New Game Round-up: Welcome New Lords of Vegas, Control Europe in The March of Progress, and Prove Yourself a Wizard Yet Again

—We believe we will soon be able to sell copies of the Lords of Vegas base set and the very-hard-to-find expansion Up!
—We hope to make the long-awaited expansion Underworld this year.
—We hope to put together a 10th anniversary deluxe edition or something like it.
—We also regained the rights to our popular poker book Dealer's Choice: The Complete Handbook of Saturday Night Poker. We hope to publish a 15th anniversary edition of that too.
—We're building a Kickstarter for all that. We hope to launch it ASAP.

Welcome to another year at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry! The House Cup calls for the brightest students to use gained knowledge and magic to learn lessons and complete challenges. Players send iconic characters like Harry Potter, Cedric Digory, Cho Chang, and Draco Malfoy out on the game board to enhance their skills. The player who earns the most points for their House will be named the House Cup Champion!

Your goal in The March of Progress is to control countries through the playing of action cards so that you generate victory points (VPs) during scoring. Whoever has the most VPs at the end of the game wins.

In the game, each side has a hand of eight action cards, ranging from Move to Attack to Recruit. Each player simultaneously chooses one card to play each turn, then reveals and carries out the action. Cards stay discarded until a player plays their score card after which they regain all played cards.

The March of Progress includes an introductory scenario based on The Thirty Years War to set out the core rules of the game. The game includes four additional historical scenarios: The Age of Marlborough, Vive l’Empereur, World War 1 in the West, and World War 2 in the West. Each scenario changes the set-up and tweaks the rules to give a flavor of strategy in different time periods. The scenarios create a varied and challenging two-player game.

"The Ming Voyages" are the seven journeys made by the Chinese treasure fleet of oceanic junks between 1405 and 1433. The Yongle Emperor constructed the fleet during a period of outward-looking expansion of Chinese influence overseas, and its commander was Admiral Zheng He. The maritime power of the Ming Empire was used for political purposes, not just for trade. The immense fleet was technologically far in advance of European counterparts until at least the 18th century. While it is purported by some that the fleet circumnavigated the world and discovered all its continents save Europe, the voyages certainly reached Calicut in India and Hormuz in the Persian Gulf, while making landfalls in the Arabian Peninsula and East Africa — but on the landward side of the Empire, border troubles were always brewing.

In The Ming Voyages, one player will be the Ming Emperor who is trying to complete all seven treasure voyages, in addition to protecting the Chinese borderlands from invading barbarians. The other player controls the three disparate barbarian factions who are trying to settle on the borderlands with China. Battles can occur in these borderlands, with players use their three dice to roll for triples, doubles, and singles that are better than their opponent's rolls. Reserved cards can be used for re-rolls.

The game uses multi-function cards to provide actions for players to reinforce their armies and attack the enemy and for the Emperor to complete voyages. Play of a card may provide an out-of-turn action for the opponent, so players must be careful of timing. Only the Emperor draws new cards. Players swap hands at the end of each turn, so the Emperor always knows what the Barbarian Overlord holds, and each player tries to exploit the out-of-turn actions.