Citrus provides players with new challenges, and little is left to chance. The moves are simple, but the decisions are tricky. Players build citrus plantations for points, yet in order to build, it's essential to harvest your plantations from time to time as this is the only way to bring new income into your account – but when is the timing right? And most importantly, which plantation should you harvest, thus taking it out of the race for the important points during the finca scoring?
Citrus is a tile-laying game for 2-5 players ages 10 and up with a playing time of about 50 minutes. The game contains a simplified family variant as well as a short version of the game. Citrus is particularly suitable for two players.
• No need to focus solely on Spiel, though, as first we need to make it through Gen Con 2013 in mid-August, and lookee here – another title set to debut at that major U.S. convention, one about which I know next to nothing. Yes, I'm talking about Le Fantôme de l’Opéra, a two-player game from Swiss publisher Hurrican and designers Bruno Cathala and Ludovic Maublanc that's based on the game system used in their own Mr. Jack. That's everything I know about the game except that Asmodee, Hurrican's distributor in North America, will have copies of the game available at Gen Con 2013 according to Hurrican's Yves Menu. Oh, and Bruno Cathala will attend Gen Con 2013 and be around to show off his latest release. Ideally he'll be wearing the mask while performing...
• Sophie Gravel at Z-Man Games has noted on BGG that the publisher will have advance copies of Uwe Rosenberg's Agricola: All Creatures Big and Small - Even More Buildings Big and Small available at Gen Con 2013 in mid-August, with the bulk of the shipment arriving later in that month. In addition, copies of this game's first expansion – More Buildings Big and Small – should be available at U.S. retailers by the end of July 2013.
• English rules for Silvio Negri-Clementi's The Mystery of the Templars, which should be hitting U.S. stores any day now, are now available on the Stratelibri website.
• In a July 22, 2013 newsletter Tasty Minstrel Games' Michael Mindes mentions two future TMG releases on top of Michael Keller's City Hall and Captains of Industry, those two titles being Seth Jaffee's Eminent Domain: Dice and Ed Marriott's Scoville. A few words about that latter title from Mindes: "Scoville is about pepper farming of all things. It utilizes a crop combination mechanism which is very interesting where you can upgrade your peppers by combining colors. For example, red and yellow combine to make an orange pepper which is more valuable. For those of you that are color blind, don't worry – we are working on final production options which will limit the difficulty cause by color blindness."