Build Bus Routes, Houses, and Hands of Cards, While Escaping Two Rooms

• For a short while, BGG sold copies of Let's Make a Bus Route from designer Saashi of publisher Saashi & Saashi through the BGG Store — then the supply dried up and it became clear (although I'm not sure it was ever specifically stated) that the game had been licensed to someone and would re-appear...somewhere.

Board Game: Get on Board: New York & London

Now the French side of IELLO has announced a Q1 2022 release date for Get on Board: New York & London, this being its re-branding of the original game with a jazzy 1950s look courtesy of artist Monsieur Z. Here's a short take on the game from IELLO:

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Ah, here’s the bus! Hurry, grab a seat, and get out of the rain! Just like every trip, you're fascinated by all the other passengers on board: tourists, professionals, students... They're all traveling together, though they each have different destinations. This bus line is truly special, but will it be able to transport everyone safe and sound?

In Get on Board: New York & London, you have twelve rounds in which to build the best bus line in town. Each round reveals a new card that shows all players the route shape they must complete. Place your bus accordingly on the central board. Take the passengers where they want to go by connecting them and their destination to your bus line, avoid traffic, and gain as many victory points as possible!

For more details on the gameplay, here's a description of Let's Make a Bus Route:

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The game includes a large shared map board, along with five individual player boards. All players draw their routes on the shared board, while taking note of their passengers, sights, and other elements on their individual boards.

To start a round, you reveal a colored bus route at random from the deck. Each player's board has a different combination of colors and required moves, so blue on one board might be go straight one block, while someone else goes two blocks and a third player must make a turn. Players make their moves in turn on the shared map board, then mark the icons of what they've seen at various intersections on their player board. Different types of riders all score differently, and placing checks on your personal board for passengers and areas (sight-seeing spots, stations, universities) before other players do can earn you extra bonus points, so strategically planning your route while keeping in mind your main destinations is very important. Sharing the road with someone else causes traffic, which might lead to penalties. Meet the conditions on public demand cards to score bonus points!

While I'm sure that some will be disappointed by the change of setting from Kyoto to New York and London, I would take bets that the subtitle is included specifically so that IELLO can release expansion boards down the line that will fit into the base game box.

• Two Rooms is a co-operative card game for two players in which a group of humans has entered the House of Mist and must escape the vampires within.

The game first appeared in 2020 from Japanese publisher YUTRIO, and Italian publisher Fever Games has licensed the design for a new edition in October 2021 that features comic artist Lorenzo De Felici. Here's an overview of how to play:

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The game takes place in the two halves of the game box, one depicting a red door, and the other a green door. The game centers around a deck of 15 cards. On your turn, draw a card from the deck and place it into one of the two rooms. When you "open" the room to add the card, you look at the cards already present and resolve their effects in ascending numerical order. Some effects will remove cards to the casualty area, others will cause cards to switch rooms, and so on. While this is happening, the other player must keep their eyes closed.

The game comes with four difficulty levels, and the players win if the Cloaked Vampire is placed in the casualty area and the players know the location of one of the human cards, Nina. The players lose in a number of ways, such as Nina entering the casualty area or the deck running out of cards.

• U.S. publisher Renegade Game Studios and Oni Games have picked The Three Little Wolves — a design from Poki Chen and Smoox Chen that first appeared in 2020 from Taiwanese publisher 桌遊鬍子 POKI Design — for release in October 2021.

Here's an overview of this quick-playing 2-4 player game:

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Centuries after a famous story featuring three little pigs, the Swine family has learned a precious lesson and become the greatest landlord in the world. (They love houses!) The Wolf family, however, has become the best architects of all time. (They hate lousy houses!) The three little wolves now work for the Big Bad Pig to build all kinds of houses. Can you help the wolves build the highest house and find the best home for them?

Three Little Wolves is a family game in which each player needs to build three houses by playing cards from small numbers to large. The higher you build, the better the chance you can score points — but your fellow players might send their little wolves to live in your nice house for big points! Plans, disguises, and a pinch of luck in your hand are all you need to win the game!

In more detail, players take turns playing one card from hand to build one of the three houses — blue, green, and red — in front of themselves, then refill their hand to four cards. If the Big Bad Pig (BBP) is drawn, it rewards the tallest house at that moment, but if you can't keep the house tall enough at the end of the game, you will get punished. If you don't want to play a card, you can discard a card and send one of your three wolves to live in other players' houses for a chance to score points!

The third time the BBP rewards the tallest house triggers the end of the game. All players compare the height of their buildings, and the shortest of each color is knocked down by the BBP! Whoever scores the most points wins!

• Japanese publisher Oink Games has licensed Kei Kajino's card game Scout! for release in a new edition that keeps the same name — SCOUT — while adopting a circus-setting, albeit mostly only on the game cover.

This new edition will debut at SPIEL '21, then be available elsewhere in Europe before the end of 2021 and in the U.S. in early 2022. Here are the details of gameplay:

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SCOUT is a ladder-climbing game in which cards have two potential values, players may not rearrange their hand of cards, and players may pass their turn to take a card from the current high set of cards into their hand.

More specifically, cards are dual-indexed, with different values on each half of the card, with the 45 cards having all possible combinations of the numbers 1-10. During set-up, whoever is shuffling the cards should randomize both the order of the cards in the deck and their orientation. Once each player has been dealt their entire hand of cards, they pick up that hand without rearranging any of the cards; if they wish, they can rotate their entire hand of cards in order to use the values on the other end of each card, but again they cannot rearrange the order of cards in their hand.

On a turn, a player takes one of two actions:

• Play: A player chooses one or more adjacent cards in their hand that have all the same value or that have values in consecutive order (whether ascending or descending), then they play this set of cards to the table. They can do this only if the table is empty (as on the first turn) or the set they're playing is ranked higher than the set currently on the table; a set is higher if it has more cards or has cards of the same value instead of consecutive cards or has a set of the same quantity and type but with higher values. In this latter case when a player overplays another set, the player captures the cards in this previous set and places them face down in front of themselves.

• Scout: A player takes a card from either end of the set currently on the table and places it anywhere they wish in their hand in either orientation. Whoever played this previous set receives a 1 VP token as a reward for playing a set that wasn't beaten.

Once per round, a player can scout, then immediately play.

When a player has emptied their hand of cards or all but one player have scouted instead of playing, the round ends. Players receive 1 VP for each face-down card, then subtract one point for each card in their hand (except if they were the player scouted repeatedly to end the game). Play as many rounds as the number of players, then whoever has the most points wins.