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New Game Round-up: Riots for Mechs vs Minions, Revisions for Dominion and Dominion: Intrigue, and Rules for The Game

New Game Round-up: Riots for Mechs vs Minions, Revisions for Dominion and Dominion: Intrigue, and Rules for The Game
Board Game: Mechs vs. Minions
• I've been swamped trying to keep up with announcements related to SPIEL 2016 — check out the SPIEL 2016 Preview here! — but plenty of other happenings have been going down in the game world, such as Riot Games announcing the October 13, 2016 release of Mechs vs. Minions, a cooperative campaign game for 2-4 players set in the world of League of Legends, its phenomenally successful battle arena game that I didn't know existed until I got a sneak peak at Mechs vs. Minions at Gen Con 2016.

Mechs vs. Minions uses programmed movement a là Robo Rally, and the game lasts ten missions, with each mission coming in an envelope that possibly contains new stuff, giving a Legacy-style element to the game.

Riot Games is selling the game directly through its online store for $75, and while I don't normally comment on pricing — since that's a personal issue for most people — I was dumbfounded when I found out what they were charging for the game. I expected the MSRP to be at least $100, but apparently Riot is treating this release as a fun experiment and not a money-making venture — perhaps because League of Legends already makes plenty of money for Riot on its own.

Board Game: Dominion (Second Edition)
Board Game: Dominion: Intrigue (Second Edition)
• Jay Tummelson of Rio Grande Games has announced that second editions of Donald X. Vaccarino's Dominion and Dominion: Intrigue will be released, um, really soon since "[t]he games have been produced and we expect to begin shipping them to distributors next week". These new editions — in the BGG database Dominion (Second Edition) and Dominion: Intrigue (Second Edition) — will each replace six kingdom cards in the original edition with new kingdom cards, while also replacing blank cards with a seventh new kingdom card. (Vaccarino details all of the changes in this BGG comment.)

For all those who own the original editions, these new cards will be sold as Dominion: Update Pack and Dominion: Intrigue Update Pack so that the most important new stuff is obtainable at a lower price than the games themselves. Vaccarino notes, though, that the revised rules and reworded existing cards will not be included, and that these update packs won't be available forever.

Board Game: The Game
• I recorded my one hundredth playing of Steffen Benndorf's The Game today, and to celebrate German publisher Nürnberger-Spielkarten-Verlag announced that SPIEL 2016 will see the release of The Game: Extreme, a standalone game co-designed by NSV developer Reinhard Staupe that features the same gameplay as the 2015 original, but now with 28 instructions on the cards themselves that must be obeyed during play. The publisher hasn't released rules or detailed examples, but in the image below you can see cards with "3!" and "STOP", and you can probably figure out for yourself what they mean.

I'm glad they widened the eye sockets on the skull to fully express how extreme this game will be.

Board Game: The Game: Extreme

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