Alderac
Thunderstone Quest is on Kickstarter again and ready to take you to New Horizons. What you get in this Kickstarter are two new campaigns for Thunderstone Quest: Vengeful Sands and Clockwork Destiny, both playable in competitive and cooperative mode. As a special goody, the Kickstarter also grants early access to the Ezuzrius’ Lair promo pack for cooperative Barricades mode. More Thunderstone Quest is never a bad thing if you ask me.
Alderac have posted a long list of card previews for Thunderstone Quest expansion New Horizons, starting with these adorable little scarabs. Aren’t they precious, the little bastards? For more previews click through the gallery. That new dwarf cleric looks fun, too!
Pearl Games
Pearl Games are going big this year with high concept science fiction game Black Angel. We – that is, humanity – have royally fucked up and Earth has become uninhabitable. All is not over for us. There is a planet called Spes that looks inhabitable. It has a downside, though: the trip there takes a couple of millennia. The multinational starship Black Angel can make the trip, carrying the human genome. To keep things running smoothly along the way multiple AIs will care for the ship’s systems. That will be your job. There are evil Ravagers to fight off, friendly aliens to learn new technologies from, and of course managing resources and robot work crews aboard the Black Angel. The AI doing their job best will receive a great honor: It will supervise the reemergence of humanity on Spes.
Burnt Island Games
The Age of Sail has passed, the Age of Expansion has begun. Endeavor: Age of Expansion is an aptly named expansion for Endeavor: Age of Sail. The basic rules remain largely unchanged, but Age of Expansion replaces all buildings and cards from the base game, creating an entirely new feel for the game as befits a new age.
Queen Games
It’s been a few years since Queen Games first released Escape: The Curse of the Temple, but now the real time dice rolling game is back on Kickstarter. There is not too much new content in the campaign, only six new tiles with Quests and Traps. It is, however, a great chance to get your hands on a copy of Escape, which has been out of print for a while now. In addition to the new bits you can get the base game, you can get an all new Big Box edition, and you can get some formerly exclusive special tiles, too. If you need some more good stress in your life, now’s the chance.
Renegade Game Studios
Pssss! Be very, very quiet. We’re playing more Clank!. The Clank! Expeditions series brings us a new board to clank around on. The Temple of the Ape Lords sounds like a primitive place deep in the jungle… and at least the deep on the jungle part is right. Primitive? Not so much. At least the temple’s passages are mechanized and there’s a mechanical ape guardian waiting for you. Have fun storming the temple!
Roll-and-write? Everyone’s doing roll-and-write, or in some cases roll-and-draw. ClipCut Parks is the first roll-and-cut game! To win the mayor’s park design contest you’ll have to build parks according to his plans, and you build them by finding matching bits in your park sheet and cutting them out. I’m not entirely sure how the dice come in. By the look of them they either tell you the length of cuts you can make or the number of squares you may cut off. Sounds like a fun evolution of roll-and-write. Now, who’s going to make the first roll-and-staple game?
Fantasy Flight Games
Mansions of Madness is moving further and further away from the mansions. Don’t worry, though, the madness part is as present as ever. The new expansion Path of the Serpent begins at a calm, friendly garden party in Arkham, takes you to the jungle where you’re told to avoid the darkness at all costs, and culminates in the lost Temple of Yig. As usual for Mansions of Madness expansions your adventures in Path of the Serpent will play out on a pile of new terrain tiles, you will fight new and unknown monsters, and find new items and spells along the way. Facing those things will be four new investigators. Finally, you can meet madness and death in the jungle from the comfort of your own home!
Kobold Spieleverlag / Hobby World
Last year we reviewed Bronze, a family friendly strategy game by Konstantin Domashev and Hobby World that forces you to make tough decisions and absolutely never lets you go backwards. If you’ve read that review and though “Sounds lovely, but I’d really like it in German,” then Kobold Spieleverlag have just the thing for you on Spieleschmiede right now.
The City of Games
Cats and boardgames. Good thing The Isle of Cats doesn’t have coffee as well or I’d hit my credit card limit on this Kickstarter. I think we can all agree that a whole island of cats is pretty awesome, right? Well, this one is in trouble. The evil Lord Vesh is coming and will do …. we don’t know exactly what he’ll do, but the cats need rescue from it. That means you will have to explore the island by drafting cards and then fit as many cats as you can on your ship. That is not as easy as it sounds because these cats are big, sit in very inconvenient poses – as cats do – and you have to keep cat families together. And then you still have to watch your fish. You need them to pay for drafted cards as well as the cats you pick. And that’s still not all, but the last thing I want to mention is: those cats are adorable!
Thunderworks Games
You may have heard of Roll Player, the 2016 dice game where you build the best fantasy hero from dice, with stats, alignments, traits, equipment, the whole nine yards. It’s fiendishly fun! And speaking of fiends, the second expansion Fiends & Familiars is now on Kickstarter. Fiends and familiars are two sides of the same coin. Familiars are helpful spirits that grant you a special boon when you place a dice on them. Fiends are much less helpful, they play tricks on you to slow you down. And of course there’s more of the things you know: hero classes, items, monsters, minions, all the fun stuff. Available in the Kickstarter as well is the Big Box Edition with everything Roll Player available in one box.
Spielworxx / Indie Game Studios
A real classic is back, but only for a short time: Die Macher. The game from 1986 that created the genre “heavy eurogame”. The first game that was ever entered into BoardGameGeek’s database – it’s true, check the id in the address. The game that deals with German politics and is nevertheless popular. For up to five people that want to win elections in different German states, pander to the popular opinion, and manipulate the media, Die Macher has all that. This new edition has some rules changes to make the game fluid, all developed with the original designer Karl-Heinz Schmiel. It will likely not be available in retail, only on Kickstarter and in direct sales from the publisher. By the way, the list of playable parties is the same as in the editions from 1997 and 2006. No AfD was added; At least in games the world can still be a good place without hate.
Indie Boards & Cards
Kodama: The Tree Spirits is an excellent, light card game that uses the cards in a very cool way. You line them up so the tree branches form a tree, and then you score points for matching symbols along a branch and, once per season, for objective cards. The only thing to complain would be that trees aren’t flat, as a rule, and Kodama 3D is going to take care of that. Some things will work different than they do in Kodama, but the general gameplay stays the same – only now in three whole dimensions!
In this week’s featured photo you see the view from the fortress in Cidade Velha, formerly Ribeira Grande, on Cabo Verde. The photo was taken by Flickr user LeRoc. Thanks a lot for sharing! (Cidade Velha, LeRoc, CC-BY-SA, cropped and resized)