Craft Golden Temples on Ravensburger's Red Peak Before Racing to Scotland Yard

• Let's dive into more coverage of the Spielwarenmesse toy fair that ended on February 3, 2019.

To point out another example of a trend I identified the other day — that being a move by publishers toward spinoff standalone games in place of expansions — Ravensburger has announced the late 2019 release of The Quest for El Dorado: The Golden Temples from Reiner Knizia.

While Knizia's The Quest for El Dorado is a deck-building racing game in which players try to be the first to reach the legendary golden city, The Golden Temples is a game that takes place inside the city, with players now hunting for other things. The Golden Temples can be played as a standalone game, or it can be combined with The Quest for El Dorado, with you playing roughly half of the first game along with roughly half of the second game, according to Ravensburger editor André Maack.

The Golden Temples is due out in the second half of 2019, with the game's U.S. debut being BGG.CON 2019 in November.

Board Game: The Quest for El Dorado: The Golden Temples

• Ravensburger also teased the 2019 release Minecraft Board Game, but had nothing on display beyond the most minimally detailed box related to Minecraft that you could possibly imagine. The publisher's description of the game is similarly minimal: "The video game phenomenon Minecraft comes to your table as a board game experience filled with epic adventures! More info coming soon."

The purpose of such previews? This thing will exist! Look forward to this thing!

Board Game: Minecraft: Builders & Biomes

Box shown at left on a huge booth banner

• Ravensburger plans to introduce the trivia game kNOW! into the U.S. market in 2019 following its debut in Germany in 2018. Here's an overview of the game:

Quote:

Thanks to the Google Assistant, the quiz game kNOW! asks questions that would never have been possible before in a tabletop game. The answers to many of the 1,500+ questions change daily and vary depending on where you play: "When will the sun rise tomorrow?", "How far is it from here to Honululu?", or "What time is it in Sydney now?" Google's free digital voice assistant has the answers to these and many other questions. Players might also be challenged by tongue twisters and other odd phrases. For additional variety, new questions and theme specials will be added "in the box" for free.

We demoed this game at Spielwarenmesse for a few rounds, and I exhibited my lack of familiarity with Google Assistant multiple times by stating questions and answers poorly. I don't use Siri or Alexa or other things like that, so I was at sea with this device. Games like this make me feel old.

• Somehow we overlooked Scotland Yard: Das Würfelspiel, a design by Inka and Markus Brand and Matthias Prinz, on our first two visits to the Ravensburger booth, but I spotted it and took a pic the third time through. Sheesh. Here's a summary of the gameplay:

Quote:

Mister X is back to make London unsafe once again! In Scotland Yard: Das Würfelspiel, you engage in the fast-paced chase for Mister X with the help of dice. Will you travel by taxi, underground, or bus? The dice are moody, so sometimes you get the ticket you need, but sometimes you don't. As in other Scotland Yard games, you need to work together to ensure that Mister X can't get away!

• On our third pass to the Ravensburger booth, we also caught more details for Carlo A. Rossi's Red Peak, which debuts in March 2019 in Europe and which will debut at Gen Con 2019 in the U.S.

The short take on this 2-6 player game is that it seems reminiscent of Cartagena — get the right stuff to advance along a path, although this path is built by the players during the game, with players taking risks that everyone will be able to cough up all the supplies that you might suspect they have — crossed with 2018's Fuji as all players need to escape from a lava-spewing volcano in order to win the game. Players move as a single party, though, so no one is at risk of being left behind. You'll live or die together, which might be a comfort for you.

You're also racing against the clock as you need to take actions within the limits of the sand timer. If you need to flip the timer and don't have any more time tiles remaining, then you're frozen in indecision and overcome by the sweet relief from uncertainty that a lava bath will provide. You can gain more time tiles during play, along with bonus cards and other goodies; these rewards are shown on the path tiles that you'll add to the map, with these map tiles also showing the components you'll need to enter that tile along with how far the lava will travel.

We recorded a video overview of Red Peak and a teaser for The Golden Temples while at Spielwarenmesse 2019, and those videos will be posted on the BoardGameGeek Express YouTube channel once they're processed. Since we're attending the FIJ fair in Cannes in late February to broadcast game demos on a livestream, we aim to get all the Spielwarenmesse 2019 footage published as soon as possible. Don't want to get backed up and have the lava overwhelm us...