• Hanno Girke from Lookout Games has teased that info on an expansion for Phil-Walker Harding's Bärenpark will be shown at the Spielwarenmesse trade fair starting on January 31, 2018. Hey, that's today! And I'll be at the show today! Maybe I'll find something out as I wander around the Messe ahead of three solid days of filming game overviews. Watch the BGG Twitter feed for the next few days for this and other news and pics.
• Frosted Games will release a German-language version of Masato Uesugi's Paper Tales, which Catch Up Games released at SPIEL '17, in Q3 2018, and according to Brettspielbox, other titles in the Frosted pipeline include a German version of David J. Mortimer's The Cousins' War, a new version of the three-player-only trick-taking game Familiar's Trouble from Fukutarou (to which I say "Woot!"), and an Andreas Odendahl title called "Cooper Island".
• Speaking of Odendahl, Flying Lemur Game Studio plans to release a second edition of Odendahl and Michael Keller's Solarius Mission, which first appeared from German publisher Spielworxx in 2016. On Facebook, Flying Lemur's Rick Schrand notes that this new edition will contain larger pieces than the original version and a reworked rulebook to make it easier to learn the game.
• Publisher eggertspiele has announced that Great Western Trail: Rails to the North, an expansion for Alexander Pfister's Great Western Trail, will debut at the Origins Game Fair on June 13, 2018, with the title hitting retail outlets shortly afterward. Here's what this expansion has to offer:
With this expansion, players deliver their herds to northeast United States with stops in Chicago, Detroit, and New York City, amongst other cities, in an effort to become the most successful cow rancher this side of the Mississippi. Be advised that business is much more difficult on this rail, so players will want to take advantage of friendly hospitality by establishing branchlets and helping form towns. In addition to the new railway system, players will also discover new station master tiles, private buildings, and an expanded player board to offer more strategic depth in their decision making.
• The most out-there, unpredictable game design that we're likely to see at Spielwarenmesse — and we plan to record a game overview, so you can find out with us — is Holding On: The Troubled Life of Billy Kerr from Michael Fox and Rory O'Connor of Hub Games, which was formerly The Creative Hub. The game mechanisms might be familiar, sure, but the context they're in and the setting of the game itself is something new:
Piece together Billy's troubled past to finally reveal the three hidden memories that keep him holding on. Holding On: The Troubled Life of Billy Kerr is a co-operative worker placement game featuring a compelling storyline that will be revealed as you play time and time again, but also allows players to replay all previous scenarios to learn more and improve upon past attempts.