In Empyreal: Spells & Steam, technomancers use mana to build rails, and the amount of mana crystals required to cast a spell varies by terrain and by the potency of the spell. Mana crystals must recharge after being used, so your choice of when and where to use each spell will be critical to determining the efficiency of your construction engine.
The towns you choose to connect to your network will provide critical resources, and the value of these resources changes over time. Some become more valuable as they become more connected, while others become less valuable as their abundance increases. Thus, you need to be wary of what your competitors are building into their trade networks and adapt your strategies accordingly to maximize the value of your stock portfolio.
Reaching new cities first gives you additional benefits, and being the first to bridge the continent provides you with a sizable commission from your backers. However, those who build first are more at the mercy of changing markets. Time your construction projects to maximize your profits and the flow of mana.
• Looney Labs has also announced one title for release in 2018: Andy Looney's Time Breaker. Here's an overview of the game's setting:
• News that slipped by me while I was in Germany: Quined Games has signed a deal with Capstone Games in which Capstone will "distribute all new and future Quined Games products throughout North America". Quined titles to be released in North America in 2017 under this deal are Carson City: Big Box, American Rails, Vanuatu, Papa Paolo, and La Cosa Nostra. Exact release dates have not yet been announced.
• Japanese anime series Sword Art Online gets a game adaptation released by Kadokawa and Arclight on June 29, 2017, with the game design coming from Seiji Kanai. ソードアート・オンライン ボードゲーム: ソード・オブ・フェローズ , which translates as something like Sword Art Online Board Game: Sword of Fellows, is a 1-4 player cooperative game played with dice in which players must defeat monsters to survive. That description, meager as it is, sounds similar to Kanai's Eight Epics, but the game components include six character cards, ten scenario cards, eight item cards, one support card, four main dice, four support dice, six character dice, and a bunch of tokens, so perhaps the concept is similar but developed along different lines.
In any case, an international version of the game will also be produced and details of that will be forthcoming from the publisher when the time is right.