![New Game Round-up: Making Kings, Building Heroes, and Seating the Family at the Table](https://cf.geekdo-images.com/buSUzVShw2Xxq14xVr3r-Q__thumb/img/AeUgUTCcyUKBgldHDN8jpZ_fvxo=/fit-in/200x150/filters:strip_icc()/pic2740779.png)
The second title from BOG is József Dorsonczky's Sixth, first published by Mind Fitness Games in 2013 as Six MaKING. I wrote a bit about Six MaKING and included an introductory video in an October 2014 post, just ahead of Mind Fitness releasing a special edition of the game that included three special pieces: a hunchback and giant in each color, and a single Milady token; those expansion pieces will be included in BOG's Sixth in a sealed bag with a note suggesting that you add them only after playing a bunch of times. Here's an explanation of the game, which also fits the BOG model of brevity:
If Milady is used, it starts off the board and either player can place it on the board as a pawn. If Milady is visible, whether alone or on top of other pieces, the player whose turn it is must move on top of Milady, if possible; if it's not visible, then it just counts as another piece.
The hunchback is a rounded piece that's added to the game normally as a pawn, but since it's rounded, nothing can be stacked on top of it.
The giant is a doubly-thick token that moves as a rook on its own or counts as two tokens when stacked with other pieces.
• French publisher/distributor Blackrock Games had intended to debut Grégoire and Quintens' AYA and the second edition of Bruno Cathala's Haru Ichiban at Spiel 2015, but they ran into a manufacturing difficulty that was as new one for me. As Blackrock's Thibaut Quintens explained to me in Essen, the manufacturer had stated that the components were boarded on a train (presumably from China to Europe for assembly) and the paperwork matched this claim, but the components weren't actually on board.
In late November 2015, the games finally arrived at the Blackrock offices, and they're now making their way to stores. The dominoes don't always fall as intended...
• Also out now is Emergents: Genesis from Urban Island Games, a superhero-themed deck-building game in which each player represents one of the Emergents and uses their Skill and Attack cards to upgrade their heroic abilities and smash others in the face with the goal of being the last one standing.
• Designer Lauge Luchau has created a trio of puzzle-y games (Uluru, Xalapa, Dimension) that present players with the parameters of a challenge that they all try to solve simultaneously, and his newest release — Tumult from Danish publisher AT Games — fits that same model, mostly because Tumult uses the same puzzle-generation system as Uluru.
In more detail, players represent members of a conveniently color-coded family, and they're presented with constraints as to who wants to sit where or next to (or not next to) whom. They score points based on how well they fulfill all of these constraints, and in a change from the previous design they want to take special care with constraints that affect them since their personal unhappiness will cost them points. Tumult also includes more puzzle cards than were present in Uluru.