Rediscover Martian Languages and Regift Horrible Presents

• On October 9-10, 2020, German publisher Spielworxx will host ConWorxx — an online streaming event in English to highlight its late 2020 releases and to give a sneak peek at its 2021 line-up. (I had posted an overview of Spielworxx's 2020 and 2021 releases in October 2019, but the line-up for 2021 has changed somewhat over the past year.)

Titles to be featured during the event are The Grand Trunk Journey, The Cost, Griffintown, Tharos, 1837: Saxony, and Squaring Circleville.

• That latter title comes from designer Matt Wolfe — who I'll note is local to me and who I've played games with many times — and Wolfe and Julio E. Nazario have just signed a new design with Atheris Games.

I poked Wolfe for a few details, and he wrote, "What I can say now is that the core loop of the game has a worker placement phase, then a worker drafting phase from the locations where the workers were placed. You usually won't get back the same workers you just used, and workers are cards that all have different stats and bonus abilities." On top of this, players are working on story cards that embody basic plots — The Quest, Overcoming the Monster, etc. Says Wolfe, "The stories can cause players to sometimes work together and sometimes be at odds with one another. You might have a Tragedy story card that makes you the villain against the other players, for example."

• But before that title comes out, Atheris Games plans to release Ruins of Mars from Don Riddle in Q4 2020 following fulfillment of a Kickstarter campaign (link) that ran in October 2019.

Ruins of Mars is a 1-4 player game that plays as follows with more than one player:

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The year is 2179, and Earth's future seems bleak. Years of pollution have tarnished the landscape, and the world's supplies of natural resources have dwindled to abysmal levels.The use of electric vehicles, solar technologies, and other energy-saving solutions have slowed the problem, but the long-term abuse on the planet by previous generations has been hard to reverse. Most Earthlings seem to have given up hope, yet a group of optimistic explorers are trekking to Mars, which some believe may turn around their fate.

In search of knowledge, these explorers hope that understanding the demise of alien populations can assist them with preventing or at least slowing the rapid deterioration of Earth. They'll need to replicate Martian technologies, translate their languages, and avoid gaining too much radiation along the way in order to end up with the most prestige and save Earth as they know it.

In Ruins of Mars, players compete to build out their arsenal of knowledge, attempting to understand the languages of ancient civilizations that colonized Mars and made it a hub of economic activity. The game is played around a board with five locations and eleven communal action tiles that are laid out at random underneath the board as evenly as possible.

On a turn, you choose one of the locations, optionally pay to shift an action tile from an adjacent location to the active one, take the action of the location — the effect of which will be based on the tiles below that space — optionally replicate alien tech by paying resources and adding it to your board for personal use, then reallocate the action tiles from the active site in a mancala-like fashion.

Over the course of the game, you learn the Martian languages and re-discover and study their technologies, which come in three levels and multiple classifications and which grant you special abilities. Along the way, you might pick up radiation from various actions, and you'll want to ditch that if possible so as not to lose points in the final scoring, which is mostly based on the tech you've assembled and your skill with languages.

• Another title coming from Atheris Games in Q4 2020 is White Elephant, a 3-8 player card game from Michael Mihealsick. Here's an overview of how it plays:

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White Elephant is a gift exchange card game, and as might be expected for anyone familiar with a "white elephant" exchange, the gifts are terrible — except if you can complete a collection of them, that is.

Each gift is a suit of cards numbered 0-10, and you want the lowest score possible. You collect cards by choosing them from the "gift exchange" in the center of the table or by trading for cards already taken. If you trade, you must place a trade chip in the center of the table, with this chip going to the player who chooses to take all remaining cards from the gift exchange. The round ends once each player has cards in front of them.

Aside from having low numbers, you can lower your score by having a collection of gifts as then each gift in the collection has a value of 1 instead of its indicated value. A collection, however, is determined by having a majority of cards in the set, so if others steal cards from you, they might also knock you out of contention for a collection...

Sample cards