• Designer Rémi Amy and publisher Ludonaute have pushed the civilization game down to what might be its lower limits in terms of simplicity with CIV: Carta Impera Victoria. The game is nothing but cards divided into three eras of play, and the cards feature nothing more than an illustration that represents a certain field of history. As you collect these cards in front of you, you gain the powers of those fields, with the powers coming in two strengths. Collect enough cards in one field, and you win.
I've played a couple of times on a review copy and found the game very attack focused. You can't sit quietly collecting only what you want because (1) others will steal things from you and (2) you will lose if you allow opponents to do what they want unhindered. I've yet to play with four players in teams, which sounds like it might be the most interesting way to play.
• Designer Ghislain Masson had a huge hit with his first design, Not Alone, in 2016, and now new publisher Funky Sheep is preparing his second design for release. Badass Force has up to six players gathering the same seven action heroes in hand, then battling and bluffing one another to take out other characters (but not the players themselves) to prove that you're the badassest.
• Unlike most games that we covered, Edgar & Lucien from designers Tanguy Camus, Stéphane Gantiez, and Basile Mayeur and publisher Guru Fabric was not being previewed. The game was available at SPIEL '17, for example, but I hadn't seen it there, so when I was walking FIJ to look for publishers to feature on camera, I saw this great-looking game and invited them on.
In the game each player controls one Edgar and one Lucien, using them to do both good and bad things to gain control of the city.
• Fairy Tile from IELLO has just been released on the U.S. market, and co-designer Matthew Dunstan visited the BGG booth to explain this game he made with Brett J. Gilbert. In general, you want to move a knight, princess, and dragon around the land — which you will create over the course of the game — in order to tell the stories that you hold in hand. Make your stories come true to win!
• Roll-and-write games are popping up all over the place, and designer Henri Kermarrec showed off a trilogy of games from publisher Sit Down! that all use the same system, games in which everyone uses the same roll each turn, while possibly entering different numbers on their sheet of paper, games marketed under the name Penny Papers Adventures: The Temple of Apikhabou, The Skull Island, and The Valley of Wiraqocha.