In Papà Paolo, 2 to 4 players compete to deliver the most pizzas to the hungry customers of Naples. To do this, you must outsmart your rivals by being a clever investor, bidding on the right city tiles, and creating your own little district of Naples.
Over the course of five game rounds, players first have to plan their actions carefully, choosing whether they want to invest in new pizzerias, make express deliveries, get sponsored by the bank, or decide to expand their district. Once all players have used up their action tokens, players get rewarded by receiving Lira, which they can then use in a bidding phase to determine how many deliveries you can make, and how many pizzas you can deliver. Once you deliver pizzas to your hungry customers, they reward you by boosting your abilities, making each action more powerful as the game progresses.
• As many have anticipated, Z-Man Games will release Matthias Cramer's Dynasties: Heirate & Herrsche in English. No word on a release date at this point.
• Tasty Minstrel Games noted in its April 5, 2016 newsletter that it's acquired the rights to both Iori Tsukinami's area-control, trick-taking game Joraku from Moaideas Game Design and Jesse Li's Ponzi Scheme from Homosapiens Lab.
• Japanime Games plans to use Kickstarter to produce versions of the deck-building game Tanto Cuore and its standalone expansions (Expanding the House, Romantic Vacation and Oktoberfest) in French, German, Italian, Spanish, and any other language in which it can gain the financial support of at least 250 backers.
• Dale Yu, editor at Opinionated Gamers, has posted a pic of one of the many prototypes that will show up at The Gathering of Friends, an annual invite-only convention run by designer Alan R. Moon. The convention started simply as a way for friends to play together, but it's evolved over the years into a platform for designers to pitch to publishers and publishers to showcase upcoming games, such as Vlaada Chvátil's Codenames Pictures from Czech Games Edition.
I got a glimpse of this design at Spielwarenmesse 2016, but it was still in rough form, so I have nothing to say about it beyond my continued admiration at the malleability of Chvátil's Codenames. The design is a delightfully interactive 5x5 shell that can be — and has been — filled with almost everything that people can imagine, and I'm curious to see what twists have been brought to the game in this iteration.