Avoid Scandal, Complete Shared Goals, and Bend Spoons with Your Mind

Avoid Scandal, Complete Shared Goals, and Bend Spoons with Your Mind
Board Game: Sheep & Garden
• Tokyo Game Market is only one week away from the publication of this post, running over Nov. 14-15, 2020 with both an on-site physical presence and a streaming site, so let's check out a few more titles that will debut at that show, starting with Sheep & Garden (羊と花畑), a tile-laying game for 1-4 players from Shun and Aya Taguchi of Studio GG, with those two being the designers of Little Town Builders, which IELLO later released as Little Town.

Here's an overview of this title:
Quote:
Sheep & Garden is a tile-placement game for 1 to 4 players that takes about 15 minutes. Each player starts the game with three objective cards, and while in the two-player game each player has their own secret cards, with 3-4 players you have one personal objective in addition to sharing an objective with each of your neighbors. Try to work well together to help each other out!

Board Game: Sheep & Garden

On a turn, you choose one of the three tiles on display and added it to the shared landscape everyone is creating in the center of play. Once all 37 tiles have been placed, players score points based on their objectives, and whoever has the most points wins.
Board Game: Little Factory
• Earlier in 2020, by the way, the Taguchis released Goods Maker (グッズメイカー), which unlike most of their other releases is a card game instead of a tile-laying game. A summary:
Quote:
Goods Maker is a small resource-management card game in which you process items and sell them for profit. The more buildings you construct, the more actions become available to you on your turn. On a turn, you take one of two actions:

—Choose a resource card or building card in the production action area, and gain the item shown on it.
—Discard resource cards from your hand to acquire resource or building cards of the same value or less from the available cards.

Board Game: Little Factory

You can use the effects of each building you own once each turn, e.g. exchanging a thread card in your hand for cloth. Chain together cards, buildings, and actions to create more victory points as whoever first has 10 VP wins.
Board Game Publisher: 数寄ゲームズ (Suki Games)
• I've written about 数寄ゲームズ (Suki Games) a few times in this space, but news of this item — the two-player-only trick-taking game Hollywood Sensation from designer しぶ (Shibu) — comes courtesy of JP games fan James Nathan, who has posted his watchlist for this show on Opinionated Gamers.

Here's his overview of the gameplay:
Quote:
In Hollywood Sensation, each player takes on the role of a starlet hoping for fame — but not too much fame, mind you, as that would be gauche, and besides, it would be harder to hide any scandals!

Each round, the players randomize the strength order of the four suits. Cards collected in two suits are worth positive points, and the other two suits are negative points.

Board Game: Hollywood Sensation

Each player is dealt a small hand, then the top card of the deck is flipped face up. The players compete in a must-follow trick-taking game, with the winner of each trick taking the face-up card from the deck in their hand, and the other player doing the same with a face-down card from the top of the deck. After the round, the players' points are converted to a type of meta points by moving a pawn on a red carpet.

In subsequent rounds, the player who is behind in meta points begins the round by setting cards aside from their hand to create a small private deck; they will draw from this deck once the main draw pile is exhausted.
Board Game Publisher: ASOBI.dept
• This last title comes courtesy of the always helpful Saigo, who translates a lot of Japanese material into English to help obsessives like me discovering what we're missing. The concept of this game will be clearer when you realize that another way to translate the title ユリゲラ is "Uri Geller", that is, the illusionist famous for "bending spoons with his mind".

Here's a slightly different description of this 3-5 player game for ages 6+ from ASOBI.dept: "In ユリゲラ (Uri Geller), player compete in a world tournament to demonstrate their supernatural powers by bending spoons with their psychic abilities. Aim for the championship, while being careful not to bend the spoon too much and be suspected of being nothing more than a magician!"

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