New Game Round-up: A New Confrontation in Middle-earth, More Exploring in Catan & Robinson Crusoe's Finally at Sea

• More exploring! More pirating! In September 2013 Mayfair Games will release a five- and six-player expansion for Catan: Explorers and Pirates, which was released on the U.S. market as of April 25, 2013 and available in Germany a month prior to that. No details about what's in the box at this time; only news that it will exist.

• Sophie Gravel of Z-Man Games notes that two advance copies of Robinson Crusoe: Adventure on the Cursed Island have arrived at the Z-Man offices, and they look good. After noting that the game had been delayed two months due to a problem with the dice producer, Gravel states that copies of the game "will be airshipped in time for Origins and the ocean shipment will arrive in July. Street date has been set for August 8."

• German publisher DDD Verlag has a new edition of Hanno and Wilfried Kuhn's Uruk: Wiege der Zivilisation in the works for 2013, an edition that will have new rules, new artwork, and more inventions. The publisher displayed a poster of Uruk II at Spiel 2012 and had one prototype available for sample games (as shown below), but hasn't announced a publication date beyond "2013" at this point.

Board Game: Uruk II: Die Entwicklung geht weiter

Image: Götz Gunther

• U.S. publisher Fantasy Flight Games will release a new edition (its third!) of Reiner Knizia's Lord of the Rings: The Confrontation, which has been out of print for some time, in Q3 2013. The Confrontation is a two-player game in which players take control of the forces of Sauron – seeking to find their master's ring – or the forces of the free peoples of Middle-earth seeking to destroy Sauron's ring in the fires of Mount Doom. Each player controls forces that are kept secret from the opponent, leaving each to guess the strategy of the other while probing with attacks to determine exactly who you're confronting in various locations across Middle-earth.

One thing not clear in FFG's announcement of this new edition is whether the game is simply the deluxe version of LotR: The Confrontation but with smaller character stands (necessitating reference sheets so that you know which characters have which special abilities), or whether it's the original edition with artwork from the deluxe version, or whether it's some meshing of the two previously released editions. Thus, we have a conundrum for the BGG database: Should this new edition of the game be listed as a new version on one of the two existing pages in the BGG database, or be awarded a page of its own due to its supposed differences? Or should all three versions be mashed onto a single page to put everything on the same footing?

• On the U.S. mainstream front, publisher All Things Equal is releasing Rob Delaney's War of Words on May 15, 2013, and if you don't know who Rob Delaney is or why a game would be named after him, I suspect you're not alone, despite him supposedly being the "Funniest Person on Twitter". In any case, the gameplay uses Delaney's tweets as the basis for challenges between the players, with players trying to present the material better or spin off humorous lines of their own in order to advance around the track and win. Thus endeth your moment in the U.S. mainstream game industry.

• Designer Kevin Wilson summarizes the life of a freelancer nicely in his BGG blog, cataloguing seven projects in the works (with still more in the offing) and the various states in which they all exist. Being a freelancer is a curious thing. You burn brightly for one project for a few days or even a week, then switch gears to something else, juggling deadlines for all the projects in motion while assuring each publisher that the project you're working on with them is the most important thing on your plate even while you're taking notes in the middle of the night for something wondrous that just sprang into being and threatens to overrun everything else.

New Game Round-up: A New Confrontation in Middle-earth, More Exploring in Catan & Robinson Crusoe's Finally at Sea

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New Game Round-up: A New Confrontation in Middle-earth, More Exploring in Catan &amp; Robinson Crusoe&#039;s Finally at Sea

Related

Crowdfunding Round-up: Amerigo, Ars Victor, The Mystique Deck, HEX: Shards of Fate &amp; Archon: Glory and Machination

Links: One Hundred Years of Little Wars, Why We Play Games &amp; The Esoteric Order of Gamers

New Game Round-up: Fresh Iron from 1A Games, More Middle-earth Deck-Building &amp; the Dead Walk into Mainstream Games

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Crowdfunding Round-up: Leelawadee, Dwarven Miner, Moby Dick &amp; KS Projects Galore

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New Game Round-up: A New Confrontation in Middle-earth, More Exploring in Catan & Robinson Crusoe's Finally at Sea

Crowdfunding Round-up: Amerigo, Ars Victor, The Mystique Deck, HEX: Shards of Fate & Archon: Glory and Machination

Links: One Hundred Years of Little Wars, Why We Play Games & The Esoteric Order of Gamers

New Game Round-up: Fresh Iron from 1A Games, More Middle-earth Deck-Building & the Dead Walk into Mainstream Games

New Game Round-up: Two from Cwali, Two from Spielworxx, Two Move to Battlefront & Too Few from Z-Man

Crowdfunding Round-up: Leelawadee, Dwarven Miner, Moby Dick & KS Projects Galore