New Game Round-up: Giants Come on Board Dungeons & Dragons, and Players Drop Ship in Island Hopper

New Game Round-up: Giants Come on Board Dungeons & Dragons, and Players Drop Ship in Island Hopper
Board Game: Assault of the Giants
WizKids Games and Wizards of the Coast are extending their board game partnership — which started in 2015 with the Temple of Elemental Evil board game — into 2017 with the announcement of Dungeons & Dragons: Assault of the Giants. This design by Andrew Parks is based on the "Storm King's Thunder" D&D storyline that starts in August 2016, but the board game, which bears a $100 MSRP, won't be available until Q2 2017. Here's an overview of the game:

Quote:
Dungeons & Dragons: Assault of the Giants challenges players to command one of the six types of giants and claim the right to rule over all giantkind. Command giants and assault settlements to score points and secure important resources, including food, treasure, ore, and runes. The game contents include fourteen giants miniatures, measuring from approximately 4" to over 5½" in height.
Tasty Minstrel Games notes that it plans to release Orléans: Invasion for the U.S. market, with the game possibly making it out in time for Gen Con 2016, but possibly not. This expansion consists of scenarios, buildings, and event cards that work with both Orléans and Orléans Deluxe.

Board Game: Island Hopper
• I love seeing Kwanchai Moriya's artwork on games, and the cover of Scott Almes' Island Hopper from Eagle-Gryphon Games seems to encapsulate the nature of this design in that one shot. Here's a more wordier description of play:

Quote:
You and your friends all make a living by selling goods amongst a chain of beautiful tropical islands. Sounds great, right? Well, there's a problem. None of you are successful enough to buy your own seaplane, so you all pitched in and bought one together, which means that each day you all have to use the same plane to make all of the day's deliveries – and some of you aren't going to get paid. To make matters worse, the plane is in such disrepair that the instrumentation is broken, the compass demagnetized, and the windshield is covered in cracks, duct tape, and the remains of a few unfortunate seagulls, so the pilot might as well be flying blind...

Each day in Island Hopper, players auction off the Captain's seat; the player who becomes the Captain is in charge of flying the plane for the day, but cannot make any deliveries of their own. To make their deliveries, the other players bribe the Captain to fly to the islands to which they need to go, thereby earning themselves cash. When it's time for the Captain to fly, the Captain must close his eyes, pick up their goods tokens, and attempt to land them in an island's harbor. A successful landing means that players can fulfill their contracts and the captain collects his bribe — but if the goods splash into the sea, you might find yourself under water...
• At Spielwarenmesse 2016, BGG recorded a video overview of Fujita, Ohki and Oikawawith's party game Imagine — which functions something like Pictionary but with illustrated see-through cards that allow you to build images or even animate stories — when Cocktail Games showed off its edition of a design that first debuted at Tokyo Game Market in 2015. Now Gamewright has announced that it will release Imagine in English, with the game debuting at Gen Con 2016 in August.

Yes, Gamewright will also be at Gen Con this year! How many publishers can possibly fit in the Indiana Convention Center? All of them?!

Board Game: Imagine

Related

Crowdfunding Round-up: Long Shots and Hail Marys

Crowdfunding Round-up: Long Shots and Hail Marys

Jun 07, 2016

• For years people wondered whether Martin Wallace's Princes of the Renaissance would ever be available again. Now Mercury Games is Kickstarting a new edition of the game, and the response has...

Links: DaVinci's BANG! Lawsuit Shot Down, Gender in Munchkin & Mark Rosewater on Twenty Years of Magic

Links: DaVinci's BANG! Lawsuit Shot Down, Gender in Munchkin & Mark Rosewater on Twenty Years of Magic

Jun 05, 2016

• In 2014, DaVinci Editrice — which publishes games as dV Giochi — filed suit against Yoka Games and ZiKo Games. DaVinci, which has published Emiliano Sciarra's BANG! (along with many...

Designer Diary: The Looter's Guide to Looting Atlantis

Designer Diary: The Looter's Guide to Looting Atlantis

Jun 04, 2016

InspirationInspiration can come from the strangest places. I had just gotten my first working prototype of another game called Born to Serve — a game in which players are out-of-work...

King of Tokyo Scrubbed Clean, Dressed Anew for Fifth Anniversary

King of Tokyo Scrubbed Clean, Dressed Anew for Fifth Anniversary

Jun 04, 2016

For the fifth anniversary of Richard Garfield's King of Tokyo, a.k.a., Yahtzee King of the Hill, which has had editions in thirty languages and has racked up more than 750,000 copies sold, French...

New Game Round-up: Revisiting Hogwarts, Making Fake Art, and Going Loony in the U.S.

New Game Round-up: Revisiting Hogwarts, Making Fake Art, and Going Loony in the U.S.

Jun 03, 2016

• For the most part, USAopoly has released themed versions of existing games — Clue this, Monopoly that, Yahtzee the other thing — but the company has taken efforts to expand its product...

ads