New Game Round-up: Steal Goods Repeatedly, Answer Questions Quickly, and Throw Coins from a Tortoise Shell

• In a mid-December 2019 newsletter, Michael Mindes of Tasty Minstrel Games noted that the company is changing course in 2020: "TMG will publish fewer new titles. This is both fewer TMG originals and co-publishing with others. For new TMG titles, a larger percentage of these after 2020 will have been heavily handled/influenced by either myself or Seth Jaffee. For co-publishing projects, we will stick with our very well established relationships."

A few other publishers have made similar changes to their release schedules, such as AEG's vow in April 2019 to publish fewer games. German publisher NSV debuted five items at the start of 2019, and now it's teasing three titles for early 2020. Thanks to the constant flow of new games, retailers are quick to clear out games that are only a few months old unless those titles are turning over constantly, which leaves publishers stuck with inventory that distributors won't take. You can adapt to this trend by publishing smaller quantities of ever more games, being content to let them die off after a month of two, or you can publish fewer games and try to generate more attention for them so that their shelf life doesn't expire as quickly.

TMG is taking the latter route, with Chrono Corsairs from John Brieger and Vincent Hirtzel originally bearing an October 2019 release date in the BGG database, but with the game now scheduled for a March 2020 debut. Here's an overview of this 2-5 player game:

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On the cursed shores of Ouroboros Island...

Okay, let me stop the description right here to congratulate the designers and publisher on this name as this math nerd is already intrigued by just that. Anyway, proceed:

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On the cursed shores of Ouroboros Island, a fearsome time storm has wrecked several pirate ships in a desolate harbor. What's worse, you're cursed to live the same day over and over again until the time storm subsides!

At the start of each loop in Chrono Corsairs, players simultaneously select plans to place into their timeline. Then, you follow those plans to move your crew around the island. Events happen at the same time in the same place every loop, so as you explore the island, you'll unlock its secrets and learn to avoid its many dangers.

At the end of each loop, all the pieces on the board reset as you collect treasure. Doubloons must be spent to upgrade your crew, while time gems can be kept from loop to loop. As the time storm's intensity increases over the course of the game, it unlocks new scoring opportunities and produces strange anomalies. When the time storm breaks, the game ends and the pirate with the most treasure wins.

Demo game at BGG.CON 2019

• At SPIEL '19, Mindes told me that one of the future TMG projects would be a North American release of Yin Yang, a game from designer DuGuWei and Taiwanese publisher BGNations that was being sold in Essen. Says Mindes, "We have two hundred copies that will be coming from Taiwan relatively soon." Here's an overview of the game:

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Yin and yang is a concept of dualism in ancient Chinese philosophy, representing two opposite principles. Yin is the feminine while Yang is masculine, and this concept is embodied in all things around the world, such as winter and summer, male and female, and light and dark.

Yin Yang takes players back to ancient China during the Warring State period before the common era. At the time, China was divided into seven kingdoms, fighting each other constantly, and people were living in suffering. To pursue inner peace, every kind of fortune-telling method was then developed.

One of those fortune-telling methods involves taking a tortoise shell with copper coins inside, then shaking it to have indications based on which coins emerge and how they fall. This method is exactly what Yin Yang is based on. Players act as Taoist priests, traveling on an ancient Chinese map to retrieve the local specialty of different cities to unlock their own destiny. Additionally, players can also build temples in different cities to earn worship from seven kingdoms.

• In an end-of-the-year wrap-up post on Facebook, Le Scorpion Masqué's Christian Lemay presents an overview of the year (gross sales in 2019 of CA$2,500,000 compared to CA$1,525,000 in 2018, with the 7,000-copy first print run of Stay Cool selling out in two months) while teasing the titles coming from the company in 2020.

Lemay's post is a good reminder that no matter how busy traffic is on BGG, activity on this site represents only a tiny portion of activity within the game industry as a whole. To put this in more concrete terms, BGG lists only eleven owners of Olivier Cipière's L'Agent Jean!: Le Jeu — a trick-taking game based on the Canadian comic book series L'Agent Jean! from author and illustrator Alex A. — whereas Lemay says, "In six months, we have placed 20,000 games in stores in Quebec alone." He adds that this amount would be almost impossible to reach without the comic connection: "Today, I see, with joy and fright, the power of a good license."

Why fright? Because a success can turn potential players against you or lead you to take risks that might harm your business in the long run. After selling those thousands of copies of Stay Cool, Le Scorpion Masqué was out of stock for 2-3 months until the second printing of 10,000 copies arrived. Who moved on in the meantime? Who gave up on the company out of frustration?

Even so, conservative production numbers seem like a wise approach for long-term survival. Lemay says that while the company sold 40,000 copies of Zombie Kidz Evolution in France alone in the first year, "we can also have difficulty selling 7,000-8,000 units of other titles... If we print 12,000 copies of a game because we anticipate a great success (an amount that would have been insufficient for Zombie Kidz Evolution anyway), we could end up with several thousands of unsold products!"

As for what's coming in 2020, the English-language edition of Stay Cool will be distributed by IELLO in early 2020. In the game, you're challenged to answer questions from the player on your left while spelling out answers on letter dice to the questions being asked by the player on your right. The more questions you can answer, the more you'll score! In later rounds, you also have to monitor the sand timer in order to play out the full two-minute round; if you forget to tell someone to flip it and the sand runs out, your answering time is over.

Joan Dufour's Flash 8 is akin to the "sliding 15" puzzle of old, with players trying to slide electrons to the right positions in their grid to claim target cards first; this title will also be distributed in the U.S. by IELLO in 2020 after having been released in Canada and France in 2019.

Three titles will debut in French from Le Scorpion Masqué: Master Word (no details yet), Zombie Teenz Évolution (which is a provisional title for now, yet clear all the same), and Mia London et l'affaire des 625 fripouilles (Mia London and the Case of the 625 Scoundrels, which sounds delightful already).