• Designer Mark Corsey's auction-based The Game of 49 has been reborn as Zillionaires on Mars thanks to UK publisher Big Potato.
Here's a quick overview for those unfamiliar with this 2014 release:
The first player to claim four spaces in a row, in any direction, wins.
Zillionaires on Mars keeps the same gameplay as in the game's original release, but with dollar values now in the zillions as players bid for lots on Mars.
Here's an overview of how to play this 2-4 player game:
On a turn, either take a tile action (add a tile or move a tile), then a rescuer action, or take two rescuer actions. Rescuer actions allow you to place a rescuer on the tile you just moved or placed, place a rescuer next to one of your rescuers (so long as not more than two rescuers are on a tile), or rescue cats to score, earning one point for each different colored tile in the area around your rescuer, along with a bonus point for each of your rescuers in the area; you then remove your rescuers from the board and add an inspector to the central tile you scored, marking that tile as off limits until the inspector is pulled elsewhere.
Once a player hits 23 points, you complete the round, then see who has the most points. The tiles also contain bonus powers, and you can choose to use those to add more challenges to gameplay.
Ares Games has announced that it will demo this design at UK Games Expo 2022 on Saturday, June 4 at 14:30, with the game due out in late 2022. For more details, check out this preview article on Dicebreaker from December 2021.
• U.S. publisher Alderac Entertainment Group re-launched the Mike Elliott deck-building game Thunderstone as Thunderstone Quest in 2018, and the line is being re-worked again in 2022.
On May 17, 2022, AEG launched a Kickstarter campaign for what it's calling "Deepwood Defenders", with this offering fans of the game two new quests: Nature's Wrath as quest #12 and Rotten Roots as quest #13. Additionally, AEG is repackaging the base game as Thunderstone Quest: Starter Set, with quest #1 being included in this box and with quests #2-11 being re-packaged into their own individual boxes.
In a comment on BGG, AEG's Ryan Dancey notes that "we are not going to be continuing retail sales of any Thunderstone product after this year's Kickstarter (although stores who buy directly from us via our Alpha Store program will have access to these products for their stores)", which is an interesting approach to take, similar to what Plaid Hat Games is doing with Ashes Reborn as described in this August 2020 post.
In a separate comment, Dancey added, "[W]e will keep doing an annual Kickstarter as long as there's customer support..."