• Polish publisher Lucky Duck Games has grown tremendously since it started business in 2016, and it featured a number of upcoming releases, including Sherlock: Case Connection from Radosław Ignatów, with this due to hit U.S. retailers in June 2022. Here's a quick take on the game:
Given Lucky Duck's success with the Chronicles of Crime series, it's no surprise to see the publisher releasing more deduction-based games, such as the pocket-sized Crime Zoom series (licensed from French publisher Aurora) in late 2021 and the upcoming Pocket Detective: Series 1, which is licensed from co-publishers Jet Games Studio and Lavka Games and due out in July 2022. Presumably this design from Yury Yamshchikov is an edition of 2019's Pocket Detective, but we'll have to wait to know for sure.
Lucky Duck Games is the co-publisher for Manny Vega's Flamecraft, for which Cardboard Alchemy ran a US$2 million Kickstarter campaign in Q3 2021, and the publisher expects that title to hit retail in September 2022.
Speaking of Kickstarter, on April 12, 2022, Lucky Duck and publishing partner Van Ryder Games will launch a crowdfunding campaign for Evan Derrick's The Dark Quarter, a 1-4 player game that plays in 2-3 hours and bears this description:
In The Dark Quarter, a co-operative app-driven adventure game set in a dark, fantastical vision of 1980s New Orleans, players each take control of a Beaumont agent and work alongside one another to solve the worst crimes that New Orleans has to offer. It's a world full of magic, where hexing curses are sold on every street, where voodoo priestesses and creatures of the night are lurking around every corner, and where even the most mundane crimes have a tinge of the supernatural to them.
Through multi-scenario campaigns, the game tells a rich, dynamic story and invites players to make critical decisions that will not only affect their characters, but change the direction and course of the story. The characters are not simply avatars, easily replaceable from scenario to scenario; instead, they are woven into the very fabric of the story itself. Their destiny and the destiny of New Orleans are inextricably linked together.
These expansions — London & Paris, Mechs & Monorails, and Moonbases & Mars, with the former being designed by Dale Yu — are currently in the BGG database as separate items, but Bézier is marketing them as Maglev Maps: Expansion Volume 1 in a Kickstarter project that will ideally hit the retail market in Q2 2023.
Bézier showed off two other upcoming releases as well, with one of them being the co-operative card game Sync or Swim from Lucas and Divya Hedgren. This title was funded on Kickstarter in February 2022 and expected out in September 2022.
I've already talked about the second edition of Muneyuki Yokouchi's engrossing trick-taking game Cat in the Box, and you can find a description of this game in that earlier post, but I took another pic of the game at GAMA Expo 2022, so here it is, with cat eyes just peeking over the edge of the box.
• Anoba Interactives is a new publisher that has yet to register its games in the BGG database despite my encouragement at the show, but I can share info on their two current projects and ideally add links later.
In Boiling Point, a game for 2-6 players, you play as crustaceous spirits that have come back to rescue your descendants and carry out sweet revenge on some unsuspecting chefs. You take control of crabs, lobsters, and shrimp, powering them to climb, fight, and escape the pot, fueled by the tears of their enemies!
Yes, "chef tears" are actual components in the game, with Anoba Interactives' website listing 75 of them as being included. You can only imagine what the Kickstarter stretch goals might be for this title...
The other title, Mate Munchers, features insects that kill or dismember their mate after copulation — although as Wikipedia informs me: "For primitive insects, the male deposits spermatozoa on the substrate, sometimes stored within a special structure; courtship involves inducing the female to take up the sperm package into her genital opening, but there is no actual copulation." Okay, the game description needs some work, but I'll let Anoba worry about that.