Aside from new art from Javier González Cava and Ossi Hiekkala and colorblind-friendly playing pieces, this version of Tinners' Trail — which Alley Cat is bringing to Kickstarter in January 2021 ahead of (ideally) a Gen Con 2021 debut — has a number of other changes, which are summarized in this game description:
Once you have a mine in place, it's time to extract the ore and (ideally) make a profit, but the deeper your mine goes, the more expensive the process gets. To reduce the cost of mining, you can place developments, such as ports, train stations, and adits (drainage tunnels), but there's only so many improvements to go around. Once you have made your money — trying to time the market to sell when prices are high — you can invest it in industries outside of Cornwall, which gains you victory points. The earlier you invest, the better the return. Can you outplay the competition and make the most money, or will you be left without two shillings to rub together?
This edition of Tinners' Trail differs from the original 2008 version in several ways. The player count, for example, is now 1-5 instead of 3-4, and the resources on the board are now set up via tiles instead of die rolls to maintain variability while reducing the randomness. Dual-use cards are now an important part of the game, giving you information before an auction or an extra boost after an auction. The game includes two expansions, with the arsenic expansion introducing a new resource and the emigration expansion seeing miners travel overseas.
Here's an overview of the game, which will hit Kickstarter in February 2021 ahead of a planned Q2/Q3 2021 retail release:
In this game, your team of workers is represented by dice, and by placing them on the game board you contribute towards rebuilding the different parts of the Eternal Palace. Each location is reached based on dice rolls, but if others have gone to an otherwise inaccessible location, you may visit it too by paying fish, one of the resources in the game. Complete tasks first — or contribute more than your competitors to these monuments — to earn tokens reflecting your overall effort. Recruit new workers to your team, and use the painting pieces you receive as each location is unlocked to "paint" a record of your work, layer by layer.
Who will contribute the most to the reconstruction and gain the favor of the Emperor? Find out in this tense and highly interactive Eurogame!
The dice in the game represent the customers, with hex tiles representing the rides in your park. Employing a unique "dice-cascade" mechanism once a customer has enjoyed a ride, their die value is reduced, but they can still continue to enjoy more rides in the theme park until their value drops to 0, at which point they exit the park. This means the more efficiently you can move your dice around to activate the most rewarding rides, the more points and money you receive!
Dice Theme Park also features a card-based turn initiative mechanism. You start with a hand of special action role cards numbered 1-6 and select two cards each turn. Whoever puts out the lowest total gains first choice of the customer dice draft and ride tiles that round, but at the end of the round, your cards will be passed to the player on your left.
• Alley Cat Games has several other titles scheduled for release in 2021, with these going the old-fashioned "straight to retail" route. These titles include:
—Paper Dungeons: A Dungeon Scrawler Game, a roll-and-write dungeon-crawling game from Brazilian publisher MeepleBR that is due out in Q3 2021 and that I happened to covered in more detail in mid-November 2020.
—Catstronauts, a sequel of sorts to ACG's 2020 release Kittin, with players trying to slam their cat tokens on planets in a specific sequence.
—Dice Commander, which Al-Jassar describes as "a casual/gateway, frantic real-time dice placement game kind of like Escape meets X-Wing.
—Milkshake, a real-time Yahtzee-style game of milkshake crafting in which your score is based on how many boys you bring to the yard. (I made up that last bit, but I want it to be true.)