Here is the board game (and board game-related!) news that caught our attention for the week ending December 13, 2019.
Gaming News
- It’s gift guide time in the blogosphere, and GeekDad ran its annual Games Gift Guide earlier this week.
- AEG has announced Inner Compass, a game where players search “for meaning in their everyday lives.” The game will be available next April, but you can download the rules now.
- Czech Games will be releasing Sanctum this winter. It’s looks to be a dice-and-card-based game with some pretty cool miniatures. There’s a teaser trailer for it on the Czech games website.
- Out now from WizKids is Flotilla, a post-apocalyptic game where players compete to control a new society in a flooded future.
- As we reported earlier, CMON will soon be releasing a Night of the Living Dead edition of Zombicide. This week, CMON posted an interview with two of the movie’s original producers about its complex copyright history.
- Z-Man has mini-expansions out for a bunch of their classic titles, including Cacao, First Class, NMBR 9, Stone Age, and The Voyages of Marco Polo.
- Aconyte, Asmodee’s book imprint, has announced their second title. Wrath of N’Kai by Josh Reynolds is set in the world of Arkham Horror and is due on bookshelves in May.
- Boardgamegeek News has this little bit announcing something I will definitely be interested a year from now (assuming I somehow remember): an advent calendar based around Exit: The Game. Apparently, each day will reveal a puzzle to be solved, and all 24 will lead up to some kind of interesting narrative. I’ve always loved advent calendars, and this one looks particularly cool.
- The Seattle Times ran a cool piece last week on Ravensburger’s Seattle office and the games being produced there.
- Last week, we mentioned open betas for a couple of apps based on board games, and now we can add Roll for the Galaxy to that list.
- Most stories about AI are based around watching Terminator too many times and assuming that eventually, AI will wipe us out, but this week came news that maybe our future robotic overlords will at least occasionally want to work, or at least play, with us: researchers at Facebook have developed an AI that can successfully play Hanabi, which had previously been a challenge because of the cooperative nature of the game. Hanabi is our featured image this week.
GeekDad and GeekMom Reviews
Here are the games we’ve reviewed this week:
- Elizabeth MacAndrew reviewed Unicorn Dice.
What We’re Playing
Finally, here’s what the GeekDads played this week:
- Michael Pistiolas played Massive Darkness and Ingenious.
- Jonathan Liu played Adventure Games: The Dungeon, Clank! Legacy, Pictionary Air, Wavelength, and Wooly Whammoth.
- I played Slip Strike.
