New Game Round-up: Guess Werewords After Dark, Then Build a Tiny Caverna for Two

New Game Round-up: Guess Werewords After Dark, Then Build a Tiny Caverna for Two
Board Game: Werewords
• Unless I've misjudged the guy, Ted Alspach of Bézier Games seems determined to introduce werewolves into every game genre possible. Witness the announcement of Werewords, a party game due out June 14, 2017 at the Origins Game Fair in which players must collectively guess a secret word using only yes/no questions, while a werewolf hidden amongst the group who knows the word tries to mislead them. I'm puzzled as to the werewolf's motives, but perhaps failure makes humans tastier.

The humans can still win if they identify the werewolf following failure, but the Vizzinian twist is that (as in One Night Ultimate Werewolf) one of the humans is a Seer, and this Seer also knows the hidden word; if the werewolf can identify the Seer, then the beast still wins in the end. Adds Alspach:
Quote:
As each question is guessed, the word-knowing Mayor (who may not speak) must answer every question by giving the asker a token: one of the limited double-sided "Yes/No" tokens (with the appropriate side up), a "Maybe" token (in case the question can't easily be answered with a Yes or No), the coveted "So Close" token, and finally, when the word is guessed correctly, the "Correct" token — but if the Mayor runs out of Yes/No tokens, the village team has to stop guessing and must identify the werewolf (or werewolves) in order to salvage a victory. Additional roles such as the helpful Beholder and the not-so-helpful Minion provide additional, optional variety for players.
Naturally the Mayor can be werewolf as well, giving them the opportunity of lying when answering questions, but they must do so in a non-obvious way in order not to be called out. As with ONUW, Werewords includes an app, with thousands of words in the categories easy, medium, hard, and ridiculous. Players can upload their own word lists as well.

Board Game Publisher: The Creativity Hub
The Creativity Hub, publishers of Rory's Story Cubes, has announced that Patrick Nickell, formerly of Crash Games, and Michael Fox of the Little Metal Dog Show podcast have joined the company to oversee game development, with two releases scheduled to debut at SPIEL 2017. These titles will be available for previewing at NY Toy Fair 2017, so I'll be able to write something about them after that show. As for what they might be, I'll quote from the press release: "[W]e have set ourselves a design challenge for 2017, to build upon what we've done in the past and push our mission further. We plan to develop game titles that bring people together, challenge assumptions and encourage players to view themselves and the world around them in new ways."

• In a comment on his designer diary about Flamme Rouge, designer Asger Granerud notes that publisher Lautapelit.fi has agreed to release an expansion for the game at SPIEL 2017.

Board Game: Caverna: The Cave Farmers
• Just as Agricola and Le Havre have yielded smaller two-player versions, now Uwe Rosenberg's Caverna is being similarly downsized in Caverna: Höhle gegen HöhleCaverna: Cave Against Cave — which German publisher Lookout Games plans to release in Q2 2017, with an English version to follow from Mayfair Games.

Note that the title is still a work-in-progress and no art exists for the game yet, but the gameplay is finished aside from tweaks to small details. Here's a written overview of the game, followed by a video overview that BGG recorded at Spielwarenmesse 2017:

Quote:
In the two-player game Caverna: Höhle gegen Höhle, each player starts the game with only two dwarves and a small excavation in the side of a mountain. Over the course of eight rounds, they'll double their workforce, open up new living space in the mountain, construct new buildings and rooms in which to live, and dig for precious metals.

In more detail, each player starts the game with an individual player board that's covered with a random assortment of face-down building/room tiles and only one space. Some tiles are face up and available for purchase at the start of play. Four action tiles lie face up as well. At the start of each of the eight rounds, one new action tile is revealed, then players alternate taking actions, with the number of actions increasing from two up to four over the course of the game. As players excavate their mountainous player board, new building and room tiles are added to the pool; some rooms can be used immediately when acquired, whereas others require the use of an action tile.

After eight rounds, players tally their points for buildings constructed and gold collected to see who wins.

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