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NY Toy Fair 2018 Round-up I: Eight Expansions from Gale Force Nine, Shadows in the Forest from ThinkFun, and a Prelude for Terraforming Mars

NY Toy Fair 2018 Round-up I: Eight Expansions from Gale Force Nine, Shadows in the Forest from ThinkFun, and a Prelude for Terraforming Mars
From gallery of W Eric Martin
I zipped to Manhattan for thirty hours this past weekend to visit NY Toy Fair 2018, take pics of whatever I could, then zip home to prepare for a trip to Cannes, France where Lincoln and I will livestream game demonstrations with designers and publishers on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, Feb. 22-24. I hope to publish a schedule of demo times at Festival International des Jeux before we go live, but I have little time to prepare before I head to the airport, so fingers crossed that the wifi on the plane will be working smoothly. Oh, yes, and my wife's birthday was Monday, so that was important, too. Busy week!

As for what was on display at NY Toy Fair 2018, I invite you to survey the BGG Twitter feed should you be interested in seeing everything that I posted — and I still have several dozen more pics that I hope to post soon — but for now here are a few of the highlights, starting with the company that had the strongest line-up across the board:




Gale Force Nine had only a handful of new games to announce, but this one caused a lot of interest, partially because folks wondered what this means for the well-being of Prodos Games' Alien vs Predator: The Hunt Begins, to which I can say only that I don't know. The tweet above gives you all the info that I know at this point, and we'll get more details in the future. Again, thirty hours total in NYC, including for eating and sleeping.




Secrecy is something you encounter again and again at NY Toy Fair, mostly because many game publishers are partnering with the owners of one IP or another, and they can't talk about that IP until the owner gives them the okay. Thus, GF9 announced that it's releasing a D&D game in August 2018, but since Wizards of the Coast has revealed no details of the new setting or storyline, GF9 can say nothing about the game's contents. You learn that you can't play it solitaire, but beyond that...zippo.

Would you prefer that a publisher say nothing unless it can talk about a game in full? Some do this, as with the thing that I did not expect to see at all and that I doubt anyone else would have expected to see, but I can't say a thing about it, so in the end I'm teasing you for absolutely no reason other than to make you feel what the NY Toy Fair experience is like sometimes. You look behind the curtain — sometimes literally — then you place all that info behind a curtain in your mind until you get the "all clear" later.




Star Trek: Ascendancy will see two more player expansions in 2018. No details beyond the covers and the Q2 and Q4 release dates for now, but for some of you those covers will be all you'll need to make a decision.




Each of the Doctor Who: Time of the Daleks expansion packs contains two Doctors, as well as components related to the television series of those Doctors, but you don't need to use those particular Doctors in gameplay. You can shuffle all the location or dilemma tiles together, then just see who ends up doing what where.




Firefly Adventures: Brigands and Browncoats is shipping to stores at the end of February 2018, with each of the two expansions planned for 2018 including two new characters. As I note in the tweet, the paper storage containers in the box are meant to serve as buildings or obstacles in play, which is a neat double use for those items, especially since that means GF9 can effectively have more components than you might expect in the box since the components are themselves storage.

What's more, the entire box bottom can itself serve as a tile in the game, giving you an additional gaming surface, and the box bottoms of the expansions will function in the same way.




Board Game: Shadows in the Forest
I already referred to my most unexpected game above, but I can talk more about my second most unexpected game since ThinkFun was quite open with it, with Shadows in the Forest being a new edition of Walter Kraul's Waldschattenspiel, an obscure German game more than thirty years old that far more people have heard about than ever played.

In the game, one player pushes a lit candle around the board, trying to reveal dwarves with the light because if they're revealed, they can't move until another dwarf touches them and frees them. All players but one represent the dwarves, and to win the game, they must gather together by one of the trees on the game board. The candle player must freeze all of the dwarves to prevent this from happening.

Due to safety regulations in the U.S., Shadows in the Forest will include an electric light rather than a candle, but you can do what you like in your home once you buy the game. Note that the components shown in these images — and almost all images that I shot at NY Toy Fair 2018 — are non-final. The light will be a bit taller in this game, for example, to assist in the creation of sharp shadows on the board. (I watched a short demo of gameplay in a tent in the ThinkFun booth. I was not kidding before about the curtains!) The dwarves of the original game have been replaced with "shadowlings" that will look similar to what's shown below. When a shadowling is revealed by the light, you take off its mask to indicate its frozen status.


Board Game: Shadows in the Forest




Did Fold-it always seem to you like a logic puzzle disguised as a game? If so, now you can rip the mask off and buy it in its naked form. ThinkFun had a couple of other logic puzzle collections on display as well:





Let's close with one of the first pics that I tweeted from NY Toy Fair 2018:




Yes, Terraforming Mars gets another small expansion from FryxGames and Stronghold Games, with Terraforming Mars: Prelude due out in July/August 2018.

This expansion includes new corporation cards as well as new "prelude" cards. Stronghold's Stephen Buonocore explained that each player would begin the game with four prelude cards — possibly acquired via drafting, but I can't recall the details right now — and each player would choose two of them with which to start in play, discarding the other two. Thus, each player has more differentiation from the get-go, leading to more variability from the first round on.

Buonocore added that a larger TM expansion, one that's Venus Next-sized, is currently scheduled for release at SPIEL '18 in October.

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