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2020 Teasers from NSV and AMIGO: Contact, The Game: Quick & Easy, Verflixxt!, and More

2020 Teasers from NSV and AMIGO: Contact, The Game: Quick & Easy, Verflixxt!, and More
Board Game: Contact: Signals from Outer Space
In years past, German publishers would wait until the start of the new year before sharing info about the titles they planned to demo at the Spielwarenmesse trade fair in Nürnberg, Germany. This approach makes sense given that they released new games in September or October and want to keep the spotlight on those titles through the holidays in December.

Except that German publishers aren't doing that for 2020. Just as publishers started teasing their SPIEL '19 releases in the first part of 2019, they're now teasing their 2020 releases in December. KOSMOS, for example, has already released cover images and short descriptions of titles due out from Q1 2020 all the way to December 2020.

• Now two more German publishers have teased upcoming releases, with Nürnberger-Spielkarten-Verlag (NSV) aiming to enhance its reputation as a publisher of co-operative games with three such titles on its schedule. The most intriguing is Steffen Benndorf's Contact, a game for 2-5 players that takes 20 minutes to play and that bears this short description:
Quote:
In the collaborative space adventure game Contact, you follow a signal while knowing neither exactly where it comes from, nor who sends it out. This signal wants to lead you to a certain planet, but instead of space coordinates, you receive only a strange sequence of flight instructions for your spaceship.

Can you identify the right target planet from this signal? And what will you find when you get there?
No details for now, but I've chatted with Benndorf briefly about this design, and it appears to fall into that camp of games like The Mind with limited communication between players that will excite some (e.g., me) and annoy others.

Board Game: The Game: Quick & Easy
Board Game: Robots
• NSV will also release The Game: Quick & Easy, another take on Benndorf's SdJ-nominated The Game, and Wir sind die Roboter from designer and NSV editor Reinhard Staupe, which bears this description:
Quote:
How far does Robbi roll in about four seconds? Well, that depends on how quickly he moves!

As a team in Wir sind die Roboter (We Are the Robots), you try to work together to develop a sense of time and speed. If you can do this, soon you'll know exactly where Robbi will stop.
At this point, I feel obliged to insert this song:


• AMIGO Spiel typically announces its early year line-up on January 2, but ahead of that reveal it's posted this teaser image:

From gallery of W Eric Martin

Glad to see Wolfgang Kramer and Michael Kiesling's Verflixxt! — a.k.a., That's Life! — returning to print. Not for me since I still have my copy from the mid-2000s, but I introduced the game to a few people in 2019, and they were bummed that the title wasn't available for purchase.

Board Game: That's Life!
Board Game: To Unlimited, and Beyond
For those not familiar with Verflixxt!, it's a roll-and-move game that uses that dog-eared design tool in an ingenious way. On a turn, you roll a die, then move one of your tokens (or a neutral token if another player's token shares that space). If you move your token and it was the only token on a tile, you collect that tile, shrinking the game path. Some tiles are worth positive points, others negative, and still others can change negatives to positives. Once all tokens have reached the endpoint — and gameplay accelerates since the path shrinks over the course of the game — everyone tallies their scores to see who wins.

• Chip It appears to be a licensed version of the hand-shedding game To Unlimited, and Beyond from designer Chikasuzu, but the description of that title in the BGG database is not ideal, so we'll have to wait for January 2, 2020 to learn more...

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