Game Previews from FIJ 2018 I: 7 Wonders: Armada, Imaginarium, Chawaï, and Attack of the Jelly Monster

Game Previews from FIJ 2018 I: 7 Wonders: Armada, Imaginarium, Chawaï, and Attack of the Jelly Monster
Board Game: 7 Wonders
• The only thing that's taken more time in development than the 7 Wonders app from Repos Production is the 7 Wonders: Armada expansion, which designer Antoine Bauza demoed at least as far back as September 2012. The expansion that will debut at SPIEL '18 in October does not resemble that earlier one in any way other than including the word "Armada" in the name. In case you don't care to watch the video below, I've summarized how the expansion works below. I don't normally summarize videos, but the game description on the BGG page was "Info to come", so I thought that lack of info needed addressing:

Quote:
With this expansion, each player gets a separate "naval" board at the start of the game in addition to their wonder board. The expansion includes additional red, green, yellow, and blue cards to shuffle into the deck, and each time that you pay for the cost for any red, green, yellow, and blue card — not only the ones added in this expansion — you can pay an additional cost shown on your naval board to advance your ship of the matching color. When you advance the red ship, for example, you gain naval strength, and at the end of an era, you compare your naval strength against all the players at the table, not only adjacent players, to determine who's strongest, who's second-strongest, etc., with victory points handed out accordingly.

Advancing on the yellow and blue tracks gives you coins and victory points, respectively, with additional naval strength at the far end of the tracks. Advancing on the green track allows you to discover islands, and to do this, you draw the island deck of whatever level you reached, then choose one of the islands in that deck and put it into play. Maybe you'll increase your navy, advance a ship of another color, find a source of raw materials...you'll see when the time comes!




Video Game Publisher: Bombyx
• I first previewed Imaginirium from Bruno Cathala and Florian Sirieix at the 2017 Festival International des Jeux, although the game bore a different name at the time. At FIJ 2018, publisher Bombyx had a few copies on hand, and the game is scheduled to debut in England, France, Japan, Germany, and the Netherlands in mid-April 2018. Distribution plans for the U.S. are "to be announced". Gameplay is to be discussed by the designers in the video below:





Board Game Publisher: Superlude Éditions
• As part of his explanation of Chawaï from Superlude Éditions, designer Bruno Faidutti gave a short history lesson on Alex Randolph's classic game Raj. Interesting to hear how games come about, and the ideas they embody continue to spread into new designs, even decades after their initial release. (Thirty years in the case of Raj!)





Board Game Publisher: Libellud
Antonin Boccara's Attack of the Jelly Monster from Libellud is another title that I previewed at FIJ 2017 and saw in its final form at FIJ 2018. I've now played this 3-5 player die-roller a couple of times, and it's incredibly hectic! You need to watch over and think about eight things at once, which is impossible to do, of course, so you're slamming things around as best as you can and hoping that others will look the other way while you set up jelly traps.

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