• Designer Richard Breese of R&D Games has announced that his SPIEL '18 release will be the card game Key Flow, co-designed with Sebastian Bleasdale and Ian Vincent, and it plays as follows:
Key Flow is a card-driven game based on many of the ideas contained in the award-winning game Keyflower. The game flows quickly over four game rounds (seasons), allowing players to develop their own unique village, with many ways to score points for their buildings, animals, keyples, resources and other items.
Key Flow is played over four seasons (rounds). Each season, players are dealt a number of cards. They then choose one of their cards and pass the remaining cards to the player on their left or right — depending on the season — until all the cards have been chosen. All scoring takes place at the end of winter. Points are scored from the village cards in various ways, through upgrading buildings, and from gathering gold. The player who scores the most points wins.
You are a thief, always on the lookout for the next target to hit. You decide to sneak into the Royal Palace, break in its treasure room, and look for the mythical treasures rumored to be hidden there. Among piles of gold, emeralds, and precious jewelry, you stumble upon a chest containing a mysterious hourglass. As soon as you touch it, you are filled with mystical energy and realize its true power: You are now able to see glimpses of your own future. By taking different courses of action, different paths unfold before you, allowing you to shape your future as you see fit. Unfortunately, everyone in the palace is now after you...
A Thief's Fortune is a card game for 1-4 players in which each player represents a different possible future of the same character. By visiting different locations, interacting with local characters and making sure that certain events you have seen actually happen, you try to find the path that will lead you as far away as possible from danger.
In more detail, players each have three area in front of them: past, present, and future. Over five rounds, players draft location, event, and character cards, adding them to their personal "future" area with resources on those cards. Players extract resources from those cards, and when they're empty, the cards move into the player's present, after which the player can activate the power on those cards to score the fortune points they need to win the game.
In Spring Rally, players control their toy car based on trick-taking mechanisms. The game lasts three rounds, and in each round, players play a card from their hand to advance their car on the track. If the player wins the trick, they move their car as much as the lowest number on the card played in the round. Other players wind up their spring, which can help to boost them along when they win a trick. As long as a player avoids winning a trick, they gain the chance to advance much more later — but too much winding makes your spring stop working!
The player who first circles the track two times wins the game.
• Let's close with another SPIEL '18 release to close the sandwich (as it were). In October 2018, Strawberry Studio will release a tiny game from Robin Lees and Steve Mackenzie titled Little Monster That Came For Lunch And Stayed For Tea. An overview of this game for 2-4 players:
On your turn, you either play or draw cards. If you play, you create combos that will move your monsters forward, pushing the opponents' critters backwards! You win the game as soon as both of your monsters reach the end of the table, so eat up!