New Game Round-up: Gloom Beyond Earth, Balloons Beyond Their Capacity, and Grossness Beyond Belief

• Time and space mean nothing to the power of gloom as is evidenced by Atlas Games' plan to release the latest addition to Keith Baker's Gloom empire — Gloom in Space — in January 2017. Yes, with Gloom in Space, which is both a standalone game and an expansion to any other Gloom title, now you can take familiar SF characters to the stars where they will suffer and perish just like everyone else in life.

• Tim Puls' The Colonists, which debuted at SPIEL 2016 in October from Lookout Games, will be available in the U.S. on January 12, 2017, according to co-publisher Mayfair Games.

• Mercury Games expects to have the new version of Martin Wallace's Princes of the Renaissance out in U.S. stores by December 21, 2016, but notes Mercury's Kevin Nesbitt, "Because of an under-production error at the factory, we ended up with only half as many copies as we expected for retail." Nesbitt says that more copies of the game should be available in early 2017, but if you want one now, you had best preorder to reserve one.

• Board&Dice plans to release a deck-building, area-control card game from Tides of Time's Kristian Čurla at SPIEL 2017. No other details announced right now.

• Balloon Pop! from Andy Van Zandt and Tasty Minstrel Games is a press your luck dice-roller due out in early 2017. Here's how to play:

Quote:

In Balloon Pop!, each player has a scoresheet with six columns on it. On a turn, you roll three dice, with each die face showing a balloon color and a shape, then record the results by circling numbers from the bottom of the column, going up. The highest number you circle in a column equals the points that you score.

Not happy with your results? Then roll again with any number of dice — but you have to roll an additional die as well, which means you'll circle more results on your scoresheet. You can reroll a second time as well to add a fifth die to your results. This (possibly) gives you better control over the results, while helping you ascend the columns more quickly to higher potential scores.

However, at the top of each column is a different colored number that's much lower than the numbers immediately below it. Hit this number, and your balloon's popped because it went too high. What's more, this popping triggers a scoring break that occurs at the end of the round, with everyone scoring based on their current heights in the columns. You want to go high, but don't trigger the break or else your points will plummet right before scoring.

After three breaks, players total their scores to see who wins.

• Tasty Minstrel Games has announced December 7, 2016 release dates for four titles that it debuted in its line at BGG.CON 2016: The Oracle of Delphi, At the Gates of Loyang, Ponzi Scheme, and Ars Alchimia. The TMG version of Reiner Knizia's Amun-Re is due out in early 2017, with Kramer and Lübke's Colosseum due to hit retail in Q1 2017.

• What's the hottest and most repulsive trend in the game industry? Games in which players stick in a mouthguard, then attempt to say things and have others guess what they're saying. As a long-time opponent of advertising that features people with food in their mouths — for goodness' sake, people, chew with your mouth closed! — I must register my disappointment, although I expect the lifespan of these titles won't last three weeks beyond the 2016 holiday season, so they should vanish from shelves before too long.