Manage Your Reputation at the Dog Park, Listen for Echoes, and Take Tricks Daily

Manage Your Reputation at the Dog Park, Listen for Echoes, and Take Tricks Daily
Lottie and Jack Hazell are the hosts of the "Board Games with My Wife" podcast, and in late 2021 they plan to move into publishing under the name Birdwood Games with the Kickstarter launch of the 1-4 player game Dog Park, which will be released in 2022. An overview:
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Welcome to Dog Park, a mid-weight, competitive set-collection and point-to-point movement game in which players take on the role of dog walkers who recruit, walk, and care for their dogs over four rounds. Each round is split into four phases:

Board Game: Dog Park

—Recruitment Phase: Players compete in two rounds of offers to add dogs to their kennels. Offers are made with players' reputation (victory points), so must be placed wisely.
—Selection Phase: Players decide which dogs to place on their lead to walk this round.
—Walking Phase: Players journey through the dog park with their fellow walkers, collecting resources, earning reputation, and interacting with other walkers.
—Home Time Phase: Players earn reputation for their walked dogs, and lose reputation for any unwalked dogs in their kennel.

Players must choose their routes and dogs carefully to earn the best reputation and prove they are the most accomplished walker of them all. At the end of the game, the player with the most reputation wins.
Lottie Hazell has posted a first designer diary about the game on BGG, explaining her desire to incorporate more than two hundred unique dogs into the game.

• German publisher Ravensburger has a new twist on "escape room" games with a trilogy of designs from Dave Neale and Matthew Dunstan that bear the name "echoes". Here's an overview of how to play these designs:
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echoes is a co-operative audio mystery game. Using the free app, players listen to mysterious noises and voices that are connected to the playing material. Together they look for hints in the sound bites to bring the story parts in order and solve the case.

Board Game: echoes: The Cocktail
Board Game: echoes: The Dancer
Board Game: echoes: The Microchip

In more detail, your task is to assemble the 24 parts of the story in the right order; each part is represented by an object — either a game board or a card — and its associated echo. The entire story is divided into six chapters, with each chapter being represented by a game board. By scanning the objects with the app, you'll hear the echo connected with each object, and by using conversations and noises in the echo, you try to figure out which three object cards are associated with a chapter and in which order they should be placed. If you're not correct, the app will inform you which cards are incorrect or in the wrong place; if you are correct, you can listen to the entire chapter all at once — and you should since new, additional hints can then be heard.

The objects themselves also provide you with clues from time to time, so neglect no details.
As for the specific cases, here are short teasers:

—The New York underworld makes dark plans in an illegal bar, and the echoes of the past hide the identity of its leader. You need to discover that identity in echoes: Der Cocktail.

—The ghost of a young girl is haunting a Scottish manor, and the echoes of the past hide the secret of her death. See whether you can unravel this secret in echoes: Die Tänzerin.

—In the far future, civilization is lying in ruins, and the echoes of the past hide the tragic story of its downfall. See whether you can uncover the truth in echoes: Der Mikrochip.

From gallery of Photodump
Non-final cover
• Speaking of "escape room" games, Exit: The Game designers Inka and Markus Brand have a new design from Ravensburger that seems to fall in the same ballpark — Mystery Games: Der verfluchte Geburtstag (The Cursed Birthday). Here's a short overview of the title, which hits the German market on September 1, 2021:
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Lady Hampton is planning a party, but a ghost is disrupting the preparation and threatens to drive away the guests.

In Mystery Games: Der verfluchte Geburtstag, you must work together to find the key to the drawer in which the ghost is hiding inside this three-story villa. When you have mastered all the challenges presented over the six rounds, which includes information from guests and employees via a supported app, a final test awaits...

What's in the Hampton Mansion rooms?!
• To continue with Ravensburger releases, the Brands have co-designed the trick-taking game Stichtag with their daughter Emely, and this design for 3-5 players has a daily twist that will perhaps inspire players to log their games:
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The basic rules of the trick-taking game Stichtag are straightforward: Each player starts with twelve cards in hand, red is trump, and players want to collect the most tricks to win.

However, the game includes a desk calendar with three flippable stacks of cards: two for the numerals in the date and one for the month. Each combination of cards corresponds to a different day of the year, giving you 366 game variants — or even more should you wish to play on March 38...
From gallery of Photodump
Non-final front cover

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