New Game Round-up: Queendomino to Reign at SPIEL '17, and Is Friese Finished?

New Game Round-up: Queendomino to Reign at SPIEL '17, and Is Friese Finished?
Board Game: Finished!
• I've already written about three forthcoming titles from Friedemann Friese due out from his 2F-Spiele at SPIEL '17 in October — FLEE, FEAR, and FORTRESS — but believe it or not, he still has more in the works for release in 2017!

Finished! is a solitaire game in which you're trying to finish your work so that you can go home. Be sure to bring the game to the office and play endlessly so that you're fired and really can go home. Victory! (Sort of.) Here's an overview of the setting and gameplay:

Quote:
It is a typical day at work. Your working schedule is chaotic as always and it‘s time to focus on the task at hand. Start sorting files and do not fall asleep. If you require a jolt of caffeine or rush of sugar, there is a limited supply of coffee and a small stash of sweets to help complete your tasks and get finished!

You start Finished! with a shuffled deck of 48 cards and try to sort these cards by cycling through the draw stack during eight rounds. You may sort cards only in your "present" area, but helpful actions will let you manipulate your cards in many different ways. If you sort all cards starting from card 00:01 up to card 00:48, you win the game! If this is too easy for you, the game offers four difficulty levels.
I played Finished! once in prototype form and can provide a bit more detail, while noting that the design might have changed in the meantime. You're kind of reliving the same day over and over again, Groundhog Day-style, but to make it stop you must sort all the cards in the deck into their proper order. You're presented with a few cards at a time in your "'present' area", while other cards lie in the "past" and still others might lie in the "future". Some of the card actions allow you to manipulate time (as it were) to move cards into different zones, and you can rearrange the order of cards only in the present, if I remember correctly. You can draw additional cards and hide things, spending candy all the while and possibly getting more to keep you working on a sugar high and therefore able to do more things than you might otherwise.

Board Game: Fabled Fruit: The Lime Expansion
Board Game: Power Grid: Fabled Expansion
• The other two titles coming from 2F-Spiele (and its publishing partners such as Stronghold Games) are expansions. Fabled Fruit: The Lime Expansion adds twenty new locations to the game, along with gambling tokens and "the mysterious camouflage coat". How did this game not have limes in it already? And how I did I miss that omission in 2016?!

Power Grid: Fabled Expansion spreads Friese's Fable Game system to Power Grid and Power Grid deluxe, with players getting two presorted Fable Decks that allow them to play campaigns of three consecutive games on any of the base game maps. In each game, players reveal Fable Cards as their conditions are met, and these cards add new rules to the gameplay.

• Two other SPIEL '17 releases that have been recently revealed come from the European branch of Blue Orange, with one of them coming from the Danish design team of Asger Harding Granerud and Daniel Skjold Pedersen, with Panic Mansion seemingly pitting 2-4 players against a three-dimensional mansion stand-in. To explain:

Quote:
The mansion up the hill has always had a reputation…of being cursed. After dark, villagers keep seeing strange things moving behind the windows as the house seems to be "tilting" and "rocking". It is said that the only way to break the mansion's curse would be to gather in one specific room some of the ghoulish ghosts, wandering eyes, slithering snakes, crawling spiders, and other objects that have been inhabiting its dusty walls. Will you be the first to break the curse…and flee the mansion?

To win Panic Mansion, you must be the first to complete five challenges by gently tilting and shaking the box to place the correct objects into one room, following the information on the cards.
• The other Blue Orange title has been mentioned a few times in passing. Having won the 2017 Spiel des Jahres award with Kingdomino, for October 2017 designer Bruno Cathala will release Queendomino, which serves as both a standalone game and an expansion. Some details:

Quote:
Build up the most prestigious kingdom by claiming wheat fields, forests, lakes, grazing grounds, marshes, and mountains. Your knights will bring you riches in the form of coins — and if you make sure to expand the towns on your lands, you will make new buildings appear, giving you opportunities for new strategies. You may win the Queen's favors ... but always be aware of the dragon!

Queendomino is a game completely independent from Kingdomino, while offering a choice of more complex challenges. Two to four players can play Queendomino independently, but also in connection with Kingdomino, allowing for games with 7x7 grids for four players, or for up to six players if you stick to 5x5 grids.

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