Lucca Comics & Games 2017 III: New and Nearly-New Games at the Show

When I first looked around the games pavilion at the 2017 Lucca Comics & Games festival, I had flashbacks of the just finished SPIEL '17 event, the massive convention in Essen, Germany that had ended only three days before Lucca opened. Many of the new games from that earlier show were on the demo tables once again, but this time in Italian, such the Cranio Creations' title A Tale of Pirates (which I had meant to preview ahead of SPIEL '17, but didn't as I ran out of time — still embarrassed about that...):

Cranio Creations also had the Italian edition of Gaia Project on hand, even though Lucca seems more oriented toward a family audience and casual play than SPIEL, which is itself very family-oriented, albeit with a rich vein of geeks running through that mainstream crowd.

As with designer Eric M. Lang, who I had highlighted in my first report from Lucca, Photosynthesis designer Hjalmar Hach had traveled from SPIEL '17 to Italy, with the main difference between the two being that Hach is from Italy, so he had a home-turf advantage when it came to signing copies and talking with game fans.

Dungeon Digger from Tin Hat Games was a title that I had added to the SPIEL '17 Preview, then forgotten. I had thought the game was brand new at Lucca until I started looking into it. Perhaps I have reached the limit of what my brain can hold.

HABA had its standard child-friendly set-up, with more Rhino Hero: Super Battle ready for action.

While Placentia Games had sold out of Danilo Sabia's Wendake for its debut at SPIEL '17, more copies were in reserve to ensure that the game could debut at Lucca as well. Plenty of publishers operate this way, and it's understandable why they do. You want to make a splash at each show, creating fresh buzz for a game in each territory it's available, with a limited number of copies getting into the hands of buyers now in order to (ideally) drive retail sales down the line.

Along that line of thinking, copies of Ares Games' Hunt for the Ring were in short supply, while...

...the new Hamilcar game hadn't quite made it to the finish line in time for Lucca after showing up at SPIEL in multiple non-Italian languages.

While not new at SPIEL '17, Balance Duels is a SPIEL regular, with designer/publisher Bum van Willigen (in the yellow shirt) having appeared at that show year after year since he debuted the game at SPIEL in 2005. Apparently he makes the rounds to other European game shows as well.

Not everything proved to be an echo of shows past as numerous publishers featured titles that were new on the Italian market, new to me, or both. When I didn't recognize games, I snapped pics, figuring that I could investigate them later. Cranio Creations had an Italian version of Piotr Siłka's deduction game Kryptos, for example, with this game having been first released by Trefl in 2014. Into my camera you go! And now you're in the BGG database, too.

Tolomeo is a new release from designer Diego Allegrini and relatively new Italian publisher Dal Tenda. Here's a description of the game from the publisher:

Quote:

In Tolomeo, players demonstrate their knowledge of astronomy to observe the sky and anticipate the planets' movement. Be careful because the speed of each planet differs in line with the Ptolemaic model, and you should consider the sun and moon as well. If you want a shot at victory, you have to spot astral conjunctions, make the best use of the comet, and take advantage of the planets' influence on each other.

Did you know that Shanna Germain's No Thank You, Evil! from Monte Cook Games is available in Italian? No? Me neither! Someone please investigate and add a version listing for this item to the database, please.

We already have Prestige and Dwarfest from Il Barone Games S.r.l. in the database, but not Stupido Umano. Another cry for action!

I was previously familiar with neither Italian publisher playagame edizioni nor Russian publisher Simple Rules, which is the originating publisher for all the kids' games being sold by playagame at Lucca 2017. This might not matter for you, but I aspire to know as much as I can about who's doing what where, partly out of self-interest but also out of curiosity to see what's happening in the industry at large.

War Titans: Invaders Must Die! from Crawling Chaos Games has been on Kickstarter twice without funding, but this title from a half-dozen Italian designers was being previewed at Lucca 2017 all the same, perhaps to gear up for Kickstarter attempt #3.

Misantropia is a design from Francesco Stefanacci and CosplaYou in which you try not to hate your fellow humans too much. From the description on BGG:

Quote:

In this game, you are a modern worker with an average job, particularly unlucky. Gradually it will happen the most different things during the day (round of play) and your patience will decrease. When you finish the patience your hatred for humanity (misanthropy) will increase and you will begin to develop psychosis and phobias of all kinds. To win you must be totally sane after a fixed number of turns. This is quite difficult, so the player with less "insanity points" will win.

Apparently Misantropia Express challenges you not to hate your fellow humans too much in a shorter amount of time. All the Italian text made this a non-starter in terms of investigating further, alas.

Other new titles from CosplaYou in 2017 include Tié, a party game in which you set rules for everyone to follow, and Sushi War: All You Can Hit!, in which you try to get the right sushi ingredients in the right places to complete orders, using only chopsticks to maneuver the dice.

CosplaYou had plenty of other titles on display as well, all of them published since 2015 when they started and all of them new to me.

I thought that one more post about Lucca would be enough to cover everything, but with so many pics to publish, I'm splitting my final wrap-up into its own post and leaving you for now with a few more random pics of games available for purchase at the show.