The highlight title of this batch is Forum Trajanum, the second game from the design team of Stefan Feld and Michael Rieneck following 2017's Merlin from Queen Games. Forum Trajanum is for 2-4 players with a playing time of 60-90 minutes, and here's what we currently know about this game:
In Forum Trajanum, each player governs a Colonia, founded by Trajan himself, and thus is the head of one of the highest-ranking cities in the entire Roman Empire. While the players try to optimally develop their own Colonia, they should not fail in supporting the Emperor's building project to the best of their abilities at the same time. The player who is most successful in doing so will — after expiry of their term of office — be admitted to the small circle of illustrious and mighty personalities surrounding the Emperor.
• Before working on this game's write-up, I will confess to not knowing who Alexander von Humboldt was. Here's the Wikipedia summary for those in the same historically ignorant boat as me: "Friedrich Wilhelm Heinrich Alexander von Humboldt was a Prussian polymath, geographer, naturalist, explorer, and influential proponent of Romantic philosophy and science." With that background in mind, a game titled Humboldt's Great Voyage starts making more sense. Here's an overview of the design from Remo Conzadori and Nestore Mangone, this being a 2-4 player game due out in Q4 2018 for which we have only a preliminary cover for now:
But the measuring of the world goes on: As venturous young scientists, players in Humboldt's Great Voyage follow Humboldt's legendary expedition route all across the American continent. Using the "mancala" principle, they travel in stages from one location to the next, collect the objects they find, and ship them to selected personalities all over the world in order to make the findings they obtained available as quickly as possible to a public hungry for knowledge. Who will succeed in making a name for themself among the renowned scientists of the 19th century and be admitted as an associate member of the Academy of Sciences?