In this family game, enter Marie Curie’s laboratory and help the famous scientist win her double Nobel Prize! Conduct experiments, improve your workshop and complete Marie Curie’s research before the other players. In the Footsteps of Marie Curie is a game featuring resource management and transformation mechanics with a card river and contracts. Resources distribution (Pitchblende, Uranium, and Radium) is done through a cube tower, and the retention or overproduction of these brings a set of surprises each turn. Players progress on a central board through Marie Curie’s life timeline. The game ends when players reach the end of this timeline.
Landmarks is a word game of hidden paths and clever clues. Your party is lost deep in an island jungle, relying on you to guide them to safety and treasure! In this jungle, every word matters. Use strategic wordplay to send a chain of one-word clues. The connections between them will create a path leading to fortune and glory.
dV Games will always have a soft spot in my heart due to their bestselling Bang! Card game. I’m a big fan as long as players understand it’s a fast-moving game. I brought the game to my school and the students were so addicted that they could eat lunch and play two games during their 25 minute lunch hour. It was nice to see the (now classic) Bang!:The Bullet release from a while back that included the base game and three or four expansions but I hadn’t seen the Bang! Dynamite Box released a few years ago that contained everything ever made for the card game. All that Bang! Said, the dice version has its own new collection, Bang!: Dice Explosion that collects all of that version’s expansions as well. Other games in the booth coming soon include Lost in Adventure: The Labyrinth which is a co-op exploration game where players look at location cards to gather clues to interact with items and characters. Until Proven Guilty is an app-driven game of examining evidence cards to find which evidence is the actual incriminating stuff. An app handles the trial, giving feedback as to whether evidence presented matches the case or not. Fans of the tile collecting and laying Bonsai will want to know about Bonsai: Wabi Sabi which has several modules that can be added to the game, including everything needed to add a fifth player. Finally, we have Rumblebots – a deckbuilder version of the popular Auto Battler videogame genre. Players build up their bots, send them into battle, gain resources, build them up (or add more bots) through six rounds to declare a final winner. There are similarities to Challengers! but I don’t know enough details of Rumblebots to make a comparison.
Lost in Adventure: The Labyrinth
Lost in Adventure: The Labyrinth is a cooperative game that has players placing cards to move and interact with the environment (the Minotaur labyrinth in this case) as a single character (controlled by all) investigates things. In a choose your own adventure style, players can move to new locations between cards and interact with characters and items. Location cards show available interactions which will lead to more cards, etc… Players have to maintain their Courage as a sort of game-ending tracker while they are trying to fulfill prophecies and gain favor which serve as points. The game will be out in September, runs about $20, works with 1-6 people and takes about an hour to play. Due to the way the cards come into play, one might be able to play it another time or two before maxing out all it has to offer. As you could guess by the name, there should be more Lost in Adventure games in the future.
Seaside is a game that features only wooden tokens, and being lightweight and super portable, can be played everywhere. Bring it along on your next adventure! The sun is shining, as a light, salty wind sends cottony clouds scudding across the sky. Sandpipers filling their bellies with strange insects, crabs hiding under piles of rocks, seashells washed up on the sand, curling waves that break along the beach. Nature in its simplest beauty.Â
One token at a time, create your Seaside with the elements the sea sends your way. The goal of the game is to have the highest stack of tokens.
Sweet Lands is the next big box game from Japanese publisher Uchibacoya. Well known for their delightful wooden tokens (the sea-eeples in Aqua Garden!), they won’t disappoint here! There are over 400 wooden bits in Sweet Lands and they are adorable. Don’t let the cuteness and innocent theme fool you, it’s not your parent’s Candyland. Sweet Lands is a big meaty strategy game.
In Sweet Lands, the King has departed to the big candy store in the sky and it’s your goal to outperform your opponents and develop Sweet Lands into the best candy nation. The game has a lot of working parts.
In Intarsia, players compete for the contract for the coveted redesign work on the parquet, embellishing it with stylish intarsias. To win the contract, players have to prove their skills by refining the floor with stylish inlays and outdoing their competitors with new tools.
