New Game Round-up: Teasers for Late 2013 Releases, Tidbits on a Second Cyclades Expansion & an Incandescent Inkognito

• In an April 29, 2012 BGGN post, I listed seven upcoming games from French publisher Bombyx, and since rules are still being written and games developed, I don't have more to tell you about the gameplay of any of them for now, only a vague understanding of when they might be available to players. Charles Chevallier's Continental Express is due out September 2013 in France and Q4 2013-ish for an English version in the U.S. Mikaël Deveaux from Bombyx says that Chevallier's 1001 Palais, Frédéric Henry's Les Bâtisseurs, and a new version of Gun-Hee Kim's Spice Merchant should be available in Europe before the end of 2013, while the other titles – Nessie, Ocean Lords, Smôk and the previously unmentioned Cardline: Animals 2, and Globetrotter – will appear in 2014. Says Deveaux, "But everything can change yet, even the names. So we'll try to show many works-in-progress on our Facebook page, and we'll prepare official announcements when we have precise information and definitive stuff."

• Designer/publisher Justin Oh notes on Facebook that his family strategy game Gemblo now has a UK publishing partner in The Green Board Game Co., meaning that the game will soon be available for sale in the UK, Ireland, and the Netherlands.

• Alan Moon's annual invite-only Gathering of Friends convention is a good place to learn about many titles that will be released over the next 12-24 months. Publishers and designers show off prototypes in all stages of development, from fresh out of the brain pan to fresh out of the shrinkwrap. As a rule, you need to get permission from designers and publishers in order to talk about anything in public – as is the case almost every time you play a non-published game as a courtesy to those who might still be developing their designs – but sometimes publishers do allow a peek behind the curtain at what's coming. Case in point – a description of the late 2013 release Russian Railroads from designers Helmut Ohley and Leonhard Orgler and German publisher Hans im Glück in the Gathering 2013 report from Larry Levy on Opinionated Gamers. Here's his (most likely) purposefully clouded description of the game:

Quote:

This Hans im Glück design pays homage to 18xx, but is actually a very challenging worker placement game. Most of the actions you place workers at allow you to build different colored track on up to three lines, but you need to build the least valuable track before you can build the next valuable one, and so on. You also need to get trains to run on those tracks and the greater the range of the train, the more track counts for you. Finally, advancing sufficiently far on some tracks can unlock all sorts of nice goodies that give you more abilities. It's a heavy game, but once you get a game under your belt, it all flows together quite well. This is probably the heaviest game that HiG will have released in many years and the best part was that the HiG representative said that this was a type of design they'd like to return to on a regular basis.

OG editor Dale Yu includes a few pics of the Russian Railroads prototype in this report from the Gathering.

Levy's write-up also touches on William Attia's Spyrium (coming from Ystari Games in middish 2013) and Brian Yu's Treasure Hunters (coming from the German branch of Mattel for Spiel 2013). (Yu has a shot of the completely unfinished Treasure Hunters game board in this OG post.

• In a separate Gathering 2013 report on Opinionated Gamers, Mark Jackson mentions that German publisher eggertspiele has a title coming from design team Wolfgang Kramer and Michael Kiesling titled Glück Auf. Can't wait to see that title used "humorously" in a million threads and Geeklists...

• In an interview by Alex Awesome (ahem) on Fortress Ameritrash, designer Bruno Cathala drops a few lines about a second expansion for Cyclades that's in the works for 2014: "New board, a sixth player, and the possibility to play in teams. It's the same goods but balanced differently. We still need to work a lot on the fine-tuning and playtesting, but we enjoy playing in this new way... We still have to finish development, production, and making new miniatures, so it will take some time."

• In August 2012, Italian publisher Ares Games announced that it would release a new edition of Alex Randolph and Leo Colovini's Inkognito in 2013. Ares showed off the new look for the game – creepy masked guy still leering in the corner, while the opulence dial has been cranked by 150% – at the GAMA Trade Show in March 2013, and now French publisher IELLO has shown off the cover of its French-language version of the game:

Sweet Petunia, that's succulent! The original version of Inkognito won a special Spiel des Jahres award in 1988, and this new version seems to have kept all the best bits of the original while upping the glamour of everything else.

New Game Round-up: Teasers for Late 2013 Releases, Tidbits on a Second Cyclades Expansion & an Incandescent Inkognito

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New Game Round-up: Teasers for Late 2013 Releases, Tidbits on a Second Cyclades Expansion &amp; an Incandescent Inkognito

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New Game Round-up: Teasers for Late 2013 Releases, Tidbits on a Second Cyclades Expansion & an Incandescent Inkognito

Links: Voting Opens for the 2013 DSP, Pegasus Moves Matagot's Goods & Playing While Drinking

New Game Round-up: Bruges and More from Z-Man Games, Another Visit to The Red Dragon Inn & Bitter Euphoria