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Now the Knizia/Grail connection continues with the announcement of a new version of Stephenson's Rocket, first released by Pegasus Spiele in 1999 and not reprinted since that time. (A spin-off title, The Great Chinese Railway Game, was announced in the late 2000s, but never published.) This new version, with art and graphic design by Ian O'Toole, is due out December 2017.
Stephenson's Rocket feels like Acquire meshed with an 18xx game. It's a luck-free, tile-laying-ish game set during the dawn of the rail age in England, with the rail baron players owning shares of seven railroad lines and trying to move them over the land to create and extend their rail networks, with share owners possibly being able to veto such moves at the cost of some of their shares.
Like other classic Knizia titles, you can take only two actions on a turn and you pretty much always want to take four or five to carry out your plans in full. The actions are to move a train, claim a goods token from a city, or place/move a station on the game board. Rail lines merge as the game progresses, and the game ends once all the tiles have been placed or shares in only one railroad remain available, then players score for first and second place in the categories of most shares in a railroad, most stations on a rail line, and most goods of each type.
In addition to the return of the original game, Grail Games notes that it "also plans to produce a previously un-released expansion map for Stephenson's Rocket that features the eastern United States". My thanks to Grail Games for including an apostrophe in the title of Stephenson's Rocket. Sometimes it's the little things that make us happy...
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Cover sketch by Ian O'Toole
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In Torres, which is Spanish for "towers", players collectively build castles and occupy them with their knights. On a turn, you have five action points available, and you use them to add a knight to the board, add a castle piece to the board, move a knight, draw an action, or gain a point. Each player receives a certain number of castle pieces to place over the multiple rounds of the game, and while you can reserve some for later play, most of the time you need to use them or lose them. You mostly score points for placing your knights in castles, with the knights scoring the surface area of the castle multiplied by the level on which they're standing. You want to go high, but a castle can't have more levels than the surface area it occupies — and castles can't merge during the game, so you often use castle pieces to hamper the building by others.
The game includes multiple variants for how to use the action cards, with these cards allowing you to make special moves, such as moving a knight diagonally or jumping up multiple levels instead of only one. You can shuffle all of the cards together, which randomizes who gets which actions; you can create individual decks so that everyone has access to the same cards, but not all at once; or you can let everyone start with all cards in hand to reduce all randomness from play.
New version by HUCH! & friends
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