New Game Round-up: Covered Boards, Smashed Licenses, and Unmatched Gothic Gameplay

New Game Round-up: Covered Boards, Smashed Licenses, and Unmatched Gothic Gameplay
Board Game: Unmatched: Cobble & Fog
Restoration Games has unveiled the next title in the Unmatched game series it's been releasing in co-operation with Mondo GamesUnmatched: Cobble & Fog, with this being a two- or four-player game from designers Rob Daviau, JR Honeycutt, Justin D. Jacobson, and Chris Leder due out in Q2 2020. As for what's inside the box:
Quote:
Unmatched: Cobble & Fog features four new characters for the Unmatched system. Invisible Man uses fog to dart around the board and strike without warning. Sherlock, with the trusty Watson by his side, schemes and calculates to ensure victory. Dracula and the sisters slowly drain you of your power. Jekyll & Hyde uses the former's cunning and the latter's brute strength to win the day.
Any character in Unmatched can be pitted against any other, so now you can finally have that Bruce Lee v. Dracula face-off for which you've always longed.

Update, Nov. 16: JR Honeycutt has been removed from the credits of this title at the request of the publishers, who note that he was paid a fixed amount for his development work on this game and that his name will not appear in the published work.

Board Game: Station Master
• Speaking of Chris Leder, he's a developer at U.S. publisher Calliope Games, which has just announced a crowdfunding project for a new edition of Station Master from Chris Baylis. (KS link) This card game was first released in 2004 from Mayfair Games — five years before the founding of Calliope Games! — and here's an overview of how it plays out:
Quote:
With the rising of a new dawn, another busy day at the station begins. Harried passengers hustle about, looking for their trains. Behind the scenes, the engineers and workers rush to connect carriages to engines. It would all be a fine mess if there wasn't someone to oversee everything, if there was no station master! Can you be that station master? Can you balance the needs of your passengers with the carriages you have available?

In Station Master, you have to compete with opponents to direct passengers to the proper trains while choosing the best place to assign your carriages. There are many unexpected things that can happen at the station, so be prepared for anything!

Station Master is a quick and highly interactive 2-6 player card game within which players attempt to influence the value of departing trains by assigning passengers and carriages in an effort to get the trains to depart on time and accumulate the most points.
Board Game: Azul: Crystal Mosaic
• With Azul: Summer Pavilion hitting retail markets now, Canadian publisher Next Move Games has teased its next release in Michael Kiesling's Azul game family — Azul: Crystal Mosaic.

This item is not a standalone game, but rather an expansion for the Azul base game, with the package including four plastic overlays (to keep your tiles from migrating across the board when playing in an airplane or on the back of a camel) as well as four double-sided game boards that provide new challenges for gameplay.
Board Game: Azul: Crystal Mosaic

Board Game: Smash Up
Alderac Entertainment Group, publisher of the long-lived card game Smash Up, has announced a partnership with The OP to bring "officially licensed factions" to Smash Up starting in 2020.

What those factions will be is a mystery for now, with AEG stating that "More will be revealed come AEG's 2020 March Smashness and future events." The OP has published a large number of games based on licensed IPs — Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle, Munchkin Marvel, Talisman: Kingdom Hearts, and Bob's Burgers: Belcher Family Food Fight to name a few at random — so feel free to make lots of smashing speculations between now and March 2020.

From gallery of W Eric Martin

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