New Game Round-up: Contests, Capers, Civilizations, and Crooks

• Upper Deck Entertainment has already released two games that make use of the myriad characters in the Marvel Comics universe, and come mid-2018 that number will increase by one thanks to the debut of Carmen Bellaire's Marvel Contest of Champions: Battlerealms, a 3-6 player game that bears this description:

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Marvel Contest of Champions: Battlerealms is a brand new, unique game set in the "Contest of Champions" universe. In Battlerealms, players take control of a character, roll dice to activate powers, and zoom across different locations to gain points or take points from other players.

I guess that description refers to the 2014 mobile game Marvel: Contest of Champions, but it could mean the comic series that started in 2015 or even the Marvel Super Hero Contest of Champions trilogy from 1982 that I still regret buying, although it led to me discovering non-superhero comics, so that was a plus.

• Also due out in mid-2018 is The Mansky Caper from Ken Franklin and Calliope Games, with this being a Prohibition-era game in which 2-6 player gangsters are ransacking the home of mob boss Al Mansky. You might have to split the take several ways as you break into safes throughout the house, but you might also run into traps that can blow your hopes sky-high. Whatever happens, the player who makes it out of the house with the most money wins.

• Little has been made public right now about CIV: Carta Impera Victoria from newcomer Rémi Amy and French publisher Ludonaute other than that it's a deck-building game bearing this brief description:

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Carta Impera Victoria is a game of CIVilization and diplomacy in which you develop your own nation. Be the first to reach hegemony in one domain to make history, but keep an eye on your opponents. Forming a temporary alliance might be the best way to prevent a player to triumph…and remember that offense is sometimes the best defense!

CIV is due out in February 2018, most likely debuting at the FIJ fair in Cannes, which BGG plans to attend.

• Hassan Lopez's Infamous from Eagle-Gryphon Games, due out in late 2018, challenges 2-5 players to be good at being bad, specifically by choosing a role as one of five supervillains, building a secret lair from the seventy rooms included in the game, recruiting henchmen attracted by your lair, then trying to complete contracts of evil actions around the world.