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Unlike our gaming collections, there can be only one this month as Highlander gets a board game. Oh okay, there is loads, and Scythe goes legacy.
Scythe’s third and final expansion is a legacy game
In 2017, Jamey Stegmaier released his take on legacy gaming in Charterstone, and very good it was too. Now he’s taking that experience back to one of his older games, the even more popular Scythe. Yes, not only will the third expansion for this game move on the world’s story and provide a series of linked gaming modules for normal play, it’ll include a campaign mode.
Now, we’re into the world of semantics here because Stegmaier promises Scythe’s legacy game will be re-settable and replayable, so some people want to call it a campaign, but it’s the next logical step from Charterstone’s recharge pack.
Equally exciting for some people is the news ‘Scythe: The Rise of Fenris’ has been co-created with Ryan Lopez DeVinaspre, a man who’d created a fan expansion for the main game. It looks like Jamey Stegmaier is looking at not just developments in the gaming world, but environmental and fan community ones too. Release date is third quarter of 2018. (Oh, and there’ll be new figures too).
Highlander gets a board game
River Horse have signed themselves up to another major IP (yes, I’m calling My Little Pony major, I have nieces) in the form of cult classic movie Highlander. The movie is a tale of immortals battling across time to be the final one who inherits great power (the second movie doesn’t exist in our world), and that’s pretty much what you’ll be doing in Highlander: The Board Game.
You’ll get miniatures of key people like Conner and Kurgan, coloured dice, many cards, character sheets and plenty of story from 40k legend Graham McNeill. It will be coming to crowdfunding early this year.
Deadly Premonition crosses to retail… sort of
Cult Japanese video game Deadly Premonition turned itself into a physical deduction game via a successful Kickstarter, but if you missed that, the game will come to retail. Well, sort of. Rising Star Games’ made mention of ‘selected retailers’, so it might not be on general sale, and a few of the Kickstarter exclusives are remaining Kickstarter exclusive, so that’s the internet calmed down a bit.
However, you’ll still be able to buy the game and get a soundtrack to play it with and a copy of the game for PC. Mechanics wise, you have to interview and deduce the Raincoat Killer to stop it before it kills all the witnesses.
Treasure Island turned into a game by Yamatai co-writer
Marc Paquien was on the Yamatai team, and he’ll be taking you on a trip to Treasure Island this year. In the game, Long John Silver will have been arrested by his mutinous crew and forced to tell them where the treasure is… but can he lie well enough to escape and get the gold himself? One player is Silver, the rest are, well, the rest, so this is not a co-op! No more details as yet.
And now a game where you can push a planet into a Black Hole
Don Eskridge, the man behind Avalon and The Resistance, has raised the stakes for his new game, Black Hole Council. As you’ve guessed this involves a council (the players) debating what to do about a number of planets, which can be settled, taxed, and several other options ending in getting very angry and throwing it into a Black Hole.
It’s social deduction so everyone has their own private agendas which affect what you say in the two phases: negotiation, when you try to decide what to do with the planets, and deduction, when you try and suss everyone else out. Guess right and you can earn credit to bribe and influence. And kill a lot of people. It’s on Kickstarter now with a release later this year.
More Details on Century: Eastern Wonders
Century: Spice Road was a card driven game, but the follow up, Eastern Wonders, looks to have a very different theme. It isn’t just set a century after Spice, but it has an actual board composed of (sort of) hexes, and there are boat meeples. Basically, the theme is Indonesia’s Spice Islands, so you’re still doing stuff with spice but this time it’s moving it around, opening up trade routes etc.
It’ll play as a standalone, but you can also combine it with Spice for the ‘Sand to Sea’ mode to really kick your spice experience up a gear. The US release date is June 13.