New Game Round-up: Games Coming in 2012, Games Out Now & Games Featured at Spiel 2011

With the Spiel 2011 juggernaut receding in the distance, its footprints still clear in our mushy noggins, it's time to look at games that will be released before the end of 2011 or sometime in 2012. Yes, indeedy, time to look ahead at what we'll be playing before the start of Job Ajaw – or The Fifth Sun – when, if I understand the Mayan belief system correctly, we'll all be transformed into colorful gels and merge into a single international pudding of love and transcendence.

• Mayfair Games has announced a February 16, 2012 release date for James Spurny's Rocket Jockey, which is being released under Mayfair's Funfair brand. Not many details about the game at this point, but it does have cool retro artwork that references 1960s Adam Strange comics.

• Mayfair has also announced Catan: Oil Springs, a new scenario for The Settlers of Catan co-developed by Mayfair and Catan GmbH and previously mentioned in this Sept. 2011 BGG News post. Mayfair will publish and distribute Catan: Oil Springs worldwide, except for Germany, which will be served by Kosmos. Here's an overview of the scenario:

Quote:

In Catan: Oil Springs settlers arriving on Catan will cry "Eureka!" as they discover black gold on the island for the first time. This resource brings great opportunity but also danger to the intrepid settlers as they make their mark on the island, claiming it for their own.

First, the good news: Oil can increase resource yields and allow a settlement to grow much faster than normal. The bad news is that players need to monitor the damage their oil use does to the environment and will eventually have to contend with global climate devastation which can result in all players losing the game!

Catan: Oil Springs is available now as a PDF, and the published version is due out Q4 2011.

• Numbskull Games has announced that pre-ordered copies of Bullfrog Goldfield are in the mail, with the game due to hit retail outlets in mid-November 2011. Numbskull is also receiving more than 500 "boxed plastic sets" of Grand Conquest from Europe and expects them to be available in February 2012. Alex Bagosy's Divided Republic is expected to be out in March 2012.

• Ted Alspach has launched a Kickstarter project for his Mutant Meeples, which he and others on the Bézier Games team demoed at Spiel 2011 and which will likely be published in Q1 2012.

Mutant Meeples is akin to Ricochet Robots in that the title is alliterative and (more importantly) that your goal each round is to move a playing figure on the board to the randomly determined target, with figures sliding orthogonally until they hit a wall. Each playing figures in Mutant Meeples has a special power, however, and once you've made that figure part of your team, you can no longer use its power, which makes it tougher and tougher to achieve the final goal of having six figures on your team.

• Cryptozoic Entertainment says that both The Walking Dead Board Game and Penny Arcade: The Game - Gamers vs. Evil are now available at retail outlets in the U.S.

• Spin Master Ltd. has partnered with U.S. retailer Toys R Us to give out four-card preview packs featuring cards from Redakai: Metacharged in the store's Halloween parade gift bags on Saturday, Oct. 29, 2011. Redakai: Metacharged should be available at retail outlets on November 1.

• Stronghold Games has opened preorders for both Core Worlds and Outpost, with the games expected to be delivered in December 2011. (Advance copies will be for sale at BGG.CON in mid-November 2011.)

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And a few items from a post I thought was scheduled to run the morning that I left for Spiel 2011. Alas, no.

• Dominion: Hinterlands designer Donald X. Vaccarino has been previewing cards from this new expansion for the multi-award-winning game Dominion. Each preview post to date – #1, #2, #3 and #4 – has featured two new cards and comments from Donald X. on their design, their drawbacks and whatever else comes to mind.

• Spiel Portugal's Nuno Sentieiro has posted a long preview of Gil d'Orey's Vintage on BGG.

• Łukasz Woźniak has posted a video overview of The New Era, debuting from Portal at Spiel 2011.