Game Previews from GAMA Expo 2020 III: Paris, Ruination, Mint Control, Trekking the World, and Dwellings of Eldervale

Game Previews from GAMA Expo 2020 III: Paris, Ruination, Mint Control, Trekking the World, and Dwellings of Eldervale
From gallery of W Eric Martin
Let's get back to more game preview videos from GAMA Expo 2020, a convention during which BoardGameGeek recorded more than one hundred overviews of new and upcoming games with their designers and publishers, a convention experience that will not be repeated anywhere for months to come — or at least that's what it feels like.

I've been publishing these videos on our BGG Express YouTube channel, in addition to the individual BGG game pages, but I keep highlighting batches of them in this space to ensure that folks can catch glimpses of upcoming games. It's hard to keep your eyes on everything, and if you don't know that something is coming, then your eye won't touch it at all.

For this post, I've chosen games that are currently on Kickstarter or games that recently completed a crowdfunding campaign. GAMA functions like a mini-Origins, with publishers often showing off games heading to Kickstarter — which is somewhat strange given that the audience at GAMA doesn't include regular gamers, but only retailers, distributors, and other intermediary members of the sales chain.

Paris is a grand design from Wolfgang Kramer, Michael Kiesling, and Game Brewer that feels like a K&K game of old. Players fight for control of arrondissements surrounding the Arc de Triomphe, with players drafting special powers and scoring abilities from the outer ring of the game board, a ring upon which you can advance but never retreat. (KS link)

I don't envy the person who created this mock-up version of the game given all the curvy edges on it...





• I missed out on seeing the overview of Trekking the World from Charlie Bink and Underdog Games, an overview that I can watch only now with everyone else. Nick Bentley, an Underdog employee, was polling people prior to the campaign going live to get feedback based on the current presentation of the Kickstarter page and to see how internal calculations measured up against the wisdom of the crowd. (KS link)





Mint Control is the latest tiny game from Justin Blaske and Five24 Labs, and while publishing the video about this area majority game, I discovered that a "mint tin" family exists in the BGG database. Only sixteen listings in that family? Someone overlooked the majority of the Cocktail Games catalog when adding titles to the group... (KS link — campaign ended)





Ruination from Travis R. Chance and Kolossal Games is the third area majority game in this post, so perhaps I should have focused on that mechanism instead. If you can spare a few moments from your current apocalyptic location, you can discover what's shaking in this game set in a post-apocalyptic Eurasia. (KS link — campaign ended)





• Okay, Dwellings of Eldervale from Luke Laurie and Breaking Games did not finish its Kickstarter campaign (link) recently, but it does have an area majority aspect along with many other things, and the game was being shown in a nearly final version that has one hundred thousand components in it, so it seems to make sense to show off the end result.

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