting the help of the kingdom’s Lords and controlling key locations. This year, they’ll have to start working with the Smugglers’ Guild to reach their goal. In Abyss: Kraken the guild has made its headquarter in a sea monster cemetery. From their, they deal nebulises, beautiful black pearls of immense value – and also quite illegal to posses. Using them can put you on the throne quickly, but being caught with them may put a sudden end to your ambition. The expansion will also contain new Allies, Lords and Locations for your underwater adventures.
The photo of the week, taken by Flickr user debs-eyes, shows the Monastery of Haghpat, Armenia. The photo was shares with a CC-BY license. Thank you for sharing!