New Game Round-up: More Mythic Battles and More Marvel Games from Upper Deck and WizKids

New Game Round-up: More Mythic Battles and More Marvel Games from Upper Deck and WizKids
Board Game: Mythic Battles
• Wow, I've missed a lot during my post-Spiel recovery period, such as the announcement of a reboot of Benoit Vogt's Mythic Battles, a two-player combat game between armies in mythic Greece first published by IELLO and Vogt's Play & Win in 2012. The reboot — Mythic Battles: Pantheon from French publisher Monolith — takes inspiration from this game and its setting, but goes further with the storyline and takes the action down to a more individual level, which entails replacing the army tokens with miniatures. Here's an overview of the setting from Monolith's Jamie Johnson:

Quote:
Hera, tired of Zeus' infidelity, decides to take her revenge and releases the Titans on Mount Olympus. In the ensuing battle, the power liberated by the combatants ignites in a combustion that shatters the Earth. In the ensuing deflagration, the weakest gods are obliterated, rendered down into the small fragments of power that constituted their being. The stronger ones were able to resist total annihilation but even their prodigious power could not save them entirely. As the survivors fell from the broken mountain, the shards of their divinity and the remnants of those that did not survive were scattered to the four corners of a now broken world.

Hades, having lost the majority of his power, no longer holds sway over the Underworld. The gates of hell are open and even though the River Styx prevents the weakest souls from regaining the mortal world, the strongest warriors, the mightiest heroes and the most vicious monsters have managed to claw their way back up the Styx and back to the surface.

As a new power struggle breaks out, Gods summon mortal survivors, returned heroes and reborn monsters to their side in their hunt for the shards of their lost power.

In Mythic Battles: Pantheon, it is these clashes between warbands, in the midst of a post-apocalyptic ancient Greece, that are the focal point of the game. Choose your God, draft your warband and take the fight to your enemies with the might of the most powerful beings from Greek mythology at your back.
Monolith plans to launch a Kickstarter for Mythic Battles: Pantheon in early 2016 once it starts delivering material for its massive Conan KS from early 2015.

Board Game: Mythic Battles: Pantheon
Prototype materials for Mythic Battles: Pantheon

From gallery of W Eric Martin
From gallery of W Eric Martin
• What else have I missed? How about Legendary: Captain America 75th Anniversary from Upper Deck Entertainment, a small box expansion for its Marvel Comics version of Legendary due out in February 2016, with Captain America having debuted in March 1941 with its iconic "Cap punching Hitler" cover. (Interesting to note that issue sold nearly one million copies, while the All-New Captain America in Nov. 2014 sold an estimated 120,000 copies, despite a U.S. population 2.5 times the size of what it was in 1941. The influence of comics is everywhere; the comics themselves...not so much.)

• Speaking of Cap, WizKids Games will release Marvel Dice Masters: Civil War in May 2016, with this release coinciding with the movie Captain America: Civil War, both of which are based on the Marvel Comics storyline that pits Captain America against Iron Man.

Cool Mini Or Not picked up Potion Explosion from Horrible Games and the design team of Castelli, Crespi and Silva for release in the U.S. in Q1 2016. For an overview of this board game version of a "match-three" app, here's a video demo that BGG recorded with Horrible Games at Spiel 2015.

Calliope Games is the new publisher of the Christmas-themed card game 12 Days from James Ernest and Mike Selinker and plans to release its upgraded version of the game — better cardstock and box, streamlined rules — in early December 2015.

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