New Game Round-up: Devil Pig Readies Heroes of Black Reach, Renegade Revisits the North Sea, and Eurydice Explores Zombology

New Game Round-up: Devil Pig Readies Heroes of Black Reach, Renegade Revisits the North Sea, and Eurydice Explores Zombology
Board Game: Warhammer 40,000: Heroes of Black Reach
• In May 2017, I posted brief news of a deal between Devil Pig Games and Games Workshop to release a game line in the Warhammer 40,000 universe that makes use of DPG's "Heroes System" from Heroes of Normandie.

The base game in that line is Warhammer 40,000: Heroes of Black Reach, a two-player game that pits Ultramarines against Orks that includes an eight-scenario campaign and hundreds of bits and retails for $75. As with Heroes of Normandie, multiple supplements will be available, including Orks Reinforcement and Ultramarines Reinforcement (with these two items each having a four-scenario campaign and more units), Ork Freebooterz and Ultramarines Vanguard Veteran Squad (with these being additional bits available solely via the DPG webstore), and the Drop Zone Demo Kit, with this being a smaller standalone two-player game with a single scenario for $25 that can serve as an introduction to the entire line, while also being compatible with it. Chaos and Eldar armies are in the queue for release in 2019.

IELLO will distribute the Heroes of Black Reach line in the U.S., and the game is part of its "Elite Release" program in which certain brick-and-mortar retailers will be able to sell these titles starting March 15, 2018, whereas other B&M stores will get the games for a May 10 release and online retailers can start selling the game on May 24. Apparently we need many more fields in which to list release dates on a game because things are getting complicated.

Board Game: Raiders of the North Sea: Hall of Heroes
Board Game: Raiders of the North Sea: Fields of Fame
Renegade Game Studios seems to announce a new game at least once a week, and the latest addition to its release calendar is a pair of titles due out Q4 2017 that were previously funded on Kickstarter: Hall of Heroes and Fields of Fame, two expansions for Shem Phillips' Raiders of the North Sea — and the Renegade version of that game is due to hit the U.S. market on October 11, 2017.

• In addition to these expansions to the North Sea line, Renegade has announced a Q2 2018 release date for The Tea Dragon Society Card Game, a design by Steve Ellis and Tyler Tinsley that is based on The Tea Dragon Society graphic novel by Katie O'Neill. No details about the game have been revealed beyond its impending existence.

• Designer James Ernest took the basics of a game created by author Pat Rothfuss for the novel "The Wise Man's Fear" and turned it into the actual game Tak. He's now doing something similar for a fantasy novel in the works by Sonia Lyris. Here's an overview of Rochi from Ernest:

Quote:
Rochi is a gambling game for 2-8 players, played with a Tarot-style deck with six suits of different sizes. It's a new deck design for us, and it's a whole new way to think about how gambling games should work. There is no betting, very little bluffing, and six different pots!

Along with Rochi, we have developed a couple more games in the same family: another card game called Roche, and a dice game called Rugen. These are both standard self-working casino games.
Rochi will be published by King of the Castle Games in 2018, but if you're interested in checking out the game now, you can download the rules and materials from Ernest's Cheapass Games website.

Board Game: Zombology
• Designer Jackson Pope used to self-publish games (and publish designs from others) under the Reiver Games brand, but he stopped around 2010. (He's detailed what went wrong on his "Creation and Play" blog.)

The itch to design games didn't go away, though, so in 2015 he returned to the method of how he launched his first game, Border Reivers, and decided to sell a handmade limited edition of Zombology, a semi-cooperative game in which 3-8 "scientists" attempt to cure a zombie plague using "unlikely cures such as homeopathy, healing crystals and a vegan diet". He's now established a new company — Eurydice Games — under which to release the game, and he's making two hundred more handmade copies of Zombology to sell through his website. So retro!

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