Suburbia is a tile-laying game in which each player tries to build up an economic engine and infrastructure that will be initially self-sufficient, and eventually become both profitable and encourage population growth. As your town grows, you'll modify both your income and your reputation. As your income increases, you'll have more cash on hand to purchase better and more valuable buildings, such as an international airport or a high rise office building. As your reputation increases, you'll gain more and more population (and the winner at the end of the game is the player with the largest population).
During each game, players compete for several unique goals that offer an additional population boost – and the buildings available in each game vary, so you'll never play the same game twice!
I've played this game a couple of times and will post a preview in the near future now that this silly "launching the Spiel 2012 Preview" business is nearly over with. Just a few minutes after this post!
• In addition to the Suburbia game, Alspach has announced Enter the Passage, a tie-in with The Passage trilogy of novels by Justin Cronin, with the game being based on Alspach's Ultimate Werewolf. A description:
In Enter the Passage, players are assigned the role of Humans, Virals or Amy, with the Humans trying to destroy the Virals, the Virals conspiring to attack the Humans, and Amy using her unique powers to help the humans determine who among them is a Viral and who is safe.
• French publisher IELLO, which also has a U.S. division, will debut Benoit Vogt's Mythic Battles at Gen Con 2012, with the game also hitting retail outlets in August 2012. Here's an overview of the game:
Mythic Battles is a game which simulates epic confrontations and battles that will take your breath away. Thanks to its innovative system – the Building Battle Board (BBB), which combines game mechanisms from miniature games, board games and card games – Mythic Battles offers you an experience the likes of which you have never seen. Recruit your army, play your cards to activate your units, roll your dice to resolve combat – reinvent your way of playing!
This box contains two complete armies to play with two or four players, an initiation campaign, as well as all that's required to play as you wish. Other armies and units will periodically be released to flesh out your campaigns.
Write your legend in the blood of the fallen!
• The international edition of Karol Madaj's Kolejka has been released by Instytut Pamięci Narodowej, Poland's Institute of National Remembrance. The game received a huge amount of publicity when first released in a 3,000-copy Polish-only edition in early 2011, and this new edition – now with rules in six languages – has engendered its own publicity in the mainstream media, such as this AP item published on FoxNews.com. So what is the game about?
The board game Kolejka (a.k.a. Queue) tells a story of everyday life in Poland at the tail-end of the Communist era. The players' task appears to be simple: They have to send their family members out to various stores on the game board to buy all the items on their shopping list. The problem is, however, that the shelves in the five neighborhood stores are empty.
The players line up their pawns in front of the shops without knowing which shop will have a delivery. Tension mounts as the product delivery cards are uncovered and it turns out that there will be enough product cards only for the lucky few standing closest to the door of a store. Since everyone wants to be first, the queue starts to push up against the door. To get ahead, the people in the queue use a range of queuing cards, such as "Mother carrying small child", "This is not your place, sir", or "Under-the-counter goods". But they have to watch out for "Closed for stocktaking", "Delivery error", and for the black pawns – the speculators – standing in the queue. Only those players who make the best use of the queuing cards in their hand will come home with full shopping bags.
On the product cards are photos of sixty original objects from the Communist era. The merchandise includes Relaks shoes, Przemysławka eau de cologne, and Popularna tea, as well as other commodities that were once in scarce supply. The neighborhood also has an outdoor market but the prices there are steep – unless, of course, you manage to strike a deal with the market trader. In this realistic game you really have to be savvy to get the goods.
Are you brave enough to confront the everyday life of the 1980s?