Kickstarter
Just because it’s cube-shaped and has different faces does not always mean it’s a dice. In Quodd Heroes, on Kickstarter, it describes the players’ pawns. Our cubic – and highly adorable – heroes move around their fantastic world in a very peculiar way: first, they turn over one edge into an adjacent space, and then they use whichever movement skill is now showing on top of their toppled body. Each face shows a different movement skill, and how far you can move with each is upgradeable. Getting where you want to go will take some planning. What you’re trying to achieve depends on the scenario, there are different kinds of races, a team play mode and, when that stretch goal is unlocked, a one-vs-all Overlord mode.
RobotLab is a lighthearted card game in which you try to be the first to build your robot from the parts available on the lab – and try to hinder the other players in their quest to do so. The game is currently campaigning on Kickstarter – and while it is funded, there are still some stretch goals to unlock! Late last week, we had the opportunity to speak with designer Adam McCrimmon about his game, and how he got from the initial idea to the final game! You can check out the interview with Adam here, and we encourage you to check out the Kickstarter page and see if you, too, want to build a friendly robot!
Iello
We don’t know much about The Legend of the Cherry Tree that blossoms every ten years, a coming game by Iello. It’s a press-your-luck game where you draw cherry blossoms and score points for collecting sets. And apparently drawing too many blossoms at once has a chance for punishment. But being the sucker for eye candy that I am, I already want the game before I know more details, just from looking at the cover by Sylvain Sarrailh.
Another new Iello game coming soon is Arena: For the Gods by Maxime Rambourg. Heroes from different cultures’ mythologies will clash in the arena, and only one can win the battle. But fighting the other heroes is only half the game, before you actually enter the arena you win weapons, armors and mounts in an auction against the other players. You’re not paying that gear with money or gold, however. The only currency accepted are health points, so the more you spend on equipment the squishier you’ll be when the battle begins. (That last part is from memory from when we saw Arena: For the Gods in Essen. So please don’t hurt me if it’s wrong. I also remember that the art by Paul Mafayon we saw there was amazing, too.)
Hans im Glück
Hans im Glück presented their 2017 lineup at the Nürnberg fair. They will release the German version of the new edition of Citadels and the new circus-themed Carcassone expansion Manege Frei. Both are very good news, but what really has us excited is the new Stefan Dorra game Valletta. Here you will construct the capital of Malta in a deck-building game: as usual you start out with some cards in your deck, but you acquire new ones by constructing buildings in the city. Doing so lets you take the card from that building, but you will also gain resources from that building for the rest of the game, so there are already two sides to the decision which building to construct. Valletta is supposed to play relatively quick – about twenty minutes per player – but looks like it has a high decision density.
Funforge / Passport Game Studios
Professor Evil and the Citadel of Time is a title that could be a Saturday morning cartoon, and the plot does sound like the typical cartoon supervillain scheme that will somehow make them take over the world, but you really can’t figure out how. Professor Evil has used his time machine to steal important, historical objects straight out of the timeline, and he’s now keeping them in his mansion. That’s it. I can’t figure out why he does it, either. But we can’t let him get away with it, and that means in the game by Brett Gilbert and Matthew Dunstan we’ll enter the Professor’s mansion and steal back history. The players move through the house and disable the traps protecting the Professor’s loot while the Professor moves around setting them back up. The players have to work together and steal four items before the Professor can hide four items in his unbreakable vault.
NSKN Games
It’s not often that a publisher advertises an expansion as a final expansion to a game. But that’s exactly what NSKN Games are doing with Event Horizon, an expansion for their space 4X game Exodus: Proxima Centauri that is now on Kickstarter. I can see why they’d call it the final one. What else is there left to add after an expansion that has seven new modules, all of which you can mix and match into your Exodus game? Leaders for your factions, jump gates, random events, the Centauri people fighting back when you exploit their planets, everything that could happen is in there. That’s a lot of new Exodus to enjoy.
MESAboardgames / Arcane Wonders
Morbid, morbid, this new game by Gil d’Orey and and António Sousa Lara. Each player of VIRAL will control a virus strain that has just infected its first host body. The various viruses will then try to take control of as much of their victim as they can, shutting down vital organs along the way to score points. No self-respecting virus would stay unchanging for long, mutating is way too much fun, and so mutating your personal virus into the most promising form to win is an essential part of the game. VIRAL should be available around August from MESAboardgames and in an English edition from Arcane Wonders.
Pegasus Spiele
With Santo Domingo Pegasus Spiele announced a small, quick character selection game by Stefan Risthaus to be released this April. In the city of Santo Domingo, the oldest colonial city in the Americas, the players are merchants in search of wealth and glory. Each round they select one card from their deck of eight to pick a character to help them this round. Characters will let them take or trade commodities and victory points. The supply of both is limited per round, so which character will bring you the greatest benefit depends on the characters acting before you.
This week’s featured photo might look familiar to many boardgamers: the Speicherstadt in Hamburg, Germany. They built it in honor of Stefan Feld’s game of that name. The photo was taken by Daniel Günther who kindly shared it with a Creative Commons license. (DSC_1753, Daniel Günther, CC-BY)