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• Martin Kallenborn and Jochen Scherer's Race to the New Found Land is Hans im Glück's big title for the first half of 2018, and Jasmin was kind enough to present a runthrough of the game when I surprised her with an interview request on the HiG stand. I can't repeat enough times how thankful I am for those who overcome their discomfort to present a game on camera in a non-native language. I couldn't do more than mime a game explanation if forbidden to use English, so I greatly appreciate their efforts on all the videos that we recorded in Nürnberg.
• Alles an Bord?! from Carlo A. Rossi and ABACUSSPIELE might be viewed as Galaxy Trucker-lite as players need to load equipment and goods into their ships to manage the pirates they might encounter, the trading possibilities that await, the discoveries they might make, and (most importantly) the contracts they might be able to fulfill. Whoever makes the most money after two rounds wins.
• Drop It from Bernhard Lach, Uwe Rapp, and KOSMOS superficially resembles Kris Burm's Batik, but the games play out very differently once you get beyond the common idea of dropping places in a vertical plastic playing area. Maybe we'll see a third such design in twenty more years...
• Along the same lines as the item above, Daniel Fehr's Woodlands from Ravensburger might have you thinking of Escoffier and Franck's Loony Quest because each player has their own playing space upon which you'll overlay a plastic sheet at the end of the round, but in this game you're trying to lay down tiles that will let you walk through the woods, collect mushrooms, avoid wolves, and much more, with multiple difficulty levels.
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One interesting element of this redesign is that the plastic arena in the box is roughly half the size of the original arena, and as a consequence players have fewer dice as well, which can make the whole experience faster. The reason why Ravensburger did this is that the box size it used for Strike in 2012 is no longer part of its line-up, so the arena had to be redesigned for one of its current box sizes. The original game still exists, of course, for those who want to track it down, but now players will have choices should they want a smaller version, with rules that can be incorporated into the earlier game.
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