Here is the board game (and board game-related!) news that caught our attention for the week ending November 15, 2019.
Gaming News
- The Op announced on Facebook this week the release of Clue: Dungeons and Dragons.
- Also in The Op news: the company has announced a partnership with AEG to begin producing licensed factions for Smash Up. No word yet on what factions we’ll see, but given The Op’s deep bench of licenses the possibilities are almost endless.
- Fantasy Flight is taking pre-orders for Fallout Shelter, a boardgame based on the popular video game.
- Amazon and Days of Wonder have teamed up to provide Alexa skills for Ticket to Ride. The skills will replace the rulebook and provide “a guided experience of the games and offer the option to use it as an additional player.” I think the possibilities of having out smart assistants not only help learn games but also potentially play with us is pretty cool, but I’ll need to wait for these things to move over to Google before I check them out.
- Fans of train games–and who isn’t?–may be interested to look at El: The Chicago Transit Adventure game. The game pits players against each other as riders trying to find the most efficient ways to move around the city on both the El and on busses. But what makes the game particularly intriguing is that it isn’t designed by a big publisher, but instead is being put out by Transit Tees, the official merchanidiser of the Chicago Transit Authority.
- I’m not sure what is behind the recently renewed interest in Chernobyl, but if HBO’s excellent miniseries earlier this year got you interested in the disaster, than you might want to take a look at Zona: The Secret of Chernobyl, a 1-4 player competitive race through the Exclusion Zone to the reactor.
- We don’t normally talk Kickstarter campaigns here on Re-Roll, but I thought this was newsworthy enough to mention. Dispel Dice launched what looked like yet another custom dice campaign last week, but it almost immediately blew past its modest $20K goal. As of this writing, a week into the 30 day campaign, 16,771 people have backed it to the tune of $2,028,610. I will admit that their dice are awfully pretty.
- The people behind the wildly successful and in my opinion decidedly meh game Exploding Kittens have release On a Scale of One to T-Rex: A Card Game for People Who Are Bad at Charades. The game, available exclusively on Amazon, is described as a “family-friendly party game” where players “perform ridiculous and hilarious actions at different intensities” and “win points by matching your intensity with another player.”
- If you like worker placement games and have a soft spot of communism, you should take a look at Lifestyle Boardgames Red Outpost, where you take on the role of a leader of a Soviet outpost on a distant planet.
GeekDad and GeekMom Reviews
Here are the games we’ve reviewed this week:
- Jonathan Liu reviewed Namiji and Mountains.
- Elizabeth MacAndrew reviewed Dragon’s Cave.
- I reviewed Deep Blue, The Artemis Project (our featured image this week), and Minecraft: Builders and Biomes.
What We’re Playing
Finally, here’s what the GeekDads played this week:
- Jonathan Liu played Wooly Whammoth, Chicken Time Warp, Lift Off!, Namiji, 3 Secrets, Adventure Games: Monochrome Inc., Flip Over Frog, J’Accuse!, Paleolithic, and Vast: The Mysterious Manor.
- Michael Pistiolas played Sword & Sorcery and, Mmm!.
- Robin Brooks played Warhammer Underworlds: Beastgrave.
- Rebecca Angel Maxwell played Marvel Fluxx, Sushi Go!, and Scrabble.
- I played Deep Blue and Endeavor: Age of Sail.
