Game Previews from the 2018 GAMA Trade Show: Shards of Infinity, Kung Fu Zoo, Kontour, Stumblewood, and Bohemian Villages

We have twelve game overview videos in our 2018 GAMA Trade Show playlist right now, with about ninety more still to be published...and a few dozen videos from FIJ 2018 in Cannes...and a handful of videos from Spielwarenmesse 2018. Most of the titles from those latter two shows lack listings in the BGG database, which is why I've been slow to push them out, whereas we saw plenty of games during GAMA that are already on the market or nearly there, so let's look at a few of those.

• Shards of Infinity, a deck-building game from Justin Gary, Gary Arant, and Stone Blade Entertainment, is similar to Gary's long-running Ascension game series in that players acquire cards from a shared market that's refilled immediately as when plates of sushi are pulled from a conveyor belt, but instead of trying to optimize a point-building engine, you are attempting to boost your mastery to strengthen the power of cards you already own and those you newly acquire so that you can smash opponents in the face and eliminate them from the game.

Shards of Infinity was available at U.S. retailers as of April 2, 2018.

• We first saw Charlie Price's Kung Fu Zoo at the 2016 Origins Game Fair — preview video — when he had only his self-produced wooden board and his dreams of seeing the game produced and Charles Dickens following him around to record the details of his life.

Now WizKids has picked up the design and released a mass-market (i.e., not wood) version of the game in late March 2018 that keeps the adorable animal dice that feature the head on one face, the paws on another, and the other critter sides on faces that all make sense. Your goal is still the same: Knock other animals off the board or onto their backs so that you score points and they don't!

• Ignacio Sánchez Usera's Kontour is a quick-drawing game in which you have only thirty seconds to decide what to draw, draw it, and have someone guess it — all while using at most fifteen lines. I like the added pressure of you not being able to choose what you're going to draw until the time starts; you can waste time if you're indecisive, so the game design spurs you to take action, probably drawing a bit more frantically than you normally would, too, to get the job done in time.

Gigamic released Kontour in France in late March 2018 and should be available in the U.S. by mid-2018.

• Charles Bossart and Sébastien Darras' Stumblewood is another Gigamic title that's already hit the market in France — under the name Mad Trip — with a due date in the U.S. of mid-2018. In this game, each player is confronted with a forest, and you need to figure out where the path is and what you need to avoid while traveling down it. Do you need to call out? Throw a bone to keep the wolf at bay? Make a mistake as you move down the path, and you start over again, so map that path in your mind and stick to it!

• Tasty Minstrel Games has three games that will be available at U.S. retailers on April 11, 2018: the original title Pioneer Days from Chris Marling and Matthew Dunstan (with a designer diary coming on BGG News on that day), and new editions of two titles first released in Germany by dlp games. Jeffrey D. Allers' Citrus is finally hitting the U.S. after first appearing in 2013, and Bohemian Villages is an Englsh-language version of a game from dlp's own Reiner Stockhausen that debuted in 2016.

In this latter game, which is demoed in the video below, players want to use their dice to claim buildings on the tiles laid out at the start of the game. You'll score points as you collect goblets or grain, as you occupy different buildings, as you spread out on multiple farms, and as you dominate particular parts of town. Daniel Hadlock from TMG gave us a full overview at the 2018 GAMA Trade show:

Game Previews from the 2018 GAMA Trade Show: Shards of Infinity, Kung Fu Zoo, Kontour, Stumblewood, and Bohemian Villages

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