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U.S. publisher Wyrd Miniatures is adding two self-contained tabletop games to its catalog, with Vagrantsong being a co-operative, boss battle game for 2-4 players from designers Matt Carter, Justin Gibbs, and Kyle Rowan. At the show, Rowan told me that he's a huge fan of Kingdom Death: Monster and Gloomhaven, so he decided that he wanted to do one of his own.
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In the game, you control one of six vagrants, each with their own abilities, on a haunted train, and you need to save the humanity of "Haints" while not losing yours along the way. Vagrants and Haints alternate turns, with you trying to acquire skills and collect junk cards. You can lose skills through Haint attacks, with Haints having varying effects. The game includes a book with 23 scenarios, and it's scheduled for retail release before the end of 2021.
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Skills must "fit" on your vagrant card by completing the square
The other tabletop game from Wyrd Miniatures is Bayou Bash, a racing game by Aaron Darland, Lindsey Rode, and Kyle Rowan in which 2-4 people compete not to complete a certain number of laps first, but to gain the most fans. The problem, however, is that when you gain fans, they are placed on the racetrack itself, thereby becoming obstacles for you to avoid in future laps and targets for your opponents to smush so that they claim the most (living) fans at game's end.
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—Picture Perfect - debuted at Gen Con 2021; due out on November 10, 2021
—Air, Land, and Sea: Critters at War - debuted at Gen Con 2021; due out in November 2021
—Onitama: Light and Shadow - due out in December 2021
—Mortum: Medieval Detective - debuted at SPIEL '21; due out in the U.S. in Q1 2022
—Air, Land & Sea: Spies, Lies & Supplies - due out in Q1 2022, with this being a standalone expansion for Air, Land & Sea
—A JNPR expansion for RWBY: Combat Ready - due out Q1 2022
—Mobile Markets: A Smartphone Game - debuted at SPIEL '21; due out in the U.S. in Q2 2022
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Let me give a brief rundown of Picture Perfect, a design by Anthony Nouveau that was first released by German publisher Corax Games. The game combines memory, deduction, and logic puzzles, with everyone trying to place various people — along with a dog and a plant! — around a table so that you meet the desired conditions of each subject as best as you can.
To set up play, you shuffle 42 condition cards, then place three cards in each of the fourteen envelopes, with each envelope corresponding to one of the fourteen photo subjects. These cards will say things like "I want to stand on the right", "I don't want the dog to be visible", "I want to stand directly behind the table", "I don't want to stand next to a man", "I want to stand next to [specific object]", and so on.
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Each player receives a few envelopes to start the game, and you can look the contents of one envelope for as long as you want, then put everything back before you open the next one. Over multiple rounds, you'll swap envelopes in various ways with players and the center of the table, with you manipulating stand-up figures behind your player screen to both meet the conditions that you're sure of and serve as a memory aid to allow you to piece together later information. This character wants to stand in the back row next to so-and-so, for example, but what does so-and-so want? Perhaps later you find this subject wants to be next to granddad and in one of four specific spaces at the table. Can you make that happen without disrupting how you've previously arranged subjects? Can you even remember exactly who wanted what?!
During the game, if you think you've matched someone's conditions really well, you can slip a modifier card in that subject's envelope, which will adjust everyone's points for that subject at game's end, so ideally you've kept that subject to yourself for most of the game so that no one else benefits.
Once the rounds are over, everyone locks in their subjects around the table, with you being able to place as many or as few characters as you wish. You then remove the player screens and reveal the contents of each envelope one by one, scoring points based on how well you met the conditions and losing points if you whiffed on all three — which is why you don't want to automatically place all subjects.
Here's how our boards looked in the end:
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Picture...perfect?
The items on the table were merely decorative as we didn't play with the auction variant, which uses tableware for currency.
We had a bum pair of rounds in which we first revealed the contents of the central envelopes, then we were invited to swap envelopes from our hand with the center — but since we had all just seen the central envelopes, no one wanted to swap since doing so would benefit only those players later in the turn order.
Still, the concept was fascinating, and I can imagine how you'd improve over time once you get a handle on all 42 condition cards because then you could deduce what you haven't seen and try to place subjects you haven't interacted with based on that information. After playing on the BGG library copy one night at Gen Con 2021, I bought a copy for myself the next day — and that copy has now sat untouched while I played other games for work. Hrm.
• Ares Games was thwarted by a lack of inventory at Gen Con 2021 due to shipping issues, with War of the Ring: Kings of Middle-earth, Last One Alive, and the revised edition of Last Friday now all due out by the end of 2021.
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• Thunderworks Games had a bit more in stock than Ares, along with a splashier layout thanks to an entire table being filled with Roll Player Adventures and Cartographers Heroes and its three map packs: Nebblis, Affril, and Undercity, with all of these items expected to be available at U.S. retail outlets in November 2021.
Roll Player Adventures: Nefras's Judgement and Cape May should also be available in the U.S. at the same time.
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The Lockup: Breakout expansion should be available in Q1 2022, with a Kickstarter project for the Isle of Cats-ish theme park-building game Tenpenny Parks from Nate Linhart due to launch in Q2 2022.
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