• In a news post covering Dutch publisher 999 Games, Bordspel.com reveals that the Dominion expansion coming in late 2012 is titled De Middeleeuwen, aka The
• Kevin G. Nunn's Rolling Freight from Ape Games has started to arrive at the homes of those who backed the Kickstarter project in 2011. As for a retail release of the game, Alliance Game Distributors lists the title as being available in June 2012.
• Asmodee's Dixit: Journey, the U.S. standalone version of Dixit 3, has had its release date bumped up from July 2012 to June.
• Despite being decades old, Star Trek continues to be gameified in numerous ways: Kosmos' Star Trek Catan, Bandai's Star Trek [Deck Building Game]: The Original Series, and now Redshirts, which is due out in May 2012 from Weaselpants Productions. Not that Redshirts is based on Star Trek, mind you – no, not at all:
Each player has a hand of cards that allows him to assign missions, issue equipment, travel to exotic locations, or use temporary abilities. Players frequently wind up with more cards than they can hold, which forces them to make strategic decisions about how to proceed.
Each Redshirt has its own combination of abilities and powers, and the players must find a way to match their crew up against missions where they cannot succeed. Other players "help" by offering the doomed Redshirt additional aid in an attempt to keep it alive.
• I often close these round-ups with a game-related Kickstarter project because so gosh-darned many of them are being started these days, but this time I'm headed east (or west – around the globe in any case) to Korea for a crowdfunding project from designer Justin Oh and Gemblo, that project being a colorful riff on Oh's Toc Toc Woodman. Here's a short description of Bling Bling Gemstone, due out in late April 2012:
To set up the game, players create a pillar of discs, with each disc having four colored plastic "gem" pieces slid into notches on its side. On a player's turn, the player takes two swings at the disc tower with a plastic axe. If any gems or discs fall from the tower, the player must keep them. Red gems are worth 3 points, pink gems 2, and transparent gems 1, while the center disc is worth -10 points.
When no discs remain in the tower, the game ends and the player with the most points wins!