• The drive for buzz at the Spiel game convention in Essen, Germany seems to start earlier each year, and in 2014 LudiCreations is leaving nothing to chance, starting with a press release in late March but also embedding Essen into the game in question. Here's an overview of Harry-Pekka Kuusela's ESSEN, due for release — oh, do I even have to say it?
ESSEN is a game for 1-4 players, and by combining two copies of the game up to eight players can compete at the same time.
• Despite all the attention being on Tokaido of late, French publisher Funforge has other titles in its catalog, too, and Passport Game Studios — which already distributes Funforge's Tokaido and Quantum — plans to make Philippe Nouhra's Illusio and James Ernest's The Big Idea available on the U.S. market in the near future.
• Passport Game Studios also has exclusive North American distribution rights for the revised edition of Exodus: Proxima Centauri from designers Agnieszka Kopera and Andrei Novac and NSKN Games, and that game was made available in the area in question on March 21, 2014.
• In your now-seemingly-regular dose of Munchkin news, Steve Jackson Games has announced that a number of out-of-print games and expansions — Munchkin Quest, Munchkin Fu, Munchkin Fu 2: Monky Business, Munchkin Impossible, and Munchkin Booty 2: Jump The Shark — will be available once again in Q3 2014.
• I recently posted a teaser trailer for Privateer Press' Level 7 [Invasion], but I hadn't realized that the publisher also had a teaser for its April 2014 release Zombies Keep Out, a co-operative design by David Carl that merges Privateer's love of goblins with the ever-present zombies from ever-so-many other games.
As you might expect from the publisher of Infernal Contraption and Heap, in Zombies Keep Out players need to use bits of scrap machinery to create devices that will keep the zombies at bay.