New Game Round-up: Lie About Spices, Share Rings with Friends, and Cut Before You Crawl

New Game Round-up: Lie About Spices, Share Rings with Friends, and Cut Before You Crawl
Board Game: Spicy
• Spielwarenmesse 2020 is upon us, so let me post about a few more titles that BGG expects to film overviews of while in Nürnberg that I haven't yet covered to this point, starting with Spicy, a bluffing card game from designer Győri Zoltán Gábor and publisher HeidelBÄR Games for 2-6 players who take on the role of card-playing giant cats:
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Once upon a time, three big cats became exhausted fighting to be top cat. They agreed to quit the fight and spice up their nine lives with a hot spice eating contest. Alas, everyone was soon cheating, so the cats invented a very hot, often tearful, bluffing game.

In the game, cards are played face down so that you can cheat when you announce your card. That said, this clever card game isn't just about bluffing for you can almost always play a card that is at least half right if you cleverly play your hand. This means tactically deciding which card to use to get through: Do I play a "Pepper 10" or a color wild on a "Wasabi 9" and declare it a "Wasabi 10"? Or do I better pass because surely someone has noticed me thinking for so long now?

Spicy contains six game-variant cards, but even without these a high replayability is guaranteed.
Board Game: Cutterland
• In 2019, Renegade Game Studios released ClipCut Parks, a roll-and-cut design in which players would use scissors to slice pieces from a sheet of paper to cover demand cards.

For 2020, designer Nikolay Zolotarev and publisher Hobby World are giving players another take on scissor-driven gameplay in Cutterland, with 2-4 players taking an "I cut, you choose" approach in this territory-building game. An overview:
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Hello, adventurer! You must have seen a lot: miraculous worlds, battles with dragons, good triumphing over evil... You also must have suspected that dungeons were not designed on their own and dragons did not collect all of those riches they usually guard. That's what we do — create fabulous lands that would meet your highest expectations! Since there are more and more of you coming, we're overloaded and ready to hire you if you want to try your hand!

Cutterland is an innovative strategy board game in which you get to cut the cards — literally cut them into pieces and compete to create your own fabulous lands. You will divide the cards, distribute the pieces between the players, and score victory points for the creatures inhabiting your land. Whoever has the most attractive land at the end of the game wins!

Cutterland includes a mode in which you can play with the cut-up pieces, and two "recharge" packs will be available for the game: "Classics", which contains the base set of cards, and "Mashroom", which features a new creature of the same name!
Board Game: Fringers
• Publisher ABACUSSPIELE has a lot of German-language licensed titles on its 2020 release schedule — a new Deckscape, three new Sherlock titles, the Undead or Alive expansion for BANG! The Dice Game — but it does have one original title: an unusual-sounding co-operative game for 3-10 players from Asger Harding Granerud and Daniel Skjold Pedersen called Fringers.

We'll record a video overview of this at Spielwarenmesse 2020, but for now I can share only this description:
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Fringers is a co-operative action game. You play as a team and based on a goal card try to rearrange the rings on your fingers before time runs out. The players are allowed to give their rings only to their neighbor on the left, while your neighbor on the right will put new rings on your fingers — hopefully with the right color on the right finger.
Shortly after SPIEL '19, I tried Sit Down!'s Palm Reader with my family, and they hated the idea of writing symbols on one another's palms with their finger, so we didn't make it past a single round. (We're not a huggy-touchy family, but I'm fine doing such things in the context of game-playing.) Guess who I won't be playing Fringers with in the future...

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