Bézier Games was back in a “big” way (see below) showing off the upcoming Colossal Cat in the Box and the Maglev Metro map compilation Maglev Maps: Expansion Volume 1. Headed the other direction, the small box card game Scram! packs a 1v2 up to 3v3 team game into a handy, tiny box.

Maglev Maps: Expansion Volume 1

Maglev Metro seems to be chugging away, enough to inspire several new maps for the game. The new Maglev Maps: Volume 1 puts together six maps that appeared in previous, smaller releases: Mechs, Monorails, Moonbases, Mars, London, and Paris.

Each changes up the rules just a smidge and brings out some of the “flavor” of the locations. Move extra far in the lightweight gravity of the moonbases and freely move forward and backwards on Mars. London puts an emphasis on the various London districts and (my favorite) Paris has to deal with strikes. Yep, occasionally stations are shut down for a strike and can’t be used for a few turns. Sure, you can break the picket line, but then you have to pay VPs and the rest of the players get to mock you in disgust in a bad French accent.

Colossal Cat in the Box

Bezier can’t get enough of big. Colossal Castles of Mad King Ludwig and Suburbia Super Collectors Edition are huge. Sometimes even big names are enough, as in Ultimate Werewolf Extreme Super Collector’s Edition. They took a look at their extremely well liked Cat in the Box: Deluxe Edition and thought, we can do better. We need to explode this five player card game with assorted scoring tokens. The result? Colossal Cat in the Box.

Bigger tokens, bigger rules, bigger scorepad, a bigger research board to hold those tokens, and (of course) a really, really (well, for a card game) big black cat token to mark the first player. Everything but the cards are 4x bigger. The cards are the same size as before (but better!) but you can now store all your stuff in a fancy cat-shaped GameTrayz. You will clearly be the colossal something when you plunk this down in front of all the other gamers in the group. I do have to give actual props to the customizable “research” board which contributes to the two “expansions” found within the colossal version.

Scram!

The new game in town was Scram! This card game sees two teams attempting to get the lowest score each round. The deck (which is thematically full of animals straight out of the Great Smoky Mountains) consists of cards from 1 to 13, plus a few wilds. Obviously, low numbers are better but cards worth 5 or more have some nice special abilities which mean they aren’t just there to be shed as soon as possible. They let players peek at face down cards or in the case of the 13, you can hand that nice 13 points to your opponent.

Players start with five cards face-down in front of them and they flip up two to start. Cardplay then proceeds with players attempting to make sets in order to clear out their hightest point cards. When one player decides they’re sure they have the lowest score, the round is called but each player gets one more play. Hopefully, no one slips you the Skunk card at the last minute.

Since it is a team game, it is playable 1×2, 2v2, or 3v3 which puts it in a somewhat unique category for card games. For the scoring-challenged folks in the audience there is another Bézier app available to assist in managing the game.

Looking at this year’s crop of Bézier, I’m going out on a limb and predict sometime next year we’ll be talking about SCRAM! the all-caps edition in a special mega-sized box to hold all those capital letters.

Before you leave the booth, watch out for the herd of creatures with genetically enhanced eyes, watching out for any shoplifters…