• First, Ole Steiness' Meeples & Monsters, which was funded on Kickstarter in March 2021, should be in retail stores in the U.S. in April 2022.
• The Guild of Merchant Explorers from Brett J. Gilbert and Matthew Dunstan should be hitting stores in June/July 2022. In this game, each player has their own map board, and you "explore" it over the course of a round to collect treasure, establish new cities, and connect routes between locations. While the game is for 1-4 players, you could play it with any number of people as long as you had enough copies, so expect to see this one being streamed after release so that folks can compete en masse online.
For a more detailed overview and more pics, head to my Nov. 2021 AEG round-up.
• Ready Set Bet, one of the titles AEG will feature in its Big Game Night program at Gen Con 2022, continues the relationship between the publisher and designer John D. Clair.
In the game, 2-9 players place bets on horses that move when their result comes up on the roll of two six-sided dice, with bonus movement being possible for repeated high or low rolls to ensure that the horse in the 7 slot doesn't always win.
After each of the first three rounds, players (ideally) receive payouts from their bets, then they receive a "VIP Club Card" that allows them to replace unique bets in subsequent rounds. After the fourth round and final payout, whoever has the most money wins.
• That Old Wallpaper from Danielle Deley and Nathan Thornton — two of the three designers of 2019's Medium — is another Big Game Night title and subsequent Q3 2022 release, with players attempting to paper a wall with matching patterns. In some detail:
When you receive regular wallpaper cards, you must add them to your other played cards immediately, ideally matching the pattern halves to create a complete pattern. Patterns come in four colors, with each color having two sizes. A wild pattern is also available, which seems kind of weird, but so be it. To end a turn, deal a new wallpaper card to each location, which means that some locations will likely have more cards than other ones.
At game's end, use your hazy memory cards to complete patterns on the edge of your wallpaper, then score for each color of pattern. The score of a pattern is the number of large symbols of that color multiplied by the number of small symbols, so if you don't have at least one large and small symbol, you score nothing for that color!
Travel across the galaxy is initially tedious, but as the captain of a passenger spaceship newly equipped with a wormhole fabricator, you can ideally build a robust network of wormholes to help you quickly get those passengers where they need to go. You can use others' wormholes by paying them, which means your wormholes can be a second source for profit if you build them in highly trafficked locations.
• Shake That City is another Q3/Q4 2022 release, with designers Mads Fløe and Kåre Torndahl Kjær challenging you to construct a city block from random bits and pieces. In some detail:
—Roads wants to connect to an edge of the board.
—Factories wants to be next to other factories and roads.
—Homes want to be placed in clusters that are as small as possible — the smallest being a single tile — so long as they're not next to a factory.
—Parks wants to be next to homes and factories.
—Shops score increasingly more the closer they are placed to the city center, but if they're not placed on an edge, they need to be adjacent to a road connected to the board's edge in order to score. Without road access, you'll have no products to sell!
At game's end, players earn points for tile-placement combinations and for the completed bonus point tiles around the edge of their board.