What's more, Crash's Patrick Nickell has laid out his anticipated (read, fingers-crossed) release schedule for 2014:
—Pay Dirt, by Tory Niemann, which I previewed at BGG.CON 2013 and which hits Kickstarter on March 12. In short, players try to excavate gold in Alaska by overseeing an entire mining outfit.
—Council of Verona Expansion, by Eskue and Nickell, which seems like a tough challenge since the main characters are dead.
—Kingdom Land, with art and design by Adam McIver and players rolling custom dice to gain followers in an area-majority "replace the king" game.
—Corruption, by Ben Pinchback and Matt Riddle and about which I know nothing.
—Heat, by Dave Chalker, a microgame with the criminal players trying to avoid the "heat" (a.k.a., the police) (and despite outward similarities, Heat is not a new edition of Criminals).
—Dead Drop, by Jason Kotarski, a micro deduction game.
—Sunset Showdown, also by Kotarski, this being a real-time dice-rolling game in which players compete for the best view of the sunset, according to Nickell.
—A secret game that involves trains.
• The results of the 2014 Hippodice game design competition have been posted, and the designers listed are a mixture of known and unknown, as is typically the case. Given past results, you can expect to see a number of these designs in print in the years to come, and Hippodice jury member Uli Blennemann, who runs German publisher Spielworxx, has already suggested that one of the titles might end up under his brand.
• Eric Reasoner at StuntKite Publishing has opened preorders for the new edition of Yeon-Min Jung and Jun-Hyup Kim's Patchistory, but be warned that the site is non-intuitive, with you apparently needing to create an account before even being able to place an order and find out what the shipping charge might be. In any case, progress toward this game being available once again...
• Not content to let people give only crummy gifts to one another in Crappy Birthday, U.S. publisher North Star Games plans to release Brian and Amy Weinstock's Happy Birthday! in April 2014. On a turn, everyone gives a secret gift card to the active player, who then chooses both the gift she most enjoys and the gift she'd prefer not to have; whoever gave those gifts each scores a point and whoever reaches five points first wins.
• Adventure Time: Card Wars – For The Glory! is a set of booster packs for either of the Adventure Time: Card Wars games from Cryptozoic Entertainment, with nine cards to a booster and the cards promoting the use of multiple landscape types in a single deck and including a taste of the NiceLands landscape to come in a future release. CE gives details of the booster set breakdown on its website.
• Video game site Polygon posted a rundown of how Portal publisher Valve and Cryptozoic came together for the forthcoming Portal board game, which currently bears the non-final title Portal: Uncooperative Cake Acquisition Game. The short version: Valve worked on the game in-house for a year, then approached Cryptozoic for polish, packaging and promotion.
• Cheapass Games has posted an upgraded (i.e. now in color) version of Mark Rosewater and James Ernest's simple push-your-luck card game Gold Digger that you can download and print-and-play.
• The Numero Group is an archival record label that's branching out with its first game release in May 2014: Cities of Darkscorch, which seems as much parody as sincere creation in the back of a high school homeroom. A description from Numero's website:
Roleplaying as any of Darkscorch Canticles' sixteen determined bands, one to six players traverse the broken roads of Darkscorch — battling such forbidding quartets as Grimsword, Narcissus, Ass-Centaur and 97 more — to collect city banners from such pits of hard rock competition as Afterdath, Wizard's Wellspring, and Throk. Along the way, players may augment their bands through the use of fate cards with new artwork from the demented minds of John McGavock McConnell and Eliza Childress. The ultimate goal is Numenor, victory, and a record contract penned in brimstone, VD, and pot smoke.