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To start, IELLO will continue to add titles to its Mini Games line, with all of the games in the line being released (and numbered) in French while only some of them appear in English due to the licenses not being available. (The English-language games aren't numbered, and I'm not sure whether that's a blessing for OCD gamers who like organizing such things, but there you are.)
Mini Games title #7 is Masao Suganuma's Candy Chaser, a bluffing game originally published in Japan by Grounding in which players try to raise the value of candy that's being smuggled. Each player is smuggling only one type of candy, though, and once any candy reaches the top price on the market, everyone gets one chance to accuse a player of what they're smuggling — and if you're caught, you're out of the game. The player with the highest priced candy who is still in the game following the accusations wins. Candy Chaser is due out in both French and English by the end of January 2016.
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• Tout là-Haut, Mini Games #8, is a French-only version of David Short's Yardmaster Express. Short helped develop Yardmaster for Crash Games, then put his own spin on the mechanism within that game to create Yardmaster Express. While Crash published both titles with a noirish feel and a train-based setting to emphasize their relationship, IELLO has gone in the other direction.
"Even if there's a few similarities in the rules (matching values or colors to connect), both games are quite different," says IELLO's Matthieu Bonin, "so we quickly decided we wanted a different theme from Aramini Circus [IELLO's version of Yardmaster], to emphasize what's different rather than what's similar. We thought we could go vertical (with trees) rather than horizontal (like the trains in the original version)." Thus in Tout là-Haut players now draft cards one by one from a shared hand in an attempt to build the best and tallest treehouse in the neighborhood.
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• Kuraki Mura's Taiwan Snackbar is being reborn under two names as Mini Games #9: Wa-Chat-Bi in French (wasabi + chat/cat) and Tem-Purr-A in English, with both versions due out before the end of Q1 2016.
In the game, players are trying not to overeat by playing cards to a shared discard pile. If you can't play, then you must eat the cards before you by drawing the appropriate number of cards from the deck; if you draw a "No more!" card, you receive a negative point, then all played cards are set aside while the "No More!" cards remain in the smaller deck, thereby increasing the odds of someone drawing one in the future. When a player has three points, the game ends and whoever has the fewest points wins.
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"No more for me, thanks!"
• IELLO also plans to release a new version of Reiner Knizia's Schotten-Totten in its Mini Games line, with versions in French and English (but only for Europe with the latter item). Says Bonin, "We'll keep a similar theme, with probably a new name and new art by Djib (a.k.a. Jean-Baptiste Reynaud)." Bonin notes that IELLO plans to release 2-3 other Mini Games titles in 2016.
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As hinted at in that earlier post, IELLO has widened the range of animals you'll see on the farm, with cows, sheep, roosters, ducks and penguins(!) also needing to be fattened up for sale at the market.
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• Also due out in Q1 2016 is English is Tales & Games: The Pied Piper, the sixth Tales & Games title from Purple Brain Creations, with IELLO serving as co-publisher on the English edition. This is designer Agnès Largeaud's first release, and I know nothing about the game other than it contains small wooden rats. (The French version debuts at the end of February 2016 at the game festival in Cannes.)
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• Sea of Clouds is a card from Shinobi WAT-AAH! designer Théo Rivière, with Miguel Coimbra providing artwork.
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• Bunny Kingdom is a drafting game of some sort from Richard Garfield that's due out in May 2016.
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• Finally, to circle back to Spiel 2015, IELLO had a great set-up at the convention to reward buyers, specifically a huge book that represented The Big Book of Madness, which was being demoed at the show (and has a U.S. street date of Dec. 10, 2015). The book weighed fifteen pounds, I'd guess, and when someone purchased an item at the IELLO booth, the buyer could open the book to a random page to see what their reward would be: a discount on the purchase, free buttons, promo items for a game, artist prints, or a free game. Very thematic, and therefore something that you wouldn't find in any of the other hundreds of booths at Spiel!
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