Days of Wonder
Ticket to Ride is the most successful boardgame about trains out there. But why only trains? You need tickets to ride other forms of transportation, too. Ships, for instance. Days of Wonder have finally conceded that point, the next installment of Ticket to Ride will be Ticket to Ride: Rails & Sails and takes you off the rails and on the water. The double-sided board will have a world map on one side and the Great Lake region of the US on the other. Both will let you place little plastic ships next to your little plastic trains, and harbors between the two as well. Another new feature are the tour tickets, ticket cards that score really big points, but only if you connect all of the three to five cities given on the ticket instead of the usual two. Ticket to Ride: Rails & Sails will be available all over the world in September.
Tasty Minstrel Games
Tasty Minstrel Games have a new game by Hisashi Hayashi (Trains,…)on Kickstarter: the worker placement game Yokohama. I call it a worker placement game, but it works a bit different than other games of that genre. What you mostly place are Assistants, handy helpers that are, however, completely useless on their own. The only action you can take is where you place your President. That action gets more powerful with each Assistant there. But you can only place three Assistants per turn, and they have to be on different locations, so planning a few steps ahead will be essential in building your economic empire in Yokohama.
Plaid Hat Games
Everything we learned about SeaFall so far was predictable and strategic: you go to a place, and if you can pay the required resources you get what you came for. But the sea is a harsh mistress and not everything will always go as planned. SeaFall uses dice for some actions, and if they are not kind to you then you may quickly find your ships at the bottom of the sea. The dice come into play when you Explore or Raid, actions that sound risky already. Both make you roll a certain number of dice and count Successes to see if you made it. You can, of course, collect enough dice in preparation to make success very likely, but do you really want to spend many turns collecting extra upgrades for your dice, or will you take a risk and be done much earlier? Exploring the seas is a risky business, after all.
Fantasy Flight Games
With the coming Descent expansion The Chains that Rust the Overlord player will have access to a new class that is sure to drive your heroes crazy. A Soulbinder Overlord does all his nasty work through his servant on the board: the Scourge. When he purchases the first card in the Soulbinder class, the Overlord gains the ability to summon his Scourge servant every time a monster dies and the Scourge isn’t already on the board. The Scourge starts out as more of an annoyance than a real threat. It slowly follows the heroes around and when one of them takes Fatigue while adjacent to the Scourge it forces another hero to take Fatigue as well. But other Soulbinder cards buff the Scourge. They make it faster, give it more ways to drain heroes Stamina and other options to interact with the game. And it never really goes away, even when the heroes kill it it will just come back. I’m so looking forward to use this on my heroes.
This week’s featured photo was shared by tefl Search in their Creative Commons program. It was taken in the Phong Nha-Ke Bang National Park in Vietnam. Thanks for sharing this beautiful photo! (Photo license: CC-BY)