New Game Round-up: White Goblin Games Keeps the Rats Coming & AEG Prepares for the 2013 Convention Season

The war for the eternal night rages around the world, and nowhere is it more bizarre than in the far east. A fully functional city in India nearly untouched by the Nightfall, uncontrolled ghouls from the seas, and strange happenings in the skies are only the beginning. Nightfall: Eastern Skies features the new Link mechanism allowing for faster play.

Countermay: The Tapestry of Worlds, the crossroads of civilizations beyond imagining. After a thousand years of war, Countermay is dying. Battles, curses, extraterrestrial parasites, demonic influence, and other hazards have ruined much of the planet. The food is running out, and the threat of starvation looms. The only way to save Countermay is to seize undisputed control. Until then, armies march, fed with the ever-dwindling food as they churn farmland into mud with their boots. Can you save Countermay from its invitable doom?

Romance of the Nine Empires is a fictitious interactive collectible card game (CCG) set in the fantasy world of Countermay. In the game, players assume command of one of nine vastly different warring factions — including steampunk aliens, a dark god-king's crusade of conversion, displaced WWII-era American GIs, and a risen empire of the undead — to expand, glorify, or defend their empires. Through its fictitious fifteen-year history, players have shaped the world of Countermay through their individual and collective achievements, and the results are reflected in the story and the current state of the empires.

Romance of the Nine Empires is based on the Legend of the Five Rings CCG and was created for use in the movie The Gamers: Hands of Fate, mimicking the way that L5R tournament results affect the actual story in future expansions of that CCG but allowing the movie creators more freedom to design the game to match the characters in the movie. L5R publisher AEG agreed to be the in-movie publisher of the fictional Romance of the Nine Empires, but as a result of Kickstarter funding for The Gamers: Hands of Fate, it decided to create a real-life version of R9E.

This game represents the 15th Anniversary World Championship Edition of Romance of the Nine Empires, and (to slip into the movie storyline for a second) it holds the decks used by the top-placing players for each faction that made it to the quaterfinals at the 2012 World Championships at Gen Con Indy.

1348, Europe – The Black Death ravages Europe, and your country still has no king after the last one was killed by the plague. The nobility of the land has had enough of you princes never being able to settle for an heir for the country. Therefore, the nobles have begun to interfere with your disputes. On your visits to the various buildings, it may now occur that you meet a noble with a political agenda of his own. In some cases, he welcomes you and helps you in your quest, while in other cases he tries to make life as difficult as possible for you. Will you be able to keep the nobles at your side in your struggles against the other princes so that at last a new, worthy king can be elected?

Rattus Cartus Nobilis, the first expansion for Rattus Cartus (a card game based on the Rattus board game) includes 18 different buildings with players using all or only some of them each game to provide a wide variety of play. This first expansion also includes special cards (Books, Horses, Lances, Privilegs, Wizard Staffs and Diplomats) and extra rat tokens; a second module in this expansion includes noble tokens.

Europe 1349. The Black Death has ravaged for a few years now. The people of Europe nonetheless try to live their lives as normally as possible. The craftsmen still produce their goods and the traders still sell them for the best prices possible, while the swindlers, thieves and raiders still grab whatever they can. In the end, however, the grave robbers might be the ones who profit the most because it doesn't seem like the plague will retire any time soon.

Rattus: Mercatus includes twelve new class cards featuring the characters mentioned above and others. These characters allow you to collect goods and use money to perform special actions.