New Game Round-up: Treasure Hunting in Germany, Invaders from White Goblin Games & a Release Update from Rio Grande Games

Earth is in mortal danger!

Invaders is a card-driven board game of warfare and horror featuring asymmetrical game-play for two players. In the game, the players take on the roles of commanding forces on opposite sides of the conflict.

One player leads the extraterrestrial conquerors whose goal is to transform the Earth and subjugate its inhabitants. The Invaders possess unthinkable weapons and unknowable technologies. More so, within their galactic armada the aliens hold bound a terrifying array of eldritch creatures engineered specifically to sow the chaos and destruction that heralds the arrival of their masters.

The other player commands the unyielding forces of a united Earth. In the shadow of a planet-wide scourge, the nations of the Earth have joined forces to confront the arrival of a doom spawned on the other side of the galaxy. The Terran alliance is a desperation-forged bulwark upon which the invading forces crash and are repelled time and again. Outgunned, with salvaged or untested technology and one foot in the grave, the determined network of military machinery, elite strike-teams, warfare scientists, and neighborhood militias are surprisingly capable of bloodying the Invaders' noses whenever the two forces meet.

The eponymous Invaders seek to destroy the forces defending the Earth and exhaust their reserves. They do this by defeating the defending forces at key locations while also causing the Earth player to disrupt cards from their deck to their discard pile. The Invader must be cunning when deploying their creatures and war-machines, or enacting their schemes, as the cost to bring assets into the war often involves the discarding of other assets.

Mankind must work desperately to defend critical resources and locations from the corruption and incursion of the alien threat. They do this by building formidable and deadly defenses, predicting where the alien player will strike and setting traps designed to deprive the Invaders of key units and wear-down their options. Like the Invader, the humans need to be clever in what they deploy and how they deploy it because their heroes may be bold but they are small in number, and the Invaders are inexorable.

Invaders is a science-fiction game piled thick with the trappings of war and horror. It is steeped in difficult decisions, but built upon a simple, elegant set of rules, and because of this, you will find each game telling a slightly different story each time you play. Both sides use cards to represent their units, plans, resources and events, but as this is an asymmetrical battle game, the way in which those cards are played and how they forward their owner's goals are very different. Regardless, knowing when to let an asset go in favor of a better one, how to exploit a weakness in your enemy's ranks, and where to press an advantage or feint a trap will be key in seeing your side emerge as the victor from the morass of galactic war.

One question remains: Which side are YOU on?

We are still working on Mogul, Roll for the Galaxy, Myrmes, and Race for the Galaxy: Alien Artifacts, and expect all these to hit stores this fall [a.k.a. Q4 2013]. We will finally have the El Caballero reprint in September, along with two new games: Renaissance Man and BOXCARS. (This is a reprint of Tom Erickson's game from 1974, which was later published as Rail Baron by Avalon Hill). Other games expected before the end of the year include Rattlebones, Quilt Show, and Stealing Time.

I told you about the quilt game Steve and I have been developing. It's a card game where you collect fabric cards in different colors and then use up the fabric in order to make quilt blocks of varying patterns and colors. Three times during the game you have to decide which quilts you want to enter in the quilt show. You combine quilt blocks in order to make the best quilts. And of course the best quilts win the best prizes.

We entered our game in the [2009] Rio Grande Games Design Contest. This was a national competition with 11 different cities hosting trials. The winner in each city then got the chance to pitch their game to the president of Rio Grande Games, the leading publisher of Euro-style games in the United States. Rio Grande guaranteed that at least one game would get published.

Well, we sent our game to Orlando, where it won the local event! And the weekend before Thanksgiving Steve and I drove to Chicago to attend the Chicago Toy and Game Fair. It was there we got to pitch our game to Rio Grande. What happened in Chicago?

We won. And if you didn't hear me, I'll yell a little louder. WE WON! Rio Grande Games is going to produce Judy Martin's Quilt Show. In truth, four different games won. One game was guaranteed to get published, but Jay Tummelson, the Rio Grande president, was so impressed with the entries that he took four of them.

When can you buy the game? Don't put it on your Christmas list for this year. There's a good chance you don't need to put it on your Christmas list for next year either. It might take as long as two years to bring the game to market. There are already a lot of things in the pipeline ahead of it and much work needs to be done to ready the game for publication. We'll keep you informed as developments occur.