Game Previews from the 2018 GAMA Trade Show: Space Base, Funky Chicken, Monster Match, The Networks: Telly Time, and Button Men: Beat People Up

• Button Men: Beat People Up is a new version of the nearly twenty-year-old Button Men from James Ernest and Cheapass Games. This new version, which was released in February 2018, features gameplay similar to the original, with players each taking one character that is represented by a set of five dice. You use these dice to capture opposing dice, with each die captured being worth as many points as the number of faces on it. Thus, d20s are good because they average higher numbers, which means that you can capture more easily with them, but they're bad because they're worth 20 points for the enemy if captured.

At the 2018 GAMA Trade Show, Ernest beat me up to show me how the game works:

• Designer John D. Clair and publisher Alderac Entertainment Group have been frequent partners since the debut of Mystic Vale in 2016, and their newest release together — scheduled to debut at U.S. stores on April 18 25, 2018 — is Space Base, a dice-based tableau-building game that seems like a crossbreed of Machi Koro, Dice City, and every roll-and-write game in existence.

• The Networks: Telly Time is an expansion for Gil Hova's The Networks from his own Formal Ferret Games that will debut at the UK Games Expo in June 2018, and the 45 new shows included in this tuckbox expansion are based on UK titles. Coincidence?! No, not at all.

• Following the widespread success of Happy Salmon after its debut in 2016, North Star Games has launched a "Happy Planet Games" line in 2018, with all of the titles designed to make you happy. Your initial response to that statement might be, to borrow a clip from The LEGO Movie:

But NSG's Nick Bentley has written in detail about why Happy Salmon is the success that it is, and now North Star is trying to release other games in a similar vein.

Monster Match — due out May 1, 2018 — is another title from Happy Salmon designers Ken Gruhl and Quentin Weir, with 2-6 players trying to jab a monster on display each round that has the right number of eyes, arms or legs, with that number and those body parts being determined by a die roll. Jab the right monster, and you collect it. If you can't find a match, jab the "Zilch" token instead to collect a monster at random and add ten more to the playing area for you to keep an eye on. Jabby jabby!

• Speaking of Happy Salmon, Funky Chicken (co-designed with Satish Pillalamarri) is another take on that design. Each player has a deck of twelve cards, with three copies each of four cards that show different dance moves. You shuffle your deck, then reveal your top card; if you find someone else with the same card, you both perform the move, then discard those cards. Race to empty your hand first to win!

The colors on the Funky Chicken cards match those in the original Happy Salmon game, so you can combine the two for a mega-game that will take three minutes tops.

Game Previews from the 2018 GAMA Trade Show: Space Base, Funky Chicken, Monster Match, The Networks: Telly Time, and Button Men: Beat People Up

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