It's time to seek your fortune, or anyone's really — whoever's is closest. To the west there's a land of milk and honey, full of giant bees and monstrous cows; to the east, a land of eggs and licorice; to the north, treacherous swamps; to the south, loyal jungles. But all of them have been thoroughly pillaged. You've heard legends, though, of a fifth direction as yet unspoiled, with its treasures conveniently gathered into troves. You have your sword and your trail mix, handed down from your father, and his father before him. You've recruited some recruits and hired some hirelings; you've shined your armor and distressed a damsel. You put up a sign saying "Gone Adventuring". Then you put up another sign, saying "Beware of Dog", in case people get any ideas. You're ready. You saddle up your trusty steed, and head florst.
Dominion: Adventures, the ninth addition to the game of Dominion, contains 400 cards, 60 tokens and six mats. This expansion has 30 new Kingdom cards, including the return of Duration cards that do things on future turns, plus Reserve cards that can be saved for the right moment. There are also 20 Event cards that give you something to buy besides cards, including tokens that modify cards.
• Among the items that the German branch of Asmodee expects to show at Spielwarenmesse 2015 in Nürnberg is Zug um Zug: Deutschland – Deutschland 1902, an expansion by Days of Wonder for Zug um Zug: Deutschland — itself a reworking of Ticket to Ride: Märklin — that adds new tickets to the game providing for more variety during play. Zug um Zug: Deutschland reworked Ticket to Ride: Märklin by removing the passengers as a game element and including the "normal" TtR distribution of train cards — but since its release in 2012 the game has been available solely for the German-speaking market, namely Germany, Austria and Switzerland.
I asked Days of Wonder's Adrien Martinot about this new release, and he said that DoW currently has no plans to release Zug um Zug: Deutschland or this new expansion outside the German markets. Personally I can imagine this item showing up as part of a Ticket to Ride Map Collection at some point, perhaps paired with a brand new design as with the release of TtR: India & Switzerland in 2011 — something that will enrage Germans who are bothered by being "forced" to repurchase something they already own — but maybe that's just me. With TtR: India & Switzerland showing up four years after the release of TtR: Switzerland, I'll go ahead and predict that Ticket to Ride Map Collection: Volume 6 – Brazil & Germany will be released in 2016. Relive the 2014 World Cup through trains!
• Tiny Epic Galaxies from designer Scott Almes and Gamelyn Games is tearing up Kickstarter right now, and U.S. publisher Green Couch Games has an Almes design of its own due out in Q4 2015, a design that fits its own goal of publishing "great little games". Here's a rundown of Best Treehouse Ever:
In Best Treehouse Ever, players compete to build their best treehouse, outfitting their treehouse with cool rooms, while also making sure that their tree doesn't tip over and that their rooms are more impressive than all of their friends' rooms at the end of the game.
Building takes place over three weeks/rounds, and in each round, players use card drafting and spatial reasoning to add five new rooms to their treehouse. Players must pay attention to the other treehouses being built since they take turns determining which types of rooms score for everyone at the end of each round.
At the end of the third week, the winner is the player with the best treehouse ever!
To summarize the situation for those not in the know, in late 2011 Rik Falch — one of the two owners of Valley Games, Torben Sherwood being the other — ran a Kickstarter project for D-Day Dice, which was delivered to backers in mid-2012. Falch then subsequently ran Kickstarter projects for two other games in 2012 — Airborne In Your Pocket from the same designer of D-Day Dice and a new edition of the long out-of-print Up Front — during which time lawsuits by Phil Sauer, who had loaned money to Valley Games, came to be publicly known.
In what's surely my worst decision in four years with BGG, I invited Falch to explain the situation between Valley/Radiant and Sauer, while linking to Sauer's explanation of the situation. As I wrote at the time: