The board game (and board game-related!) news that caught our attention for the week ending August 17, 2018.
- After last week’s monster edition, things have ebbed a bit and seem to be back to normal. Good? OK, let’s get on with it!
- Gale Force Nine (Firefly, Star Trek Ascendancy) announced this week that they have acquired the licensing necessary to bring Frank Herbert’s Dune to tabletop. The agreement extends to a range of games, with the first dropping just before the upcoming theatrical release of the sci-fi classic in 2020. Cardboard must flow.
- You like movies? Let’s keep going then. In the least attractive annual report ever, Games Workshop lays out their vision and plans for the future. At the bottom of page two, in regards to Warhammer, they say they are hoping to “find new partners to help us bring the worlds of Warhammer to life like never before. Together, we’ll explore animation, live action and more…”
- Shifting gears, let’s talk about Quiver mats. Jonathan Liu can’t say enough positive things about them. He loves his and you can see it in darn near every game photo he takes. Well, Quiver mats are hard to find but they are taking preorders on an upcoming print run right now. What’s more (and breaking my Kickstarter rule), I’ll point out that they have some pretty amazing Gloomhaven mats being funded as we speak. But ACT RIGHT NOW. The Kickstarter ends today.
- CGE announced an upcoming word game, Trapwords, that’s set in a fantasy world. The party game tasks two teams with providing clues to a word. However, each team sets trap words, which are words the clue-provider can’t say. The catch is that these trap words aren’t known until the clue-giver says them. The game releases at Essen in October and will retail for under $20.
- This week’s image is from Space Base.
- Last week we let you know about the release of the almost infinitely unique new card game from FFG, Keyforge. The Richard Garfield design has 104 quadrillion possible decks. I’m not great at math, but I think that’s a pretty big number. Well, FFG is not one to let a marketing opportunity go to waste. This week they announced the next product in their new line of Unique Games (capitalized because it’s trademarked, don’t you know). In Discover: Lands Unknown, every single boxed game is different and unique. Your game of Discover might take place on a beach and your friend’s copy might strand you in a desert. (Or you might get different colored meeples than your friend—who knows, the possibilities are seemingly endless!) Look for Discover: Lands Unknown in Q4 this year.
- Target is getting a lot of exclusives these days and a related email hit my inbox yesterday that got my attention. Now selling at the box store is MacGyver: The Escape Room Game. My family loves escape room games (shout out to The Werewolf Experiment, our current favorite), so with heightened anticipation, I clicked the link to find out more about this MacGyver affair. My expectations fell a bit when I saw that chewing gum and a Swiss Army knife were not listed in the components—a paperclip is, though! Still, we look forward to trying this one out.
- Hitting shelves this week are a few games we saw at Gen Con. First, there’s Pantone, from Cryptozoic. It’s a fun little guessing game based on the colors swatches printers and designers deal with every day. Next is another expansion for Terraforming Mars, Prelude, which will accelerate your games by boosting your engine and get you deeper in the game faster. Lastly, Founders of Gloomhaven will be hitting shelves next week too.
At GeekDad, we write a lot about tabletop games. Here’s what we’ve written about this past week:
- Logan Giannini reviewed a couple of games, Blank Slate, a predictive party game about filling in blanks, and Dinosaur Tea Party, the revisited Restoration Games version of the classic deduction challenge.
- Sara Blackburn took a look at another two-player, Caper, from Keymaster Games. I want to buy all of their games just because they are beautiful.
- Jonathan Liu is a machine. He has more energy than the rest of us put together, which he demonstrates in his exhaustive photo diaries after Gen Con every year. Relive this year’s convention through his lens in parts one, two, three, and four.
- James Floyd Kelly wrote about a D&D 5e comic!
- Simon Yule? You know he’s playing D&D, which he’ll tell you about in his 66th episode of Curse of Strahd.
- Lastly, Robin Brooks introduces newbs to some gateway games from Games Workshop—three of them, to be exact!
Finally, here’s what some of the GeekDad Crew has been playing this week:
- Michael Harrison: Arkham Horror: The Card Game, Galaxy Trucker, Magic: The Gathering, Scythe, Viticulture Essential Edition, Welcome Back to the Dungeon
- Michael Pistiolas: Coconuts, Massive Darkness, One Deck Dungeon: Forest of Shadows
- Jonathan Liu: Clank! Expeditions: Gold & Silk, Penk!, Pikoko, Trash Pandas, Welcome To…, Before There Were Stars…, I Would Fight the Dragon…, Kaosmos, Moneybags, Scarabya, Zogen
- Robin Brooks: Soundilicious, Gubs, Machi Kori, Go Nuts for Donuts, Outfoxed
- Rob Huddleston: 5 Minute Dungeon, Ricochet Robots, Forbidden Island, The Artemis Project
- Dave Banks: Tower of Madness, Spell Smashers, The Game (fancy Target version), Welcome To …, Before There Were Stars…, Dude, Biblios, Escape Room in a Box: The Werewolf Experiment
Yay for Werewolf Experiment being your current fave!! We are also excited to test out the Macguyver one – couldn’t get more perfect theming.