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Expansions are announced this week for Gloomhaven, D&D and multiple Uwe Rosenberg games, but it’s Ravensburger who produce the highlight!
Jane Austen: The RPG
The Australian design team of Vee Hendro and Hayley Gordon have produced an RPG with a very strong literary theme: the works of Jane Austen. Known for her humour and social comment, Austen is one of the English literary greats, and ‘Good Society’ aims to use both.
So, your characters will have to navigate the world of social climbing and dramas of the heart, while interacting with a game that ditches NPCs for NPGs (Non Player Gentry) and dumps dice for ‘resolve’ tokens. As this is 2018, it's currently on Kickstarter with an end of year release, but a modest target has been blown apart already.
D&D is getting more monsters with the Tome of Foes
Firstly the bad news: Wizards of the Coast say there are no plans for Illithid playable characters, which quite frankly makes us sad. But the good news: Mordenkainen’s Tome of Foes is the latest Dungeons and Dragons release and it will combine many pages of excellent new monsters from across the many worlds, with greater detail on the established beings.
We’re looking at a May 29 release date for the standard edition, and an early bird version a little before.
Gloomhaven is going to get bigger
Gloomhaven is already a big game, so imagine what creator Isaac Childres means when he says he’s working on a “giant” expansion. Yes, not only is the already epic Gloomhaven getting more content, you’re going to be getting the same amount as the base game, including “a full new campaign, plenty of new character classes, monsters, and scenarios, plus a lot of new mechanics I’m excited about.”
However, if he’s only just started on the project it’s not going to be out soon… which isn’t a problem given how many hours are in the base.
Endeavor rises from the depths, not a barnacle in sight
Burnt Island Games and the Grand Gamers Guild are in the process of some quality necromancy, bringing the sailing and empire building game Endeavor back from the seabed where its lain. Critically acclaimed on release nearly a decade ago, Endeavor goes to Kickstarter with a new name (Endeavor: Age of Sail), polished rules, a new ‘exploits’ system, a two-player expansion now part of the base game, and a second chance at life.
Given that it's tripled its funding already, a future seems assured.
Ever more from @LookoutSpiele: Artifex is from 2017, Patchwork Xtrem is probably 2019, & the rest is for 2018. —WEM pic.twitter.com/vDxaGkZlQX
— BoardGameGeek (@BoardGameGeek) February 2, 2018
The Great Patchwork Mystery of 2018
Uwe Rosenberg’s charming collage game Patchwork is getting two new expansions, or spins offs or… well we don’t know. There’s going to ‘Patchwork Express’ and ‘Patchwork Xtrem’, but no one is letting on what either of these mean. Eagle eyed viewers have spotted something on the Xtrem mock up box, namely the lack of the two player symbol, so is this for more than a duel?
We don’t know, so prepare the theories, the internet is waiting…
Caverna is expanding
More Uwe Rosenberg now, and Caverna is also getting an expansion. This time, however, we know some more, with ‘Forgotten Races’ doing exactly what it says and bringing species other than dwarfs to the table.
This looks to almost certainly be based on the fan expansion that Lookout games bought into last year, so goblins and trolls will be mixing things up.
The legacy game that comes with a plunger
So we could talk about Ravensburger’s forthcoming legacy game, The Rise of Queens Dale, in the traditional terms of each player being a family competing against each other to build a tower for a dying queen, but quite frankly that’s avoiding the elephant in the box: the plunger.
Yes, the box comes with a plunger, their solution for how players open the compartments in the bottom half of the box when special events happen. The English version will be out at Gen Con. 2018 and your ability to unblock a sink will increase after.
The most important component in The Rise of Queensdale: the king's plunger. (You need it to pick up tiles.) —WEM pic.twitter.com/lEflBUbnll
— BoardGameGeek (@BoardGameGeek) February 2, 2018
Giant Azul?
Do you love Azul? Then you’re going to want the giant size version that Pegasus Spiele (PS) have produced, because the photos make it look both a lovely artefact and an even more tactile version of the game. But there’s one major problem: they’ve only made 50 copies of this giant edition and those are for retailers and other promotional goals.
The choice is either hitting eBay with a month’s wages when one goes wild, or everyone getting together and showing PS that the demand is there for a bigger run. I mean, they made 50, are their 50 people who want another run?
Century Colour Blindness News
Just a little bit of info on Century: Eastern Wonders. It comes with four sets of coloured cubes, in the same colours as the earlier Spice Road, but the tones are being changed to allow colour blind folks to still play easily.