![New Game Round-up: Medici Gets a Little Brother, Millennium Blades Returns, and The Game of 49 Scores](https://cf.geekdo-images.com/R3ZA__lUAv4gCAwsno-nbA__thumb/img/1W_RWokRR5SBM8cgFQZ_NhnZz4Y=/fit-in/200x150/filters:strip_icc()/pic3024922.jpg)
In 15th century Florence, players try to acquire the most valuable goods for their merchant ships by drawing 1-3 cards from a common deck each turn. After drawing, the active player must take the final card they drew and may select one or both of the previous two cards drawn (if available). They then load these commodity cards on their boat. Cards that are not taken remain available to future players. Once a player's boat is full (seven cards with two players, five cards with 3-6 players), they are out of the round and the day is scored.
Players score points for the value of their ships' holds, but also for the number of commodities of each type that they have stored in their warehouse. The highest earning merchant over three days wins the game. Some cards do not take up space on ships, while others contribute to the value of a hold, but cannot be stored in warehouses.
• Level 99 Games has announced that it will reprint owner Brad Talton's Millennium Blades — which debuted in April 2016 and sold out almost immediately — via a new Kickstarter campaign in July 2016 similar to the one it ran in May 2015. The Millennium Blades expansion Set Rotation should be released in late 2016 at the same time as this reprint, along with Promo Pack #3 (which introduces two new playable characters) and Promo Pack #4 (which consists of four new Master-level card sets, each themed around one of the bosses in Set Rotation's Cooperative mode).
• Talton and Level 99 Games note that BattleCON: Trials, the next title in its BattleCON Universe, is getting ready to move to production.
• White Wizard Games plans to release the Star Realms expansion United in 2016, with this expansion including dozens of new cards, some of them multi-faction cards such as the one depicted below:
• I find myself mentioning the U.S. retail chain Target over and over again in these new game round-ups, and that's because the company is making a big push in the hobby game market, both by expanding the number of titles that it carries and by working with publishers to carry new exclusive titles. In the former category, I present Mark Corsey's The Game of 49 from Breaking Games.
As Mark noted in a June 4, 2016 Kickstarter update: "Two years ago today, on June 4, 2014, we launched the Game of 49 Kickstarter campaign with a goal of printing 1,500 copies. Two weeks from today, on June 18, 2016, Go49 goes on sale at 2,000 Target stores nationwide."
I played games numerous times with Mark in the late 2000s, mostly when he visited my game group in Concord, NH, where he almost always arrived with a plate of cookies in hand to share with everyone. He's got a great spirit that always came out while chatting and playing, and I'm pleased to see his game succeed. Congrats, Mark!