CMON
You’ve fought zombies. You’ve fought zombies in the middle ages. You’ve fought a side order of orcs with your zombies. Now Zombicide is approaching the final frontier: fighting evil – and really, REALLY ugly – aliens in space. In Zombicide: Invaders the players fight together against evil Xenos. The usual action of a Zombicide game is all there, but being in the distant future gives you some new options. Like a combat robot to control. And if Invaders doesn’t pack enough action for you then you can get the Black Ops expansion from the same Kickstarter.
Space Cowboys
Time do dive headfirst into the time stream once more! The next T.I.M.E. Stories expansion Brotherhood of the Coast takes you back to the golden age of piracy. It’s not all going to be fun and swinging from chandeliers, however. Something is badly wrong in the past. Wrong enough that the team that was sent to resolve the problem before you disappeared without a trace. Good luck, T.I.M.E. agents!
Archona Games
We were already in love with Archona Games’s area control games Small Star Empires. Two expansions are going to make it even better. The Galactic Divide adds variable player powers: The four player colors now correspond to one of the four galactic civilizations, each of which has two special abilities. The power to use those abilities comes from building the new Battle Stations next to opponents’ stations. Dawn of Discoveries is more peaceful. Players will collect different kinds of minerals to buy technology cards and use their advantages. Together with the two expansions the second edition of the base game is on Kickstarter.
Capstone Games
If auction games are your jazz then you may have heard of Neue Heimat by Klaus Zoch. The game from 2007 has some mean special features. One player acts as the auctioneer each round. The other players bid for a piece of a building to put on the board, but the auctioneer decides if he accepts the highes bid and takes the money or if he wants the piece himself and pays the highest bid to the bidder. Also interesting is the fact that the game ends when two of the three rows are completed. Those rows score positive points for buildings there, the unfinished third one scores negative points. And there are more details in this deceptively simple game to keep you on your toes. Why do I bring up Neue Heimat eleven years after its release? Capstone Games have an English language edition on Kickstarter titled The Estates, and the game is still as good as it was in 2007.
Fantasy Flight Games
The next Imperial Assault expansion lets you join – or fight against – the Rebellion in the Outer Rim. It will also bring the most popular villain of the Star Wars expanded universe to the table. In Imperial Assault – Tyrants of Lothal the Rebels will face Grand Admiral Thrawn. If you’ve read the novels about this guy, then you know the new six mission campaign will be a tough one. The first preview doesn’t talk much about the Grand Admiral, however. It introduces us to Tress Hacnua, a cybernetically enhanced brawler fighting for the Rebellion.
Arkham Horror: The Card Game expansions with new plots to thwart, new monsters to slay and new dooms to stop are welcome and expected. Equally welcome but entirely unexpected is Return to the Night of the Zealot, an expansion that takes us back to the classic campaign of the Arkham Horror: The Card Game base game. Without spoiling to much of a story, a large part of that campaign has you pursuing and interrogating cultists. This new expansion has a new, more dangerous cult with new, more dangerous members. And some old acquaintances who are now also more dangerous. And who have some more dangerous artifacts at their disposal. You know, just in case you found the original campaign to easy. Spoiler: it isn’t. But these new cultists should be fun to lose against.
Slinky Gibbon Games
Few themes are as fecund for games as Lovecraft’s Mythos. There are always new games coming with that background, and we don’t get tired of them, either. One new such game is I Am The Fourth Wall by Slinky Gibbon Games. It comes with different game modes to play cooperatively, solo, or in an asymmetric one-vs-all mode. All modes share that an eldritch horror called The Wall tries to drive the world into madness – in 1950s suburbia. The game mechanisms are sleek and quick, but have an evil risk-vs-reward aspect. The investigators trying to stop The Wall can do great things, but everything comes with a price. Using cards to combat The Wall also drains the investigators’ sanity because the number of cards in their hand is their sanity. And if they go for a really spectacular move and exploit the power of the otherworldy rift, then the rewards for that are great – but they also make The Wall stronger. So you see, there are no easy decisions here.
Z-Man Games
When I was younger, so much younger than today, Choose Your Own Adventure books where an awesome way to pass the time. Yes, books. Not scrolls, not stone tablets. How old do you think I am? Anyway, the idea of CYOA games has recently been popular in boardgame circles, with games like T.I.M.E. Stories, the various escape room games, or Legacy of Dragonholt. It was only a question of time until someone decided to mine the books and turn them into a more tabletop-y format. That someone is Prospero Hall and Z-Man Games. They turn the classic book Choose Your Own Adventure: House of Danger into a card game with the same name. There is no rulebook to download yet, so we have no idea if this is just a remake with cards instead of games or a real, new game with the same basic plot. We’ll hopefully know, soon!
Plaid Hat Games
New challengers join the fray of Plaid Hat Games’s fantasy battle game Crystal Clans. In four separate expansion decks you find the stealthy Shadow Clan, the ferocious Fang Clan, the highly mobile Feather Clan, and the Leaf Clan, masters of mulching and composting – that’s much more threatening than it sounds, trust me.
This week’s featured photo shows one of the most impressive sunrises you can see on this planet: Sagarmatha National Park in Nepal. You may know Mount Sagarmatha, lending it’s name to the national park, by another name: Mount Everest. The photo was taken by Göran Höglund. Thank you for sharing, Göran! (Tibet – Mount Everest, Göran Höglund, CC-BY, resized and cropped)