New Game Round-up: Digging Up More Root, and Expanding The Big Book of Madness

• In its April 2019 Kickstarter campaign for Root: The Underworld Expansion (KS link), which adds two new factions to the Root base game, publisher Leder Games offered an add-on item titled "new automated factions". Those factions have now been upgraded to a complete product — Root: The Clockwork Expansion from Benjamin Schmauss and Cole Wehrle — which bears a Q4 2019 release date and this description:

Quote:

Root: The Clockwork Expansion allows players to square off against four fiendishly automated factions. Insert a faction to round out a low-player count game or team up for co-operative play! Compete against the:

—Mechanical Marquise 2.0 - Dodge her marauding patrols as you try to stop her from completing her building tracks.
—Electric Eyrie: Shore up the Woodland's defenses against this fearsome invader. If they go unchallenged, the Woodland will soon be flooded with their forces.
—Automated Alliance - Police these radicals and raze their bases before a little uprising turns into a massive rebellion.
—Vagabot - Hunt the dastardly Vagabot across the many clearings of the game or attempt to court him with items.

• Another expansion sort of along the same lines is One Night Ultimate: Bonus Roles, which collects all of the extra characters created for the various One Night Ultimate titles from Bézier Games and puts them in a single box that will debut at SPIEL '19 in October.

• IELLO has announced that The Big Book of Madness: The Vth Element, the long awaited expansion for Maxime Rambourg's 2015 release The Big Book of Madness, will debut in February 2020. This expansion includes two modules that can be used independently or combined, with "phobia cards" being madness cards that include a permanent constraint on the holder while the "Dark Matter" module adds the "Vth Element" along with the Dark Book, Dark Curses, Dark Monsters, and new magicians.