To start with, U.S. publisher Alderac Entertainment Group will release a new edition of Hisashi Hayashi's Trains, which was released in 2012 by OKAZU Brand, with all the copies available from Japon Brand at Spiel 2012 being blown out within minutes of the doors opening on Thursday. According to AEG, this edition from AEG features "updated graphics, artwork, and streamlined card abilities"; in a BGG thread, AEG's Todd Rowland clarifies that the photographs from the original games could not be used for legal reasons, and two cards had their costs raised as in-house playtesting found them undercosted. As for future expansions, whether cards, game boards or both, Rowland says, "It's possible. We're not going as aggressively into expansions as we have with some of our other titles, but it's definitely not off the table. We had a bunch of ideas for cards ourselves while playing so there is ripe territory for growth." AEG's revised English rulebook (PDF) can be downloaded from its website, and the game is due out Q3 2013.
• And in other GTS news from Alderac, customer service rep David Trudeau posted a quick table scan of the AEG stand at the trade show, and among the titles being featured are a boxed (possibly deluxe?) version of Seiji Kanai's Love Letter that apparently uses the original Japanese art, a new edition of Motohiro Nakamura's quick-playing zombie-avoidance game Card of the Dead (another Japon Brand item from Spiel 2012), Romance of the Nine Empires – a special "15th anniversary" retrospective set of an imaginary game created as a result of a Kickstarter stretch goal for the film "The Gamers: Hands of Fate" (additional details in AEG's Sept. 2012 newsletter (PDF)) – and Maximum Throwdown, a game from Pixel Lincoln's Jason Tagmire and co-designer Alex Strang. Tagmire posted about the game in his write-up of Unpub 3, held in early 2013, and explains the game in this video recorded at that convention:
• At GTS, U.S. publisher Flying Frog Productions showed off Last Night on Earth: Blood in the Forest, and FFP's Jason Hill has updated the game description on the BGG page:
This expansion, which can be added to Last Night on Earth: Timber Peak or the original Last Night on Earth board game, features new forest game boards (four corners and four straight pieces), a new double-sided forest center board (with the Airfield), two new types of zombie figures – a pack of vicious feral zombies and the menacing zombie behemoths – to hunt down the heroes, two new heroes (Sister Ophelia, the reformed nun, and Agent Carter, an FBI agent who knows more about the outbreak than he lets on), as well as a host of new hero and zombie cards, counters, scenarios, and game mechanisms. Last Night on Earth: Blood in the Forest also expands on the Experience system originally introduced in LNOE: Timber Peak. As the zombie plague spreads, the forests will run red!
• Stone Blade Entertainment, né Gary Games, has been showing off Ascension: Rise of Vigil, which has an April 3, 2013 release date in the U.S, but will be available for purchase or play ahead of this date at PAX East. Rise of Vigil is for 2-4 players and can be played on its own or combined with other Ascension titles. Here's a summary of what's new in the set:
When you play a treasure from your hand, you immediately draw another card from your deck; more importantly, you can use the energy on these cards to activate special powers on certain heroes, constructs and monsters. (Non-treasure cards can also provide energy, but they are usually worth VPs whereas treasure is worthless aside from the energy.) Energy available on a turn can be "spent" more than once, so if you have, say, two energy, then you can power up all cards with an Energize cost of two or less.