New Game Round-up: Trade Goods, Scavenge for Weapons, Line Up Birds, and Assemble Factions of Bone, Flesh and Spirit

New Game Round-up: Trade Goods, Scavenge for Weapons, Line Up Birds, and Assemble Factions of Bone, Flesh and Spirit
Board Game: Moorea
Reiner Stockhausen of dlp games seems to alternate releasing lighter and heavier games, and 2017's Altiplano is being followed in March 2018 by the card game Moorea, which will debut at the new SPIEL DOCH! game fair in Duisburg, Germany this coming weekend. Here's an overview of this 2-5 player game set on the South Pacific island of Mo'orea:

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Each player in Moorea starts with a hand of six commodity cards, with three such cards placed face up and the rest placed as a face-down deck. Lay out the four types of tools, then lay out ten product cards in a face-up display; the products are separated into two types, with the easiest to acquire coming into play first. On a turn, you must draw a face-down commodity card from the deck, then you take an action or pass, then you discard down to your hand limit, which starts at six cards. When you take an action, you can:

• Discard two commodity cards in hand to take one of the face-up commodity cards.
• Discard hand cards for a product card from the display, adding that card to your hand (if it's a hut, canoe, or stoneware) or placing it in front of you.
• Discard a set of commodity cards to acquire a tool card, which you place in front of you; tools increase your hand limit, use fish as jokers, draw two cards at the start of your turn, and draw from the face-up commodity cards instead of the deck.
• Discard one or more commodity or product cards to an appropriate store placed in front of you.

If the commodity deck runs out, shuffle the discards to create a new deck. When you can no longer fill the product display to have ten cards available, each player takes one final turn, then the game ends. Players then tally the points on their product cards, tool cards, and commodities and products laid at stores, and whoever has the highest score wins.
Board Game: Court of the Dead: Mourners Call
Court of the Dead is a world created by Tom Gilliland of Sideshow Collectibles in which Death assembles souls in the Underworld into three factions — Spirit, Bone, and Flesh — in order to stand "against the destructive forces of Heaven and Hell", which are battling one another in "a savage conflict burning with a destructive fury that threatens to one day consume all of creation". Sounds fun.

Now Project Raygun, a division of USAopoly that released The Thing: Infection at Outpost 31 in 2017, is working with Sideshow on a competitive board game based on this property for release in late 2018. Here's a rundown of Patrick Marino's Court of the Dead: Mourners Call, which is for 2-4 players and which heads to Kickstarter in April 2018:

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Everyone is already dead in the Underworld. It's time to join the factions of Bone, Flesh and Spirit as they work to achieve the goal of the underworld: to gather enough forces to take on the celestials of Heaven and Hell to end their ceaseless war. If the players work diplomatically to maintain a balance, they can ensure the Underworld survives long enough for them to also complete their collective and hidden individual objectives. The player who best contributes to these goals will earn Death's favor and a place among the elite of the Underworld.
Board Game: Remnants
Fireside Games showed off two upcoming titles at the 2018 GAMA Trade Show, and until we post the overview videos that we recorded, you'll have to make do with the short descriptions below. First, due out June 27, 2018, is Remnants from Fireside's Justin De Witt and the Between Two Cities team of Matthew O'Malley and Ben Rosset:

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Remnants takes place in a post-apocalyptic world. Each player builds a compound and fights to survive raiders and mutant creatures. The game is played in five phases: Scavenge, Build, Fight, Heal, and Clean-up. In the Scavenge phase, you send survivors into the Badlands to roll dice in a real-time race for resources. In the Build phase, you take turns spending those resources to buy weapon, defense, and special development cards that enhance your compound. When threats attack, you roll dice and use abilities from cards you purchased to survive. You'll fight a Level 1 threat, followed by a Level 2 threat, then finally face down the Raider Boss.

After the final attack, the game ends and the player with the most victory points wins. Victory points can be scored from development cards, survivors, specialists, defeated threats, and special bonus tokens.
Board Game: Grackles
Grackles from Sarah Graybill and John Shulters is a 2-4 player game that hits the U.S. market August 1, 2018, just ahead of Gen Con. As for what you're doing in the game, you're doing what you do in many bird-themed games: Placing birds in particular arrangements to score points:

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Grackles are noisy, iridescent birds that love to gather on telephone wires at sunset throughout the southwestern United States. In the lightly-themed abstract strategy game Grackles, you line up your birds on the telephone wire to score as many points as possible. Each turn, players choose between drawing and placing a tile, connecting two spots on the telephone wire with their birds, extending a line of birds, or rotating an empty tile. After the board has been built to five tiles by five tiles and all available pairs of spots on the telephone wire have birds on them, the player with the most birds on the telephone wire wins.

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