Candice's Gen Con 2022 Round-Up/Discoveries: Part 3

Just minutes before thousands of eager gamers stormed into the main exhibit hall on opening morning at Gen Con 2022, I had a brief, yet heartwarming encounter with David Thompson, who I was so happy to finally meet in person.

A delightful encounter

David was excited to be at Gen Con with Osprey Games to show off Undaunted: Stalingrad, the newest and most ambitious standalone game in the Undaunted series, which he co-designed with Trevor Benjamin. Undaunted: Stalingrad is a 2-player game that adds a branching narrative campaign to the Undaunted deck-building system.

Undaunted: Stalingrad sprawled out

Undaunted: Stalingrad is completely player driven. Every casualty suffered in battle will weaken your forces for the entire campaign. Alternatively, there are ways to unlock new units, and as you use particular units more and more, they get promoted with access to new actions. If you blow up a building, that building is gone for the rest of the campaign. In that case you'd use a new tile reflecting the blown-up building. There are also lots of narratives for each character.

It looks and sounds like the design team and publisher have pushed the limits to expand the Undaunted series with Undaunted: Stalingrad, and I'm here for it! There will be limited amount of copies available at SPIEL '22, and then it will be more widely available in Q4 2022.

When I was at the Osprey booth to take a peek at Undaunted: Stalingrad, I got updates on other upcoming releases from Osprey. David Thompson and Trevor Benjamin's Undaunted: Battle of Britain is another standalone game in the Undaunted series, which is focused on aerial combat in World War II with a variety of WWII aircrafts, spitfires, and more. It is due out in May 2023.

Later in 2023 we can expect to see Imperium Horizons, a standalone, big box game in Nigel Buckle and Dávid Turczi's civilization, deck-building Imperium series. Imperium Horizons adds 14 new factions, covers fresh aspects of history, features deluxe components, and is fully compatible with Imperium: Classics and Imperium: Legends.

Ahead of the titles mentioned above, Matthew Dunstan and Brett J. Gilbert's puzzly, railroad tableau-building card game, Village Rails, hits the streets in late September 2022.

• I played a quick round of Powerline, an upcoming release from designer Dirk Henn (Shogun, Alhambra, Wallenstein) and Queen Games. Powerline is a simultaneous dice action selection game where 1-6 players attempt to connect cities with new sources of energy production. It is the first game in Queen Games' new "Green Planet" series, which is targeted to launch on Gamefound for crowdfunding in October 2022.

• At the Plan B Games booth, Eric can attest I walked into our meeting with Isabelle Frenette like a kid in a candy store with blank check. I was pumped to learn more about Great Western Trail: Argentina, which is a SPIEL '22 release from Alexander Pfister and eggertspiele. Great Western Trail holds a very special place in my gaming heart since it was the first heavy board game I played and it is still one of my favorites, so I've been very curious and excited about Great Western Trail: Argentina ever since it was announced in February 2021.

Great Western Trail: Argentina maintains the look and feel of Great Western Trail, but has a decent amount of changes to vary it up and steer players to new challenges and strategies. You'll find the usual cattle deck-building with a familiar, yet different rondel map. Instead of delivering cattle to different cities via railroad, you are now delivering to boats that each have a different value. In order to place your disc on a particular boat, you need to deliver that value of cattle cards from your hand. Then as the game progresses, the boats will be shipped off to one of three ports, where you can eventually place your discs on port bonus spaces to gain money and/or victory points.

Great Western Trail: Argentina also introduces farmers as a new type of worker which you need to generate grain, a new resource. You'll need grain to deliver to certain boats and to place your discs on the port bonus spaces.

Great Western Trail: Argentina player board

I can't speak to all of the new elements in Great Western Trail: Argentina or how they all work together since I haven't actually played it yet. However, from the rundown we got at Gen Con, it seems like Pfister and the eggertspiele team did a great job creating a completely fresh, yet familiar Great Western Trail experience. I can't wait to play it!

New cattle cards & boat tiles

The folks at the Plan B Games booth were running demos of Great Western Trail: Rails to the North (Second Edition), which looked really nice on the table with the second edition of Great Western Trail.

Isabelle also showed us Maui, a towel-laying game from Next Move Games and designers Frank Crittin, Grégoire Largey, and Sébastien Pauchon, the design team behind 2021 release Botanik. Maui is a SPIEL '22 release where 2–4 players place towels on their own beach boards by matching patterns.

• I had a great time playing a 3-player demo game of Glenn Drover's new civilization-building game, Mosaic: A Story of Civilization, from Forbidden Games.

Mosaic can be played with 2-6 players in 90-120 minutes, and I was pleasantly surprised how competitive it felt with only 3 players. On your turn, you take one of the seven actions and acquire different components to make your civilization unique. There are four different decks of cards with card markets around the board representing different types of buildings, technologies, and more. Each deck is seeded with scoring cards, so as the game progresses and your civilization grows, you'll eventually reveal and resolve scoring cards. We ended up learning and playing through the first scoring phase, and had we not all had places to be, we would've happily finished the game.

The game board for Mosaic is gorgeous with its mosaic map, and the components for the deluxified Colossus edition were awesome. Gameplay wise, I really appreciated that the turns felt snappy with minimal downtime. I also dug how streamlined it felt when it came to adding units and buildings onto the board. I hope to play some full games of Mosaic in the future to explore it further and see how it feels at different player counts.

My civilization was thriving...

• I bumped into Abandon All Artichokes designer Emma Larkins as she was wandering around with a demo copy of her upcoming release Starry Night Sky, which is due out in Q1 2023 from Buffalo Games. Starry Night Sky plays with 2-4 players in 30-45 minutes and is all about locating new stars and mapping them onto constellations.