• The second title from Capstone Games is Holger Lanz' The Climbers, with this being the first release from Simply Complex, a new brand from Capstone that focuses on "board games with a beautiful 3D table presence, relatively low rules overhead, and deep gameplay, accomplished in under one hour of play".
In The Climbers, players take turns moving colored blocks — which initially form one giant block — in order to create towers that they then climb with their figure. Sometimes you can jump to the next level; at other times you must spend one of your precious ladders. You can climb only onto the neutral color or sides of the blocks that match your own color, so ideally each move of yours serves to both advance yourself and hinder others as you try to ascend higher than anyone else.
• Nuno Bizarro Sentieiro and Paulo Soledade's Brasil was added to the BGG database in 2012, and the game at one time bore a SPIEL 2016 release date, then that date was moved to 2017, and now the designers and publisher What's Your Game? have announced that they'll take the game to Kickstarter sometime in 2017, which will push the release date to (at least) 2018. Says Soledade, "The main reason for this to happen is related to production values. As the development progressed during these past couple of years, the once called Vila Rica transformed itself into a bigger game named Brasil. In order to pay justice to it, all of the components and some of its now 'epic characteristics' were calling for a general improvement of the normal production elements."
• Ian Brody of Griggling Games will be playtesting two games at both the 2017 Origins Game Fair and Gen Con 2017, one of those being a three-player expansion for Quartermaster General titled The Cold War and the other being SHAEF, a two-player WW2 card-driven wargame covering the ten months following D-Day in Western Europe that will be released by PSC Games.
• Thames & Kosmos, the U.S. branch of German publisher KOSMOS, has let me know that Legends of Andor: The Last Hope — the third boxed set in the fantasy cooperative game from Michael Menzel — is due out in the U.S. on November 1, 2017, with the Dark Heroes expansion to follow later that month.
An English-language version of the two-player game Die Legenden von Andor: Chada & Thorn is not currently on Thames & Kosmos' release calendar.
• Stronghold Games' Stephen Buonocore has let slip that Terraforming Mars now has six planned expansions for it instead of the four previously announced. The first expansion — the double-sided game board Hellas & Elysium — will debut at the 2017 Origins Game Fair in mid-June, with a U.S. street date of July 12, 2017.
• Level 99 Games will release a standalone sequel to Cliff Kamarga's drafting, tile-placement game Sellswords, with Sellswords: Olympus being first available in July 2017 to those who preorder, then in August to those attending Gen Con 2017, then finally to retail stores later in August. Here's an overview of the game:
Sellswords: Olympus is a fast-paced strategy game of drafting soldiers and deploying them to the field of battle. It takes only a few minutes to learn, but with fifty different heroes and monsters, each with their own unique ability to use and master, the possibilities for forming your army are limitless! Capture enemy units to turn them to your side in the battle. It's not enough to simply control the most of the field, though; you have to choose your targets carefully to outflank your opponent! Four different terrain tiles provide alternate play methods, giving you new strategies to explore!