New Game Round-up: Get Your Pie Face on with Hasbro & Say Goodbye to Treefrog

• In the category of news I overlooked during Origins 2015, in June 2015 Hasbro announced that it had acquired a license from Rocket Games to produce and sell Pie Face in multiple markets, including the U.S. and the UK. Yes, the Pie Face game featured in that video with grandfather and youngster that was shared on Facebook hundreds of times.

Crazily enough, this game was apparently first released by Hasbro itself in the mid-1960s, as can be seen by the commercial included below, yet Hasbro does not currently own the rights to the game. Perhaps there's hope for still lost Avalon Hill titles to re-emerge in 2040 or thereabouts...

• GMT Games plan to add Tom Lehmann's 1846 to its P500 preorder program in either September or October 2015.

• Jason Brenner from Upper Deck Entertainment has noted that as with the Marvel Universe version of Legendary, UDE will produce small expansions for both the Alien and Predator versions of Legendary Encounters.

• Richard Breese from R&D Games says that for now he plans to release a mini-expansion for Keyflower — Keymelequin — in 2016, with reprints of the various Keyflower promos possibly coming in 2017.

• In late August 2015, Martin Wallace from Treefrog Games announced that he planned to move away from self-publication, with the final title being A Handful of Stars in "hopefully" the first half of 2016: "This will be a limited production of 2500 units, so we will be taking pre orders close to the point where the game will be ready for shipping."

As for why Treefrog is ending, Wallace writes, "We will cease to produce our own titles and focus instead on designing games for other companies. There are numerous reasons behind this decision, but the main factor has been the increased costs of running the company from New Zealand. This does not mean the end of 'Treefrog' style games, it just means they will appear with another companies [sic] logo on."

• IELLO plans to release its own version of Yuichi Sakashita's Sheep & Thief, first published in 2014 by Power9 Games in Japan. IELLO expects to release this game in time for the Cannes game festival in late Feb. 2016, and I expect to publish an overview of this card-drafting game within the next month.

Update, Sept. 7, 2015: After being contacted by an agent for Power9 Games, I've discovered that IELLO does not currently have a contract to release its own version of the game, so apparently some miscommunication has occurred. That said, I still plan to post a video overview of the game given that it's part of the Japon Brand line-up for Spiel 2015.