• Mainstream U.S. game publisher USAopoly is branching out a bit in its catalog with its licensed versions of BANG! and now with its reprint of Donald X. Vaccarino's Nefarious, which features artwork from the Russian version of the game. I've said multiple times that a Despicable Me license would have been a great way to attract mainstream gamers, but given the ho-hum ratings for Minions, perhaps it's better that this design wasn't entangled that way.
• Speaking of entangling licenses, USAopoly has also published Risk: Game of Thrones, which places the Risk gameplay in Westeros with many fancy plastic pieces and a double-sided game board.
• Lift it! Deluxe from Per Gauding was first released by a couple of European game publishers, and now those in the U.S. can also enjoy the feeling of strapping a crane to their forehead and trying to assemble something fragile and fleeting.
• Strangely enough, Shane Willis' forthcoming Garbage Day from Mayday Games is not the first game about stacking things precariously on a garbage can as the 2013 design Ab in die Tonne from Carlo Rossi covered the same ground, but if we can have hundreds of games about elves in a fantasy world, then we can find the room for two garbage can games in our lives.
• Hoplomachus: Origins from designers Adam and Josh Carlson and publisher Chip Theory Games makes good use of the fancy materials included in the box for this 1-2 player dueling game.
• Finally for now, designers Daryl Andrews and JR Honeycutt snuck into the booth to preview Fantasy Fantasy Baseball, a card game coming from CSE Games in 2016. So many preview videos...