Don New Duds in Mascarade, Develop Mobile Markets for Smartphones, and Join the Earthborn Rangers

Don New Duds in Mascarade, Develop Mobile Markets for Smartphones, and Join the Earthborn Rangers
• Belgian publisher Repos Production will release a new version of Bruno Faidutti's hidden role game Mascarade with new art by Diana Chen, a.k.a., Things by Diana. Here's the glorious cover:

From gallery of W Eric Martin

In a BGG post, Faidutti notes: "The characters are a mix of the basic game and the expansion, we tried to keep the best ones — but we didn't always agree on which ones were the best."

From gallery of W Eric Martin

• U.S. publisher Arcane Wonders has teased a new game from Ivan Lashin, designer of Smartphone Inc., with Mobile Markets being subtitled "A Smartphone Inc. Game".


• U.S. publisher Deep Water Games has a special licensed version of Marek Tupy's Floor Plan in the works, with a license that I think few people would ever have anticipated.


Like many other people, I first encountered the Winchester Mystery House in the pages of Alan Moore's Swamp Thing, specifically issue #45 in 1986 in which a fictionalized version of the mansion is used as the setting for a story about a haunted house populated by the ghosts of people killed by the "Cambridge Repeater". (You can find a summary of this issue here.) Seems like a perfect pairing between license and game design!

• In my August 7, 2021 round-up of adventure games for 1-4 players, a reader pointed out that I had overlooked Earthborne Rangers, the debut title from Earthborne Games, which was founded by Andrew Navaro, former head of studio at Fantasy Flight Games. The publisher's name leads with "Earth" for a specific reason, as explained in the "Commitment to Sustainability" on the game's Kickstarter project, which ends on August 17, 2021:
Quote:
Earthborne Games was founded on the principle that tabletop games can and should be manufactured sustainably. As such, every component in Earthborne Rangers (and in each add-on) is able to be sourced and manufactured sustainably. How that manifests itself will be determined by the manufacturers with whom we ultimately work, and the suppliers from whom they source their materials.

We are currently in discussions with manufacturers in the U.S., the U.K., and the E.U. Each of these manufacturers offer varying levels of sustainable production. Some are carbon-neutral or work with carbon-neutral suppliers, others focus primarily on eco-friendly materials, efficient energy use, and waste reduction.

Wherever Earthborne Rangers is produced, it will be with a manufacturing partner who shares our vision for sustainability, with an eye toward continual improvement.
As for the game — which is co-designed by Navaro, Andrew Fischer, Brooks Flugaur-Leavitt, Adam Sadler, and Brady Sadler, and which plays in 60-240 minutes — here's an overview of the setting and its approach to gameplay:
Quote:
Earthborne Rangers is a customizable, co-operative card game set in the wilderness of the far future. You take on the role of a Ranger, a protector of the mountain valley you call home: a vast wilderness transformed by monumental feats of science and technology devised to save the Earth from destruction long ago.

Board Game: Earthborne Rangers

You begin by building a deck that reflects your Ranger's interests, personal history, and personality. Then, as you explore the open world and your story takes shape, you augment your deck with improved equipment, refined skills, and the memories of your journey.

The story of Earthborne Rangers is presented as a branching narrative campaign consisting of a main storyline and a multitude of side stories. In it, you can choose to follow the critical path or to strike off on your own to discover the Valley's many engaging characters, mysterious ruins, and beings both familiar and strange.

Each game session represents one day in the Valley, and you'll pick up in the same location on the map where you rested the night before. Your goal is to either complete one of your available missions or to explore the open world. The session ends when you're either forced to rest (through either fatigue or injury), or you choose to rest for the night.

From gallery of W Eric Martin
This single card suggests a lot is going on in this design!

An individual game session is played in rounds, and those rounds consist of turns. On your turn, you perform one action: either play a card from your hand, or choose an action from a card on the table. Each action allows you to interact thematically and narratively with the world, and each time you take an action, the world comes to life around you. Predators stalk their prey, rain pours from the sky, rocks tumble down the mountain to block your path, and much more.

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