• When we met at NY Toy Fair, Renegade's Sara Erickson also showed off the final look for Shannon Kelly's press-your-luck dice game Lucidity: Six-Sided Nightmares. In the game, you draw a certain number of dice from the bag each round, return a couple, then roll to see whether you collect power from dreams, sleep, or suffer other effects. You can rest to end your turn or draw even more dice to continue, possibly losing your progress or even turning into a nightmare. If you collect 15 power first, you win — unless you've become a nightmare in which case you need to steal power from others to maintain dominance over them.
Erickson noted that the deluxe Kickstarter edition is on the boat, and that version needs to reach backers before the Renegade version hits retails stores, which she now expects to happen in April 2018.
• Renegade has announced a March 14, 2018 release date for the North American release of Emanuele Ornella's auction-based, set-collection card game Byzanz, which publishing partner Lautapelit.fi released in a new edition in late 2017.
• Renegade is also partnering with Hunters Books, publisher of the RPGs Outbreak: Undead (which has a second edition coming in late 2018) and the forthcoming Kids on Bikes, to co-publish these titles and expand their distribution network in North America.
• Finally — although of course not really since Renegade seems to announce something new every week or two — at NY Toy Fair 2018 I got a glimpse at Daniel Solis' Junk Orbit, which Erickson told me is due out in June 2018 with a $35 MSRP. Looks nice and puzzle-y, with you needing to anticipate who might be moving where and throwing out what, while also trying to scoot yourself around the planetary bodies in profitable ways. Here's an overview of the game, along with a mock-up of the game that we shoved onto a table at NY Toy Fair. Keeping in the spirit of the game, you gotta park that junk wherever you can to get what you need!
1. Launch junk — Choose any one junk tile in your cargo hold and move it away from your ship (clockwise or counter-clockwise, your choice) a number of spaces equal to its numeric value. If it reaches its destination city this way, you have made a remote delivery. Otherwise, it simply comes to rest after moving its full distance. It is also possible to hit an enemy ship with launched junk, causing that opponent to discard one junk tile from their cargo.
2. Move ship — Your ship must now move the same distance that your launched junk did, but in the opposite direction. When your ship reaches a transfer point between location boards, you may choose to switch orbits. If you do, your ship changes direction (from clockwise to counter-clockwise, or vice versa) as it enters the new orbit. If the space your ship lands on is the destination of any junk in your cargo, you have made a direct delivery.
3. Pick up junk — After moving your ship, pick up all junk tiles present in your current city, adding them to your cargo hold. Then, refill your current city with one new junk tile from the corresponding stack (e.g., if at a Mars city, refill from the Mars stack).
Each player has their own ship with a unique ship power that breaks the rules above in some way. The end of the game is triggered when a city cannot be refilled because its stack is empty. When this happens, every player gets one final turn, then players tally the values from all of their delivered junk tiles, and whoever has the highest total wins.