New Game Round-up: Fun Gets Reemployed by IronWall, Emerald Gets Repolished by Treefrog & Inquisition Gets Mooned by Bezier

Funemployed! is a card-based party game in which everyone's trying to become employed. Apply for real jobs, like astronaut, lawyer or priest, with unreal qualifications, such as a dragon, the ability to speak panda, or a DeLorean. In the game, each player uses his qualifications to convince the other players that he's the best qualified for a job. To do this, players tell the story of why their qualifications make them the best fit for a job by role-playing and acting like they are on an interview. Find innovative ways to use your qualifications and become the most "funemployed" player at the table!

New York, 1929: A frenzy of interest in antiquity is sweeping the nation! With museums hungry for mysterious and exotic artifacts — and you hungry for adventure — you start up your own archeology company. Untold wonders await within dangerous jungles, harsh deserts, and wind-swept mountains. Will you gain a reputation as the most intrepid and famous adventurer of all time?

In Artifacts, Inc., 2-4 players compete to grow the most famous archeology company. Players roll dice, which represent their troop of adventurers, and place them on cards in order to find artifacts, sell them to museums, and purchase new cards representing their company assets. Players can choose to focus on making lots of money by selling artifacts, having museum majorities, creating the best combination of expeditions and buildings, or searching below the waves for lost cities and hidden treasures. The first player to reach 20 reputation triggers the end of the game, and the player with the most total reputation wins!

• The aim with the redux is to reposition the game as a more mass-market version of the game, with the hope of appealing to not just the hardcore boardgamers, but also Neil Gaiman fans, Holmes fans and people into Cthulhu.

• As such, the game has been stripped down to the core elements — still a deckbuilder, still with bidding for influence. The semi-teamwork idea has been retained but tweaked to be less fiddly on scoring, and less punishing for the team with the last place player. (Losing team lose VPs instead of wholesale elimination.)

• The deckbuilding is now even more a central element of the game. In our session, Martin brutalized us with some very canny card acquisitions.

* Permanent effects have been absorbed into the main market of cards as normal cards.

* Agents have been massively simplified to make them quicker to get to the board, more effective, easier to move and, most importantly:

* Assassinations has been massively simplified, but still retaining some of the nuance and limitations of the original. ASiE Redux is a much livelier game on that front.

* Sanity can go very quickly for Restorationists, perhaps a little too much so - I'd like to see a few more opportunities to improve sanity.

All this adds up to a much faster game (I think we were done in about 30 -40 mins) that should be infinitely easier to teach as well. It doesn't really replace the original, but stands alongside it. Martin also told us that there won't be any easy way to convert the original as the new version is too different and I'm inclined to agree. As ASiE v2 will be aimed at mass market, it should also be cheaper than the original...