Rosenberg Heads North, Riverboat Heads South, and Lookout Games Heads to SPIEL '17

Rosenberg Heads North, Riverboat Heads South, and Lookout Games Heads to SPIEL '17
Board Game: Nusfjord
• Rumors of an Uwe Rosenberg game set in Norway have been around for a couple of years, and now Lookout Spiele has officially announced Nusfjord as a SPIEL '17 release in October, with Mayfair Games releasing the game in English at about the same time, according to Lookout (which is owned by Mayfair). Here's a rundown of the game's setting and how it works:

Quote:
Nusfjord is a tranquil fishing village in the Lofoten archipelago in northern Norway. Fifty years ago, business was blooming when the codfish would come for spawning. Today, Nusfjord is more of a museum than a village, with less than a hundred people living there. Imagine how beautiful this place must be given that you must pay a fee to even look at the houses. Cruise ships used to pass by this long and now mostly abandoned island world.

In the time period in which the game Nusfjord is set, things looked quite different. Sailing ships dominate the fjord. The rocks around Nusfjord are covered in trees. As the owner of a major fishing company in Nusfjord on the Lofoten archipelago, your goal is to develop the harbor and the surrounding landscape, and to succeed you must enlarge your fleet, clear the forest, erect new buildings, and satisfy the local elders. Others do this as well, of course, so the competition is steep.

As with Agricola and Ora et Labora, Nusfjord has a worker placement mechanism, with each player starting with three workers that they place on a central board to trigger certain actions. Whether a player wants to clear a forest on their own board, buy a new cutter, or construct a building, they must place a worker on the appropriate space — which is possible only if room is available for this worker. Money is scarce, and one of the quicker and easier ways to get it is to place shares of your own company on the market. This risky action could be worthwhile because if you succeed in buying these shares yourself, you have usually won money and not suffered any disadvantages; however, if an opponent acquires these shares, then you must allow them to benefit from your hard-earned catches at sea. The village elders might want their own share of your catch as well, especially if you've visited them to take certain actions in the village, so if you don't take care, your catch could end up entirely in the hands of others and your camp will be empty.
Board Game: Oh My Goods!: Escape to Canyon Brook
Board Game: Agricola: Artifex Deck
Board Game: Isle of Trains
Board Game: Isle of Skye: Journeyman
Board Game: Riverboat


Nusfjord is just one of many new titles that Lookout will release at SPIEL '17. Alexander Pfister's Oh My Goods!: Escape to Canyon Brook is the second expansion for Oh My Goods! and it continues the storyline started in the first expansion, Longsdale in Revolt.

• The Agricola: Artifex Deck contains 120 cards for the revised edition of Agricola that debuted in 2016, with half the cards being occupations and half minor improvements. As for the deluxe, all-in-one-box anniversary edition of Agricola that has been mentioned in passing, Lookout's Hanno Girke [article=26749606]says[/article] that item is still in the works, but:

Quote:
We absolutely underestimated the timeframe that Mr. Klemens Franz needs to create the amount of new artwork for all the new cards.

Agricola always has been and will remain a modular system. Depending on the players' needs they can add between nothing and everything.

The current specs for the Deluxe Revised edition list several 168 card decks plus major expansions like [Farmers of the Moor], plus several goodies that were available only as a promo or only in German so far.

Some of the decks probably will be released in upcoming years.

Plus some kind of sorting trays, deck holders and whatever we'll come up with. Be assured that we're reading all the BGG threads on the deluxe edition, and we might have a first mock-up to showcase at SPIEL 17.

No promises. We won't rush the project, and we won't rush Klemens.
• Another small box item coming from Lookout is Bummelbahn, a German edition of Seth Jaffee and Dan Keltner's Isle of Trains, which first appeared in 2014 from Dice Hate Me Games.

Isle of Skye: Journeyman expands the 2016 Kennerspiel des Jahres winner from Andreas Pelikan and Alexander Pfister with new player boards that track "your progress in terms of strength, prosperity and popularity", with new scoring tiles that reflect these traits and a journeyman pawn that travels the islands to activate tiles.

• Finally, Lookout will have a larger game from Michael Kiesling titled Riverboat that plays in about 90 minutes for 2-4 players. This description is rather high-level, but it gives you some idea of what's going on in the game:

Quote:
Riverboat posits each player as the owner of a 19th century farm on the bank of the Mississippi River. You need to organize your workers to ensure that the fields are ordered according to their type and harvested when ready so that the goods can be shipped to New Orleans.

In more detail, the game lasts four rounds, and at the start of each round players draft phase cards until they're all distributed. The phases then take place in numerical order, with the player who chose a phase being the first one to act. In the first phase, players place their workers in the fields, with each player having the same distribution of colored field tiles, but a different random placement for each player. In phase two, players organize their crops, trying to group like types together, with some fields requiring two or three workers. In phase three, players harvest crops and load riverboats, with a dock needing to be filled with all the goods of a single type before it can be loaded. In phase four, the boats are launched and players can take special actions, with additional victory points possibly coming in phase five.
From gallery of W Eric Martin

Riverboat being demoed at Gen Con 50: two player boards and two central boards

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