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New Game Round-up: Surviving for Three Decades, Mage Wars for Two & One New Import Company

New Game Round-up: Surviving for Three Decades, Mage Wars for Two & One New Import Company
Board Game: Biblios
• Designer Steve Finn says that a new print run of Biblios from IELLO has been finished, but still needs to ship from the manufacturer, which means the game won't be available for a couple more months.

• Coffee Haus Games, which is bringing a number of European releases to the U.S. market, has received Wiraqocha (Sit Down!) and Arnhem '44 (MDVC Games) and will offer those titles through U.S. distribution soon. Reiner Stockhausen's Siberia (dlp games) is expected to arrive in a few weeks.

Eric Price at Global Games Distribution says that like Japanime Games, Coffee Haus Games is owned by GGD. "The idea is that we needed a new brand to publish our European titles." Some of the releases from Coffee Haus are multilingual editions bought directly from the publishers and imported to the U.S., while others are new printings produced specifically for Coffee Haus. Says Price, "Arnhem '44 has been out for a few years, and we are now importing into the states. Siberia is a brand new game, and we have the North American rights. Vanuatu is a French game that we have the English rights to. So there are different circumstances to each game. Some we are actually publishing, and some we are acting as the publisher in North America." My spidery BGG database completionist sense is tingling like crazy. Which games are imports? Which are actually new editions? Can the database artifice ever match reality?!

Board Game: Survive: Escape from Atlantis!
• Stronghold Games has announced details of the 30th anniversary edition of Survive: Escape from Atlantis! in its April newsletter. In addition to new cover, tile and game board artwork, the wooden meeples in Stronghold's 2011 edition of the game led to complaints from some that you could learn which wood grains corresponded to which point values on the meeple bottoms, so those figures are now plastic, with white numbers instead of black to make them easier to read. The tiles are now of uniform thickness, instead of being different thicknesses depending on the landscape they depict. The optional dolphin and dive dice components have been removed, and this change – likely along with the change to tile thickness and the licensing of the game for release in Europe by Asmodee – has lowered the MSRP from $50 to $40. This new edition of Survive: Escape from Atlantis! has a release date of June 6, 2012 in the U.S., with its European counterpart The Island set to debut in late May.

 
• ICv2 has reported that Bryan Pope's Mage Wars, which was solicited as a two- to four-player game, will be released as a two-player-only game with the MSRP lowered from $75 to $55. From the news item: "This new two-player configuration will include everything that had been already planned for the base game: four Mages, 330 Spell cards, Spell Books, the full gaming experience originally designed. The only exception is that if four players wish to play together, two base sets will be required. But with a lower initial price, Arcane Wonders sees this as a fair trade off." Multiple expansions are planned for release starting in 2013, with a new expansion every 2-3 months that will include two new mages, 110 spells, and spell books.

• For Kickstarter this time we have something in the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" department, that being the self-published MEGAcquire by Lloyd Solon. Game play appears to be the same as in Sid Sackson's Acquire – with players creating companies, buying stocks, and merging companies in order to get payouts to fund future stock purchases – but set on a hexagonal game board with more spaces and more companies. In response to a backer's request as to whether he obtained a license for this game from Hasbro, Solon wrote:

Quote:
I tried to get Avalon Hill to create this idea in the mid 1980's and they said that there wasn't enough interest in the game. Then I tried to get Hasbro to do this idea about six years ago but they had already regulated the game to their subsdidiary, Wizards of the Coast. I hired an agent and was told that Wizards was not interested in paying royalties to two different inventors for the same game. Therefore I significantly changed the shape of the tiles, parts of the rules and artwork and names to make the game of MEGAcquire my own.
Sounds like another case for SAZ... (KS link)

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