Fast forward to 2017: Cheapass Games has just launched a Kickstarter for a new button-free version of Button Men, now titled Button Men: Beat People Up, which is due out in October 2017. Guardians of Order's Mark MacKinnon is now president of Dyskami Publishing Company, which has just announced a "North American licensing arrangement with Toei Animation Inc. to design and distribute a line of tabletop board games based on the popular Japanese animation series Sailor Moon Crystal", an anime series based on the original Sailor Moon manga.
The first such title coming from Dyskami, due out Q3 2017, is Sailor Moon Crystal: Dice Challenge, a 2-8 player dice game based on — wait for it! — James Ernest's Button Men. Dyskami also plans to release the tile-passing-and-bluffing game Sailor Moon Crystal: Truth or Bluff in late 2017, with more SMC games to follow in 2018.
I think it's fair to point out that Guardians of Order went out of business in 2006, with many freelance creators accusing MacKinnon of using their work in GoO publications without paying them, then continuing to sell works following the closure of the business, again without paying them. MacKinnon presented his version of what happened to GoO in 2013 when starting Dyskami and attempting to fund Upon a Fable on Kickstarter, with many of those freelancers responding in that same BGG thread.
• One of the many titles distributed by Japon Brand at SPIEL 2016 was Yoshiyuki Arai's Defense Three Kingdoms, a solitaire game in which a player had to defeat an invading army while losing defense forces to attrition in each combat and taking damage when avoiding combat. That game included a competitive two-player mode in which one player would take charge of the attacking forces to make the game's AI a little less A.
Now Sweet Lemon Publishing and Mandoo Games are partnering on a new version of the game titled Fantasy Defense, with the game featuring new artwork by Yann Tisseron, a new cooperative two-player mode, a new setting (with humans and elves now partnering to defend against orcs), and a new "campaign" mode that unlocks new cards after meeting certain criteria in the game.
• To stay with Japanese games this post, let's look at Alicematic Heroes, a new game from Kuro that will be co-published by Japanime Games and his own Manifest Destiny. The game debuts at Tokyo Game Market in May 2017, with Japanime demoing the game at Origins 2017 in June ahead of its U.S. release. Here's an overview of the gameplay:
In Alicematic Heroes, you take charge of one of these teams, and you'll have a handful of Alices to use in your efforts. Alices come in five colors, with each player having a set of player boards in these five colors. On a turn, you first summon an Alice to your kingdom, playing that card from your hand onto the player board of the same color, but only if you can pay the cost in dream power; each Alice has a cost, and you must have at least this many dream cards (yellow) or be able to make up the difference by paying dream tokens. If you can, you immediately use the power — or Megalomania — of that Alice; if you can't, choose another card or lay an Alice face down as a commoner. Playing a commoner doesn't cost anything, lets you draw another card, and builds up the power of one of your five colors, but you don't get a Megalomania bonus and your turn ends immediately.
If you played an Alice, you can then invade a territory in the playing area, which is composed of modular hex tiles. To conquer the territory, you need enough military power (red cards) or supplemental military (red) tokens, and if the territory is not on a hex where you occupy a city, you must have enough food (green cards) or food tokens to reach that space. If you conquer it, you receive a bonus based on the territory's color: military, food or dream tokens; Alice cards; or points. If you conquer a city, you score points and now have a foothold on that hex.
If you lack enough military and food, you can still place the territory under attack and finish it off on a later turn, but another player can potentially conquer it in the meantime.
Mystic forests cannot be conquered until they're surrounded by player-controlled territories, and only the player(s) with the most controlled surrounding territories can then capture the forest, which has a toughness and point value equal to the number of surrounding territories.
The game ends after fourteen rounds, then players score points for having the most or secondmost territories controlled in each hex and for having the most Alices in any of the five colors. Players can also score points for Alice Megalomania effects, and whoever has the most points wins!