Capstone Games / dlp games / Nanox Games
Well, talk about a dystopian setting. In CloudAge, terrorist group Cloud sabotaged oil wells and started forest fires all over the planet to trigger an environment catastrophe. Now, years later, survivors – the players – travel the dried-up world in airships looking for scarce resources. The game by Alexander Pfister (Great Western Trail, Isle of Skye,…) has elements of deck building and engine building in how you upgrade and crew your airship. Gathering resources to pay for those things depends on card sleeves that partially cover the resources a card will provide. You know some of what you’re getting, but not all of it. To start playing quickly, CloudAge will have a campaign mode that doesn’t introduce all the rules and options at once, and that you’ll guide the story and can optionally play single scenarios hints at a legacy element. I might be wrong about that last part, but either way I’m intrigued.
2fat2fly Games
After a few centuries, anyone might get tired of their (un)life. Even, in this case, Count Dracula. Looking forward to retirement, the Count is looking for a successor among his numerous progeny. In Dining with Dracula, you are one of the progeny, you have to convince great-granddaddy you’re worthy, and the best way to do so is not doing the work yourself. Using your vampiric powers of hypnosis you grab some tourists, turn them into something like … workers, and you place them where they can do the best work for you. Tourists are not just interchangeable workers, though. When you put a tourist to work, you pick a special ability for them from a pool shared with the other players. That’s not the only thing you share, either. You also share working hours. Every action advances the clock, and when it reaches the end the day is over for everyone and you get your chance to the old Count over dinner. 2fat2fly Games calls Dining with Dracula a family-friendly worker placement game, so it’s probably not too heavy, but those two elements of interaction nevertheless make it very interesting.
CMON
Zombies are a staple of modern horror stories, and the movie that started it – not the first zombie movie, but the first to be a really big deal – was George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. Now, if you had a super successful series of games about the living dead, you might want to do a crossover, too. That’s what CMON will do this December with Night of the Living Dead – A Zombicide Game. The cooperative game putting Zombicide and Night of the Living Dead together will be on Kickstarter this December, just in time to be my birthday present. Then we’ll learn more details, too.
Queen Games
We’ve talked about Hamburg and Amsterdam recently, the new editions of Stefan Feld classics Macao and Bruges. Now they’re on Kickstarter, and with the launch there we’re also learning a little how these new editions will differ from the originals. There are be many detail changes, but what we can see from the big ones appears aimed at making the games quicker and less random. The biggest change I can see in both games is that different kinds of cards now come from different decks, and the player decides which to draw from. That alone goes a long way to reduce randomness and play time. Oh, and for a little bonus information, it looks like the next two games in the Stefan Feld City Collection will be New York and Marrakesh. Since Stefan didn’t make any games with those names, we’ll have to wait and see if they are also new editions of older games, or if they’re all new games.
Renegade Game Studios
(Renegade Game Studios)
Some people go on adventures, other people sell them things. That’s the way of many a fantasy world. Player characters are usually the first kind of people, but Renegade Game Studios’ Bargain Quest gives them a chance to keep a shop and change the world through the miraculous power of capitalism. That’s all old news, though. What’s new is the latest expansion Bargain Quest – Sunk Costs, a nautical expansion with new monsters, new heroes, and new stuff to sell them. On top of those regular expansion goodies, Sunk Costs also introduces the new Supply Ships game mode, but for now we don’t know what that entails.
This week’s beautiful banner photo shows Dobrota, on the Bay of Kotor in Montenegro. It was taken and kindly shared by Jocelyn Erskine-Kellie. Thanks a lot, Jocelyn! (Morning Mist over the Mountains, Jocelyn Erskine-Kellie, CC-BY-SA, resized and cropped)