New Game Round-up: Take a Train to Ride the Empyreals, and Fluxx Your Way Through School

New Game Round-up: Take a Train to Ride the Empyreals, and Fluxx Your Way Through School
Board Game: Empyreal: Spells & Steam
• Designer Trey Chambers and artist Nokomento worked together on Level 99 Games' Argent: the Consortium in 2015, and now the pair has a new game in the offing for release in 2018, a game that transports Argent's technomancy into an unexpected environment. Here's an overview Empyreal: Spells & Steam, a 2-5 player game that plays in 30-75 minutes and that will head to Kickstarter for funding in mid-2017:

Quote:
The industrial age has come at last to the World of Indines! Use your ingenuity and the skill of your team of technomancers to cross the continent of Indines while connecting towns and building a vibrant trade network. Research new spells as you carve a path through the many treacherous terrains of the continent, using your company's unique advantages to outbuild the competition and secure supply lines for rare resources.

In Empyreal: Spells & Steam, technomancers use mana to build rails, and the amount of mana crystals required to cast a spell varies by terrain and by the potency of the spell. Mana crystals must recharge after being used, so your choice of when and where to use each spell will be critical to determining the efficiency of your construction engine.

The towns you choose to connect to your network will provide critical resources, and the value of these resources changes over time. Some become more valuable as they become more connected, while others become less valuable as their abundance increases. Thus, you need to be wary of what your competitors are building into their trade networks and adapt your strategies accordingly to maximize the value of your stock portfolio.

Reaching new cities first gives you additional benefits, and being the first to bridge the continent provides you with a sizable commission from your backers. However, those who build first are more at the mercy of changing markets. Time your construction projects to maximize your profits and the flow of mana.
Board Game: Math Fluxx
Board Game: Chemistry Fluxx
Looney Labs has three new versions of Andy Looney's Fluxx coming in 2017, with Math Fluxx (due out March 9, 2017) challenging you to use whole numbers to achieve goals, while also including the Plan B Meta Rule that gives special victory conditions should you be able to use your numbers the right way. Chemistry Fluxx (due May 25) gives you elements and molecules that need to be combined into compounds to match the current goal, and it's hard to imagine a more natural fit for the Fluxx engine. (Drinking Fluxx, due July 24, is the third Fluxx title, and officially it's being released by Fully Baked Ideas, an imprint Looney Labs uses for adult-themed games.)

• Looney Labs has also announced one title for release in 2018: Andy Looney's Time Breaker. Here's an overview of the game's setting:

Quote:
In Time Breaker, you work for the security division of the Time Repair Agency. A Time Breaker has gotten loose, and you must apprehend them before they do any serious damage to the space-time continuum. Soon they will begin closing down the time doorways we need to use to pursue them. The agent who brings in this perp will get a promotion, and thus win. Quick everybody, into the time machine!
Looney released the time-traveling based Chrononauts in 2000, so it will be interesting to see what he does differently this time around. Maybe it will be exactly the same, which seems appropriate for a time-travel game. As the saying goes, everything old is new again...

• News that slipped by me while I was in Germany: Quined Games has signed a deal with Capstone Games in which Capstone will "distribute all new and future Quined Games products throughout North America". Quined titles to be released in North America in 2017 under this deal are Carson City: Big Box, American Rails, Vanuatu, Papa Paolo, and La Cosa Nostra. Exact release dates have not yet been announced.

• Japanese anime series Sword Art Online gets a game adaptation released by Kadokawa and Arclight on June 29, 2017, with the game design coming from Seiji Kanai. ソードアート・オンライン ボードゲーム: ソード・オブ・フェローズ , which translates as something like Sword Art Online Board Game: Sword of Fellows, is a 1-4 player cooperative game played with dice in which players must defeat monsters to survive. That description, meager as it is, sounds similar to Kanai's Eight Epics, but the game components include six character cards, ten scenario cards, eight item cards, one support card, four main dice, four support dice, six character dice, and a bunch of tokens, so perhaps the concept is similar but developed along different lines.

In any case, an international version of the game will also be produced and details of that will be forthcoming from the publisher when the time is right.


Board Game: Sword Art Online Board Game: Sword of Fellows

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