News from Clever Mojo: Factions for Alien Frontiers & Princes of the Dragon Throne

News from Clever Mojo: Factions for Alien Frontiers & Princes of the Dragon Throne
Video Game Publisher: Clever Mojo Games
U.S. publisher Clever Mojo Games had a huge hit on its hands in 2010 with Tory Niemann's Alien Frontiers, the only drawback to the game seeming to be its unavailability on the wider market.

Clever Mojo currently expects the second edition of the game to be available by the end of April 30, 2011 and its preorder window for ordering directly from the publisher – at a discount and with bonus items – ends March 15.

One expansion in the works for Alien FrontiersOuter Belt – has already been announced, but no release date has been set. A second expansion, and one possibly hitting print ahead of Outer Belt, is also being developed. Here's what you can expect to find in Alien Frontiers: Factions:

• Ship and colony tokens for a fifth player.
• An additional orbital facility available to all players.
• Factions (thus the name), with each faction providing its owner a special ability and new locations under his control. One faction, for example, is Gaia Reborn, which allows the faction owner to use a 5 or 6 at the Terraforming Station. It also provides a docking space that anyone can use to remove a ship already docked at the Terraforming Station; to do this, a player docks a ship of any value and pays one fuel to the faction owner for the privilege of using his faction facility.
• Agendas, which are hidden objectives that allow a player to earn bonus points at game's end when the agenda is revealed.
• New Alien Tech cards, such as the Lunar Tunneler, which will allow its owner to pay one fuel to receive an extra ore when using the Lunar Mine. This card's discard power will send all ships docked at the Lunar Mine to the Maintenance Bay, which can be useful when the Mine is clogged with high value ships.

As with Outer Belt, Factions does not have a release date set, but Clever Mojo's W. David MacKenzie told me that the date "will likely be the end of 2011 or early 2012".

Another release for 2011 in the works from Clever Mojo is Princes of the Dragon Throne, a deck-building game in which players need to defeat the Dragon King, then any other Princes who survive the final battle, in order to claim the Dragon Throne. To build their decks, players recruit cards from a row of dragon cards or citizen cards, with only a handful of cards being available at a time. As players buy (or don't buy) prospects for their decks, these cards disappear and are replaced by new choices from face-down decks. The game also includes agents that you place in another player's deck in order to poach goods from him. For a more detailed explanation of agents and game play, head to this February 2011 post on DiceHateMe.com.

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