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New Game Round-up: Turtles and Tiles from ThinkFun & The Return of Prophecy and Lewis & Clark

New Game Round-up: Turtles and Tiles from ThinkFun & The Return of Prophecy and Lewis & Clark
Board Game: Robot Turtles
• U.S. publisher ThinkFun has picked up the self-published game Robot Turtles from designer Dan Shapiro and plans to release a revised version of the game in June 2014.

Robot Turtles is a game for kids as young as three that helps them learn programming by placing turtle movement cards in a row, then "executing" the moves so that their turtle moves toward (and ideally reaches) a goal. Shapiro raised more than $600,000 for the game on Kickstarter, producing 25,000 games when his original goal was one thousand. As it turns out, ThinkFun CEO and co-founder Bill Ritchie is brother to Dennis Ritchie, creator of the C programming language, and the former Ritchie thought publishing Robot Turtles would be a fitting tribute for his brother, who died in 2011. Ahead of the June 2014 release, ThinkFun is offering a "special edition expansion pack" for those who preorder the game.

Board Game: Robot Turtles

Board Game: Last Letter
Board Game: Zingo! Word Builder
Board Game: Zingo! Time-telling
• Another new release from ThinkFun for 2014 is Last Letter from designers Joe and Dave Herbert. As is true of all ThinkFun releases, whether puzzle or game, the rules are short and sweet: "Each player in Last Letter has a hand of illustrated cards, and you want to get rid of your cards as quickly as possible by playing them from your hand onto the table. To play a card, though, you must name something depicted on the card, with the first letter of that word matching the last letter of the thing previously named. Dump your hand first, and you win!"

• ThinkFun is also building on its Zingo! line of "games with a chunky tile-dispensing slider" with the 2014 release of Zingo! Word Builder — in which players race to use the tiles to complete three-letter words on their individual cards — and Zingo! Time-telling, with the two stacks of tiles being hour tiles and minute tiles, with players trying to grab the tiles and match the clocks shown on their boards.

Board Game: Prophecy
Board Game: Lewis & Clark: The Expedition
• Z-Man Games has announced that it's bringing back Vlaada Chvátil's Prophecy in Q2 2014 after many years of the game being out of print. What's more, the Prophecy: Water Realm expansion released in the Czech Republic in 2006 but never before available in English will also see print, although no release date has been announced for that item. First things first, after all — base game, then expansion...

• French publisher Ludonaute has posted details of the second edition of Cédrick Chaboussit's Lewis & Clark, noting that the three thousand copies of the first edition sold out almost immediately.

The second edition will consist of ten thousand copies, with games being localized into English, French, German, Spanish, Italian and Polish instead of having rules for all languages crammed into a single box. With the change to a square box, the game board has been shrunk slightly to fit; the card quality is supposedly improved from the first edition, and a bonus card will be released in issue #63 of French gaming magazine Plato. The games are already in transit and should be available in the U.S. and Europe in March 2014.

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