![New Game Round-up: Conjure Spirits, Examine Human Behavior, and Push People to Their Doom](https://cf.geekdo-images.com/9HmEpoCvntysrR1nb35FbQ__medium/img/LaIeLuUo8C0no6zPqgMvHv9hGZ8=/fit-in/500x500/filters:no_upscale():strip_icc()/pic2790798.jpg)
Now Penny Arcade has published its own deluxe, all-wood version of Push Fight, the description of which I've rewritten below:
Players take turns placing their five pieces (three with square tops, two with sphere tops) on their half of the board, with white placing first. White then takes the first turn, and players alternate turns after that. A turn consists of 0-2 moves, then a push of one space; a player can move any of their pieces orthogonally — changing direction if desired — any number of spaces as long as those spaces are empty. A player can push only with one of their square top pieces, and they push both friendly and opposing pieces one space. After pushing, the player places the red anchor piece on the piece that pushed; this piece cannot be pushed on the opponent's next turn.
Players continue taking turns until someone pushes an opponent's piece off either end of the board. (The sides are ridged, and pieces cannot be pushed over them.)
• Sweet November, French publisher of The Grizzled, has a title with a very different feel due out in February 2016: Bruno Faidutti's Waka Tanka, which seems an example of his minimalist designs that are 20% about the components and rules and 80% about reading other players and getting in their heads. A summary:
Each player in turn plays an incantation card face down in front of an animal totem. Other players can call the bluff if they think it's not the right animal. A player can also try a full ceremony if he thinks enough incantations have been made to a given animal spirit. A player wins by getting rid of all their incantation cards or fulfilling two ceremonies.
• Dan Ariely is not a game designer, but a professor of behavioral economics and author of books such as Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions, which falls into the Malcolm Gladwell school of surprising you with facets of human behavior that are counter-intuitive while also being perfect for demonstrating whatever it is the author is trying to explain to you.
That said, in case you couldn't guess from the link in the first sentence, Ariely actually is a game designer after all, with his Irrational Game collecting $280k on Kickstarter. Irrational Game presents players with human behavioral experiments similar to those in his books, with them trying to both predict the results and win power cards to challenge opponents directly.
• Ascension: Dreamscape, the next title in the line of deck-building games from Stone Blade Entertainment, has a U.S. release date of Dec. 18, 2015, and since nothing else is happening on that date, I'm sure that it will be the talk of the town.
• Has anyone already discovered how to create the hundreds of images possible with a tangram and clamored for something new along the same lines? If so, you're in luck as Néstor Romeral Andrés of nestorgames has taken the Rub el Hizb, a.k.a. the Gadeiro (an octagonal star superimposed on another octagonal star) and divided it into ten pieces to create, well, Gadeiro, which is not a game admittedly, but I post about puzzles as well sometimes, so here it is.