Wrapped in the inspiring artwork and portraits of the steampunk scene, Incredible Expeditions combines the riveting core gameplay mechanisms of deck-building, exploration and resource management.
Beginning at the Port City location, each Expedition Leader (player character) equips her unique ship with the Resource cards and Crew cards she'll need to make her way to the Lost City of Atlantis. As each new Location is discovered, Encounter cards are drawn to reveal the challenges the Expedition Leaders must defeat using the skill of their Crew and their Resource cards at hand. Encounters that prove too harrowing will leave your crew weakened, or worse, cursed! The expedition moves on only once a Location's Encounters have been defeated.
Race against each other to be the first to uncover the secrets of the last Location, the Lost City of Atlantis, or band together to use your combined strength to face down Lovecraftian horrors and test your mettle against the hazards of expedition. Competitive, cooperative and single-player rules provide different play modes.
• Planet Defiant: Onslaught of Vanas is a first design from Kyle Pollex and Phillip J. Woodward, and here's an overview:
Planet Defiant: Onslaught of Vanas will feature multiple factions fighting for survival against an aggressive alien species. Aliens will spawn every turn with more coming the longer you are playing. You will be fighting epic battles against many creatures at once and insanely powerful bosses to find the resources needed to escape the planet. Only with the help of your teammates can you hope to make it off the planet alive.
The game is completely cooperative with you and your teammates playing against the board which is constantly striving to kill you due to unique mechanics, story driven encounters, powerful bosses, and more.
• Queen Games has launched its next Kickstarter project – Templar: The Secret Treasures – with an expected delivery date of February 2014, so I guess I'll be removing this title from the Spiel 2013 Preview (unless Queen plans to demo the game at that convention, that is). (KS link) This design by Jesús Torres Castro was originally published under the name Palacio de Viana, but now the action has been shifted a few centuries earlier and thousands of miles away from Spain. Here's a description of the game:
Each player has a hand of ten character cards and a starting supply of treasure: one book, one chalice, and a handful of signet rings, which comes in three types. A harbor with six storehouses is stocked with additional treasures, and three characters – Abbot Remigius, Vitus, and Prior Severus – are placed in the 13-room abbey.
For the first round of the game, each player secretly chooses a character card, then they all reveal them simultaneously, with players then carrying out the actions on those cards in player order. Some characters represent monks who help you move through the abbey and hide treasure, others allow you to take treasure from the harbor, open a locked door while closing off another passage, move treasure that another player has already stashed, among other things. When a player moves Abbot Remigius, the Abbot rewards all players who have stashed treasure in the room in which he ends his movement, with all of the treasure then being marked as scored – other than duplicate signet rings, which can score again should the Abbot return. (Vitus, who isn't controlled by a card, follows the Abbot closely to spy upon him, thus keeping the Abbot from returning to the most recent room he entered.) If the Prior Severus is in a room, though, the Abbot can't do his thing as Severus would then discover the treasure and learn of the Knights' actions.
After the initial round, a player must play a character card that doesn't match the top character card on any player's discard pile – which means that you (and others) play both offense and defense with the same character card, restricting the action of others while ideally make good use of the character yourself. When a player lays down The Bells card, he picks up all of his played cards, then restocks the harbor based on the number of his previously played character card.
When the harbor can no longer be filled properly or when a player has placed at least one treasure in each room, the final round is triggered, then players have a final scoring for their rings still in the abbey and for the number of rooms that hold their treasure. Whoever scores the most points wins!
• Mayday Games is on Kickstarter with Click Clack Lumberjack, a new version of Toc Toc Woodman that features a "grubs" variant along the familiar wood-chopping action. You know what's fun about Toc Toc Woodman? Stacking one tree on top of another, then whacking it to pieces. I haven't tried three trees yet. Something for the future... (KS link)
• Through his Escape Pod Games, designer Steve Wood is expanding his Gunship universe with Gunship: Afterburners! that features a "gladiator-style tournament" with "a deadly obstacle course that must be navigated as the combatants do their very best to destroy each other". (KS link)
• In what sounds like an entry for the Geeklist in which people remove letters from game names to create new games, designer James Campbell is trying to fund Drag Ball: The Game, a mostly card-based game about drag queens for 5-12 players that has nothing to do with Dragon Ball Z. (KS link)
• BGG might be the wrong audience for this game – just maybe – but in case it isn't, I thought I'd mention Landing Mr. Right, looking for funding on KS from designers Alys Daly and Victoria Brewer. (KS link)
You roll the die, pick your guy, and share your story. The game revolves around dating six types of men: Blue Blood, CEO, Regular Guy, Rock Star, Triathlete, and Techno-Geek. When you choose a Date card, you are free to select whomever you'd like to date – just like in life. The guys take you on exciting dates to ten destinations around the board. But, whether your date gets you closer to or further away from Landing Mr. Right is all in the cards. After your date, you pick a Your Story card with a question that prompts you to share dating experiences with your girlfriends. From, "who was the first boy you kissed and is he now a friend on Facebook?" to whether your last relationship was sealed with a kiss or the great kiss-off – your answers get you thinking, laughing, and discovering new things about yourself, your dating choices, and the best kept secrets of your closest girlfriends.