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W. Eric Martin
United States
Apex
North Carolina
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• Dutch publisher 999 Games has announced its release schedule for the first half of 2012, and while most of the games are Dutch-language versions of games originating from other publishers – a list that would be best viewed on Gone Cardboard, BGG's calendar of recently released and upcoming games – two items stand out. First, a new card game from Paolo Mori called Olympicards, which is briefly described as follows:
Quote: Olympicards has the player athletes compete in nine different events, with competition taking place via card play. Each sport has its own rules for playing cards, so sometimes you'll want to sit out an event to conserve your strength, while other times you'll push yourself to the limit to win the gold.
Each player starts the game with six cards, each card having a number and color. On a turn, you'll play one or two cards until you cannot – or don't want to – play any more cards. The first player to drop from the event receives more cards for next time, while whoever remains in the event until the end wins the gold medal (i.e. points).
Whoever has the most points after nine events wins!
The other title of interest might be Metropolis, a Dutch version of the Tom Lehmann game The City. I know some folks' eyes rolled into the back of their heads when they saw the Klemens Franz artwork on the cards in that game, and I just wanted to clue you in that while Metropolis has new cover art, the interior art remains the same as earlier AMIGO release.
• Swiss publisher GameWorks SàRL has two upcoming releases that it's showing at the Nürnberg toy fair at the start of February 2012. One of those is Crazy Circus, aka Maniki!, aka Jungle Smart, a Dominique Ehrhard design due out Q3 2012 in which players are simultaneously challenged to rearrange three animals standing on two podiums so that the match the arrangement revealed on a card to everyone. Players need to use a combination of up to five different commands, with repetitive commands being allowed and sometimes required. The first player to call out a correct solution claims the card, and whoever claims the most cards wins.
Some players are terrible at this type of game, and some are awesome. I fall on the awesome end of the scale, so I asked GameWorks' Sébastien Pauchon whether the company had considered including a fourth animal to up the challenge of the game. Says Pauchon, "We tried that, and it is really super hardcore – so much so that our guess was 90% of the people wouldn't even play a second card." Ah, well, maybe we'll still get to see a seal or hippo added to the circus act some day...
Masomalo!
The other title from GameWorks is PIX, which has been in the works for a few years, presumably because of the difficulty of getting exactly the components needed to create this party game. The gist is that some players create images using only a few pixels, and the others must guess the image in order for both guesser and drawer to score points – but the fewer pixels you use, the earlier you reveal your image, thereby giving you a chance to look like a chump when no one can decipher your 8-bit doodle or like a genius when your iconic masterpiece is instantly named.
The downside of this release is that PIX will be available only in France, starting in February 2012 at the Cannes game festival. Said Pauchon on BGG, "Production costs are very high for this one, and when you add the shipping, the game is unfortunately unmarketable in the U.S. at the moment." The retail price in France is €30, which doesn't seem outrageous to me, but then I'm not the one tasked with shipping thousands of copies to North America, so what do I know?
•French publisher Ystari Games is still working on a local release of Alien Frontiers - the cover art of which was revealed in November 2011 by original publisher David MacKenzie of Clever Mojo Games – and while that's percolating, Ystari's Cyril Demaegd will instead show off a new version of Dominique Ehrhard and Duccio Vitale's Serenissima. Says Demaegd, "As it's a Descartes license, we'll do it with Asmodee in the U.S." He expects the game to be released in May 2012, and here's the cover artwork:
This new edition was discussed on the French-language forums of TricTrac.net in mid-2011, and BGG user Frederic Mariusse summarized the changes in this new edition as follows:
-----• Smaller game area
-----• One less resource
-----• No more "phases" system as a more clever and dynamic system will be implemented
-----• An unpredictable ending of the game
-----• Different combat system
-----• Rules for a fifth player
This assumes, of course, that nothing has changed in Ystari's plans for the game over the intervening nine months, but we all know that game publishers never change their minds about anything, so we can take this list for fact, yes?
• U.S. publisher Twilight Creations has announced three titles for the first half of 2012, two of them being sequels to existing lines: Zombie Survival 2: There Goes the Neighborhood (March 2012) and Humans!!! 3: ZombieCon (April 2012), with the zombies in this latter title swarming into a gaming convention in search of brains. So many easy jokes to make!
The third title, due May 2012 is Go Goblin, Go! and here's a description from the publisher:
Quote: Beneath the mountain called Goblins' Rock, the goblins have been mining for centuries. They have dug deeper and deeper. Their precious ore is running out and the taskmasters are getting BORED!
So in order to pass the time, the taskmasters have taken to racing their underlings into a...PIT OF FIRE! (Underlings are expendable, after all.) It is agreed that secretly choosing their favorites would be best and the race would end when the "winner" falls into the pit. Oh, and there should be gambling. You know, just to keep it interesting!
Go Goblin, Go! is a light, standalone racing and gambling board game. You secretly pick three of the racing goblins and you get points based on where they finish. You manipulate their movement, so you have some control over where they finish. Just don't be first. The first goblin to fall into the pit "wins", but they don't get any points.
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Quote:Olympicards has the player athletes compete in nine different events, with competition taking place via card play. Each sport has its own rules for playing cards, so sometimes you'll want to sit out an event to conserve your strength, while other times you'll push yourself to the limit to win the gold.
Masomalo!
Something like the cover art would do as well. Anyway, new art or not, an English version would be great as it could reach a much bigger audience. The game itself although really easy, is absolutely fun and great.
