• In August 2021, U.S. publisher Deep Water Games ran a Kickstarter campaign for Rat Queens: To the Slaughter, a 2-4 player co-operative adventure game from Erica Bouyouris and Sen-Foong Lim that's based on Kurtis Wiebe's Rat Queens comic series.
Deep Water expects this title to be available at retail in the second half of 2022, and here's what you'll get:
Players spend the first half of the game defeating monsters to earn rewards to upgrade their ability deck and stats in order to prepare for the Big Bad hiding in the wake. The more monsters you defeat, the more powerful you become and the more time you have before the Big Bad arrives, with that enemy being determined by which monsters escape. Combat is a simplified version of RPG-style combat with easy-to-learn dice checks for attacks and abilities.
From the first sip to the last drop. Sisters. Warriors. Queens. Friends to the very end.
• Along similar lines, Sovereign Suns from Aaron Andrew Wilson and John Prather, which is due out in 2023, is a standalone engine-building game in the same universe as Wilson's 2020 release Sovereign Skies.
• And one more: Floor Plan: The Winchester Mystery House from John Brieger and Marek Tupy is a standalone sequel to Tupy's 2020 roll-and-write game Floor Plan. In this licensed game due out Q4 2022, you get to add on to the Winchester Mystery House by building two stories that fulfill six different building requirements.
• David Van Drunen's Block and Key was Kickstarted in March 2021, and publisher Inside Up Games hopes to debut the game at Origins Game Fair in June 2022 so long as production and transport rolls along as anticipated.
In Block and Key, players take turns placing blocks in a shared area following certain rules in order to score target cards based on what they see from their own point of view. After someone has scored a designated number of cards, players tally points for their completed cards to see who wins.
Inside Up's Conor McGoey notes that all of the components, boards, and supports shown in the image below nest to fit inside a box that's roughly the size of a large square KOSMOS box.
• Mythic Games expects to have Jochen Eisenhuth's Super Fantasy Brawl available at retail outlets by the end of April 2022. This will be followed by:
— Darkest Dungeon: The Board Game in Q3 2022
— 6: Siege – The Board Game in Q3 2022
— Enchanters: Darklands in Q3/Q4 2022
— Rise of the Necromancers in Q4 2022
Lots of movement in and out of the Mythic warehouse the second half of the year...