New Game Round-up: More Anima, More Game Previews & How to Attract a Publisher

• Clever Mojo Games has announced that it plans to release a tile-laying game from designer Isaias Vallejo in Q4 2011. Here's a short description of Sunrise City:

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Players build a city with zone tiles, bid for control of those zones, then score victory points by placing building tiles on the city zones to their best advantage. Each round the players use role cards to grant them special abilities in the various game phases. After three rounds, the player with the most victory points wins.

Says CMG's W. David MacKenzie, "Sunrise City started off as an entry in the Quick Print and Play Design Challenge. I noticed that the designer, Isaias Vallejo, was a local and suggested that he visit our weekly playtest meetup and bring his prototype with him. He did and we played it several times, did some brainstorming, and came up with a few adjustments. Along the way I found that I enjoyed Sunrise City and, after a few more weeks of playtesting, Isaias offered it to CMG for publication. I snapped it up and the two of us, and his design partner Drew Sayers, started work on bringing it to a publishable state." This story points out one possible avenue to success for a designer: Live near a publisher.

• In other Clever Mojo news, the second printing of Alien Frontiers is due to hit U.S. stores around April 22, 2011, with a third printing in the works since the second printing is already sold out at the publisher level. CMG's David MacKenzie notes that the game has been licensed for two separate European editions in a wide variety of languages.

• Edge Entertainment has set up a game page for Guilty Gods, a new two-player card game set in the Anima universe, yet apparently not compatible with the other Anima card games. (Just for the record, Edge released Anima: The Twilight of the Gods in 2009, with Fantasy Flight Games following with an English release in 2011. I'm not saying that FFG will release Guilty Gods in English – only that any such release might take a while.)

• Fireside Games has posted a preview video of Bloodsuckers using a production sample of the game.

• Ystari Games is now listing early June 2011 – instead of the previously anounced April 2011 – as the release date for Philippe Keyaerts' Olympos.

• In an April 19, 2011 post, Steve Jackson Games highlights the difference in components between Ogre of editions past and the mondo super-colossal, chrome-on-top-of-chrome version of Ogre in the works for a possible 2011 release.

• SJG has also released rules (PDF) for the newest edition – #8! – of The Awful Green Things from Outer Space, which is likely to hit U.S. stores by the end of Apirl 2011.

• Alderac Entertainment has started to preview cards from Thunderstone: Thornwood Siege, due out June 2011.

• Stronghold Games plans to open preorders for Confusion: Espionage and Deception in the Cold War on April 30, 2011 on its new website.

• On Opinionated Gamers, editor Dale Yu (who has been involved with developing the Dominion empire) has posted advance pics of most of the cards included in Dominion: Cornucopia, which is due out May-ish 2011.