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From the fjords of the north to the rivers of the east come the longships of the Vikings — and as someone riding aboard those ships, you'll seek your fortune in the lands of Russia, trading under the watchful eye of the prince of Kiev or pillaging with the Golden Horde.
In Vikings on the Volga, players take turns sailing down rivers, trading goods, bribing officials, and looting cities. Careful planning pays off, but when things go wrong you can always go a-viking. On your turn, you either move your ship (to buy and sell goods at cities), or you move the horde (to burn cities), or you move the prince (to rebuild cities). The goal is to be the richest Viking, with the game ending when someone hits 30 rubles or five cities have been burned.
In Vikings on the Volga, players take turns sailing down rivers, trading goods, bribing officials, and looting cities. Careful planning pays off, but when things go wrong you can always go a-viking. On your turn, you either move your ship (to buy and sell goods at cities), or you move the horde (to burn cities), or you move the prince (to rebuild cities). The goal is to be the richest Viking, with the game ending when someone hits 30 rubles or five cities have been burned.
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I played Monsoon Market three times with Daniel at an UnPub event in May 2014 in Durham, North Carolina and am surprised to see how the game has evolved since we played it, although perhaps I shouldn't be as he's the consummate iterator. At the time the game had a fourth action — the forced trade — but in our three games that action was used only once, and I encouraged Daniel to dump it or revise it. The goods mix differs. The orders used to be split between special powers and set bonuses, but you could possibly get stiffed on sets depending on which orders came up, making them seem a mug's game at times. The orders were also worth varying point values, so you were trying to determine how 17 points for this combo of goods compares to 24 points for that combo, and the streamlining to more concrete point units feels like a plus as you're losing fussiness that was more distracting than anything else — not that I've played the final version yet, mind you.
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Solis (r), looking like a poser posing
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• Days of Wonder notes that its initial print run of Ticket to Ride: 10th Anniversary has already been sold through to retailers, meaning that none remain with publisher or distributor to fulfill reorders. That said, DoW has stated in a press release that "[w]e've already ordered a second print run and expect to have more games available by late August [2014]."
• U.S. publisher Tasty Minstrel Games has founded KOI Games to publish Japanese-language versions of its microgames — Coin Age, Burgoo, Templar Intrigue and This Town Ain't Big Enough for the 2-4 Of Us — with Arclight handling distribution of these boxed titles in Japan. As noted in a June 2014 Kickstarter update for This Town, "The microgames were identified as being ideally suited for the Japanese market, and a distributor was interested in creating a fully-boxed retail version for each microgame in Japanese." More enticingly for the future, "This also means that an expanded line of products adapted from Japanese games may be coming to TMG in the coming months."
• Finally, there's this teaser on Facebook from French publisher Funforge:
Zombie much?
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