Alderac Entertainment
A struggle sounds like something long and epic. Which is nice when you have the whole night. But sometimes you want something that’s over in 15 minutes or less. More like a squabble. With Twilight Squabble, Alderac will give you the chance to participate in the cold war when you don’t have the time or the energy to play that other Twilight game by GMT. Just like its big cousin, Twilight Squabble will be two-player game, but it’s a simple card game that puts players in charge of the space race, one on the US and one on the USSR side.
FryxGames
One aspect of FryxGames’s Terraforming Mars that the previews didn’t really go into until now is what you do back on Earth. Sure, your goal is to terraform Mars, but you do that as a Earth mega-corporation, surely you have something to do back home, too. The latest preview shows some cards from the home planet. They all deal with the financial side of your project. You can, for example, take a loan, or you can televise the whole operation to make sure you can afford it.
Gamelyn Games
Tiny and epic, this is not the first time Gamelyn Games have made that promise. And the last time around, with Tiny Epic Galaxies, it worked out really well, according to everyone I’ve seen talk about the game. Now they are back on Kickstarter with Tiny Epic Western, a Wild West worker placement game. Making this new game special is not only that it’s a worker placement game that plays in 30-45 minutes, it’s also crossbred with Poker: whenever you place a worker you play a card with it and whoever makes the highest hand at that location with this card and the cards at that location wins a bonus. Naturally for a Western game, you can also drive opposing workers away in a duel if you really need that spot. Everything sounds and looks as if this tiny game will be just as epic as Galaxies.
Artipia Games / Stronghold Games
If you want a game where you control your entire life, from the cradle to the grave, you are no longer limited to The Game of Life. Artipia Games and Stronghold Games’s The Pursuit of Happiness lets you do the same thing, but instead of the annoying roll-and-move you get a tight resource management game. The one resource you never have enough of is Time, and doesn’t that sound familiar? You use your time on projects, your job, your family and other activities, and some of those will give you other resources like Creativity or Influence that, again, you can use to do other things. Your goal is to achieve more in your lifetime than the other players – I’m not sure if that’s the key to happiness in life, but in a game it’s the obvious choice. The Pursuit of Happiness will also be available from Stronghold Games, but the Kickstarter campaign is by Artipia Games only.
Queen Games
We first talked about Queen Games’s Liguria about two months ago. The game by Alessandro Zucchini is a sort of prequel to Queen’s Fresco, it makes you a merchant dealing in pigments that will become the colors used in Fresco. But Liguria is not a cheap Fresco knockoff, it’s a game in its own right that just happens to be thematically related. Anyway, the Kickstarter campaign for it is running now, and it included the very interesting option to get Liguria together with the Fresco Big Box. Damn, that’s tempting.
Days of Wonder
Days of Wonder may not publish as many games as other publishes, but what they publish is mostly very good. Quadropolis looks like it will continue that tradition, it was the winner of the Boulogne Billancourt International Game Designers Contest before Days of Wonder picked it up. It’s a city planning game where you as the mayor of a growing city have to take care of your citizens’ needs and extract the maximum score from the buildings you erect. Different types of buildings have different ways to score, and they work together to give you even more points when used right. Suitable for ages eight and up and only taking 30-60 minutes Quadropolis is one of DoW’s lighter games.
This week’s featured photo, taken by Vyacheslav Argenberg and kindly shared with a CC-BY license, shows the ancient city of Chersonese, a Greek colony on the Black Sea in today’s Ukraine. Thank you for sharing that photo, Vyacheslav!