New Game Round-up: Climb Blocks and Mountains, and Avoid Falling Through Space

• Yes, I'm still catching up on games announced during Gen Con 2019. Publishers, please share info with me in advance and slap an embargo date on that press release! Then I can prepare posts in advance and not be doing this six weeks later.

In any case, during Gen Con 2019 Deep Water Games announced that it had picked up 7 Summits from designers Adrian Adamescu and Daryl Andrews, a title that had originally been announced from Mayday Games. An overview of the setting and gameplay:

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In 7 Summits, players take on the roles of a team of world class mountain climbers. By the effective management and use of drafted dice, players upgrade their equipment, advance in skill, and ascend the highest mountain on each of the seven continents.

At the beginning of each round, the first player rolls the dice, then each player selects dice to use to either climb a mountain or improve their equipment, i.e., unlock abilities to aid your way up the mountains. Mountain climbing can be dangerous, so try to make it to plateaus before bad weather hits! Each round, a new weather card is drawn, with the weather affecting one mountain — or possibly all of them!

Once the final weather card has been drawn, the game ends and whoever has the most points wins.

Love the Kwanchai Moriya cover that amps up the vertigo and heightens the feeling of hypoxia. Blarg!

• Somewhat along the same lines, at least thematically, is The Climbers: Family Edition from Holger Lanz and Simply Complex, with this version of The Climbers coming with fewer components for a faster playing time and a $40 MSRP, which is important since this item will be exclusive to the U.S. retail chain Barnes & Noble. Publisher Clay Ross notes that this edition of the game includes a special two-player variant.

• I've already posted about Tony Boydell's Lux Aeterna — a 6- to 12-minute real-time solitaire game of not falling into a black hole that will debut at SPIEL '19 from co-publishers Surprised Stare Games and Frosted Games — but the cover image wasn't complete at that time, so I'm showing it off now. You can find a soundtrack for the game here.