Update, June 23: The "All Original Art" phrase was possibly a holdover from an earlier solicitation, according to UDE gaming sales manager Richard Dracass, who confirmed that Legendary: Buffy "and future TV properties" will "use screen grabs from the show as this is how fans relate to those brands".
• At SPIEL 2016, Korean publisher Happy Baobab released Fold-it by Yohan Goh, a real-time, pattern-creation game in which each player has a double-sided cloth and races to fold that cloth in a particular way to reveal only the dishes shown on that round's menu card. The game is a tricky take on the Spot it genre because spotting the images that you need to feature isn't enough; you need to also figure out how to make all the other images disappear within the folds of the cloth.
Two things have happened since that release: First, publisher ThinkFun has licensed the game for release in the U.S., with a listed street date of July 21, 2017. (Hong Kong-based Broadway Toys has also licensed the game for a Chinese-language edition.)
Second, at SPIEL 2017 Happy Baobab will release Battlefold, a new take on the system with co-designer Dave Choi and art by Vincent Dutrait. Says publisher representative Kevin Kim, "Originally, we had planned to make a Fold-it series of games with different artwork and puzzles, but the same game rules. However, after the successful launch in Essen, we changed the main direction of the project. We found the potential of the 'folding handkerchief' system and decided to make very different games while keeping only the folding handkerchief to show certain icons." Here's an overview of this new game:
As in the earlier game Fold-it, once a mission card is revealed, players must fold their handkerchief to leave visible only the right combination of symbols. After successfully making a combination, the player takes the lowest remaining turn order token. Starting with the first player, each player controls their character on the arena board, moving and fighting with the goal of being the last one standing. If a player defeats all other opponents, they win!
Battlefold is a player-elimination game, but eliminated players can still participate via the "ghost" rule. When a player's character dies, the character becomes a ghost. Flip the character board to the ghost side and keep playing. A ghost player can gain spiritual energy by successfully attacking living characters, and if a ghost collects full spiritual energy before only one living character remains in the arena, then the ghost wins the game.
• IELLO has released an overview of Sentai Cats, the details of which sound as ridiculous as the name. The design, which hits brick-and-mortar stores on September 28, 2017, is credited to "Tokyo Boys", probably because they didn't want to fit all the designer names (Antoine Bauza, Corentin Lebrat, Ludovic Maublanc, Nicolas Oury, Théo Rivière) on their miniature box. Here's the setting:
Sentai Cats is a fast-paced and quirky game in which you train your cute little kitties into world-saving heroes...wearing latex suits!