Alderac
Commanding a spaceship is a job for simple captains. That’s below you. You command a whole fleet of them from your Space Base. Coming in April, Space Base will be a card drafting and dice game. The commanders will draft ships into their space stations. With the two dice they activate either two sectors or sum the dice to activate one. The ship docked in the activated sector will bring a reward. You create your own reward roll table. With every dice roll all players may pick the rewards from their own base, so no one is ever waiting.
NSKN Games
Deck building, bag building, dice building – now it’s dice bag building in NSKN Games’s 4X game Dice Settlers. You fill your personal dice bag with different colors of dice with different icons on them. When it’s your turn you draw some dice and roll them, trying to hit combinations for the actions you want. Actions like exploring new landscape tiles, settling them, gathering resources, attacking your neighbors or buying new dice to add to your bag. Where there are dice, there is luck, of course, but in this game by David Turczi you’ll also have plenty to strategize between building your bag and your actions on the board.
Schwerkraft Verlag / Mighty Boards
Petrichor: the pleasant smell of rain after a dry spell. Also the quick, interactive card game that Mighty Boards kickstarted last year and that Schwerkraft Verlag will now release in a German edition. Players in Petrichor make weather, specifically rain, and score points by having their rain contribute the most to growing plants in the fields. A very fun and interactive game that I’m happy to see spreading across the globe.
Lucky Duck Games
Think what you want about boardgames that need mobile apps to play, it’s a trend that’s here to stay. With Chronicles of Crime Lucky Duck Games takes it a step further than others: a boardgame that you play with a VR app. Well, it’s still a mobile app, and you don’t have to play it with the VR glasses on your phone – but come on, given the option, why wouldn’t you? With app and glasses you examine crime scenes, an important part of your job on the murder team. But that’s not all you do in the cooperative police procedural, you also track down and interrogate suspects, talk to your scientific contacts, all through the app. There are physical components, but they mainly serve to carry a QR code that the app scans and tell you what a character has to say or what you can find in a place. You could argue why the physical components are even needed, but there is a clear advantage to this approach: A simple download and you have a new case with the same pieces. And that’s part of the plan, but boxed expansions are already on the horizon as well.
Fantasy Flight Games
Fantasy Flight Games always try to introduce something new with their expansions. Not just new components and scenarios, but new concepts. In Mansions of Madness – Sanctum of Twilight we get map tiles moving across other map tiles. The latest preview goes into more details about the Twilight Fair parade floats.
Z-Man Games
It’s mini expansion season at Z-Man Games! Available on their web store now are goodies for Terra Mystica, A Feast for Odin, The Voyages of Marco Polo, Beyond Baker Street, Carcassonne, and Sylvion. So if you want to freshen up some of your games, here’s your chance.
Cryptozoic / Igrology
The best way to control the Eternal City is through religion. Good that you’re the patriarch of one of its cults already. Bad that there are a few others. In Cult: Choose Your God Wisely you’ll compete with up to four cult leaders for control. You probably know worker placement games, but how many of those have a battle royale between Cthulhu, Fafnir, Anubis and a bunch of other divinities? Your chosen patron grants you different powers each game, so they’ll favor different strategies. Some will win more easily by violent revolt, others by becoming the official state religion of the Eternal City. And you always have the option to summon your god into this world to win. Very cool theme, great concept, I’m sold.
This week’s featured photo was taken at the Cistercian Abbey in Fontenay, France by Felix Lamouroux. Thank you very much for sharing, Felix! (L’Abbaye de Fontenay (Cloister), Felix Lamouroux, CC-BY-SA, resized and cropped)