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."
• 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".
Again I'm over here just dropping things on our timeline late on a Friday night and then closing twitter ;) pic.twitter.com/8rfKUYoWTc
— 🐲Arcane Wonders🏛️Next @ Essen Spiel 22 (@ArcaneWonders) August 14, 2021
• 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.
Attending a masks-mandatory vaccine-mandatory media event for a new title, Floor Plan: Winchester Mystery House! Spooky challenges, second floor, and finally, rewards for being suspiciously bad at door placement! What is a mainstay of your nightmare house?https://t.co/MHizqtYeVa pic.twitter.com/acaBb4mzex
— What's Eric Playing? (@whatseplaying) August 14, 2021
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:
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.
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.
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.