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• Fireside Games had mock-up versions of Castle Panic: Deluxe and Castle Panic: Crowns and Quests, which are (as of March 2022) expected to be produced in October 2022 for possible delivery in December 2022.
In its Kickstarter campaign for these items and the larger Castle Panic: Deluxe Collection, Fireside Games had anticipated a May 2022 delivery date, but release delays have been a running theme throughout news from GAMA Expo 2022.
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• Speaking of which, Wise Wizard Games expects to release Robot Quest Arena — a deck-building game of robot combat from Paul Waite and co-publisher Perfect Day Games — in Q4 2022, whereas the Kickstarter campaign had anticipated a May 2022 delivery to backers.
Wise Wizard's edition of KAPOW! — a dice-based superhero combat game from Larry Bogucki, Douglas Hettrick, and Carl Van Ostrand that was funded on Kickstarter in December 2020 — is also expected out in Q4 2022.
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Sunlight through adjacent windows washed out many colors
• A Royal Will from Marlon Fussell of MEGA MINT Games is all about quick bluffing. Each player has a hand of two cards at the start of a round, and you play one card face up for its action and another face down for the coins. All of the hidden coin cards are then revealed, and if players are collectively grabbing more than what's in the pot, the players get nothing and whoever wanted the most coins has to pay two coins to the pot; otherwise, players then receive the coins they wanted. Keep playing rounds until someone hits ten coins.
A Royal Will was released in Q1 2022.
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• Darkridge Reunion, from U.S. publisher Starlux Games, is a murder mystery-style party game in which you are also apparently at risk of being the one murdered.
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• Goryō is a January 2022 release from Andrea Candiani and GateOnGames in which one player embodies a goryō — that is, a spirit of vengeance — that is trying to smash five objects before the other player can determine which object in which room the goryō's spirit is bound to.
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Another sun-drenched image for you
• Fire for Light is a campaign adventure game from Will Sobel and Greenbrier Games in which players have multiple objectives in any one particular story, objectives that might be difficult to achieve due to bandits, the weather, and available tools, among other things. You can craft new tools for various effects and find ways to withstand the weather, with all of your actions having both near-term and long-term effects on how the campaign plays out.
Greenbrier Games stopped its initial Kickstarter campaign for this title and plans to relaunch in May 2022.
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A small sampling of mock-up components
• Batman: The Dark Knight Returns from Daryl Andrews, Morgan Dontanville, and Cryptozoic Entertainment should reach retail outlets before the end of April 2022. This game for 1-2 players allows you to play through the four chapters of Frank Miller's groundbreaking comic series, Batman: The Dark Knight Returns.
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• Aside from visiting the media room, I met with Adam Minton from Funko Games for a playthrough of the tutorial level on Jurassic World: The Legacy of Isla Nublar, the Kickstarter campaign for which ended on April 11, 2022, so possibly I should have written about this session earlier, but here we are.
The gist of the game is that you're arriving fresh on Isla Nublar, which has nothing more than a helicopter landing pad, plans for a visitor center and a genetics lab, and four dinosaurs that are already roaming on the six regions of the island. Each player controls a character, some of which are from one of the Jurassic films and some of which have been created for this game, and during each of the five rounds you will collectively take nine actions, with your character having a bonus effect or action and supplies you discover also giving bonus actions. In our four-player game, each player had two actions, with the ninth action being available to whoever wanted it.
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Each round has an event card — sometimes fixed, sometimes random — and at the start of the round you place a random sector card on each of the board's six sectors. If a character starts in a sector or moves into it, you reveal that card, which lets you know how any dinosaurs in that region will move at round's end, and that's important because carnivores will attack humans and herbivores. (I think herbivores might step on humans, too, but I don't recall.)
Among other actions, you can heal dinosaurs, and this is essential because the death of a dinosaur, not to mention one of the humans, causes consequences, by which I mean the revelation of one or more tokens in the upper right of the board. These consequence tokens are valued 0-2, and if the sum of them ever reaches 5, you lose the game. Thus, you need to build barriers, lure herbivores away from carnivores, heal wounded dinosaurs, and otherwise keep the peace, all while also trying to figure out how you can build the visitor center and a genetics lab, then use the tools in these locations to complete some of your objectives.
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We got lucky with many things large and small in our game, such as revealing a token that allowed us to set up the genetics lab early, with the player who can move efficiently through the lab being the one who set it up. The objectives for the genetics lab and visitor center involved token manipulation, and we didn't need that many turns to put things in the right order. The dice used for dinosaur attacks weren't quite as friendly, but they could have gone worse for us, with only one dino perishing during play.
The other two players, whose names I forgot to write down, were far more into the game than I was, but I think that's mostly because I have no nostalgia for Jurassic Park, the only one of the Jurassic films that I've seen. More generally, as much as I have enjoyed something, say, Frank Miller's Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, I have almost no interest in experiencing it in a different medium. Miller's comic series had such an impact because it took everything you knew about the character and transformed it into a one-off story that actually had a resolution. I have no interest in pretending to be Batman and taking on the mutants, especially since it's been 30+ years since I first read that story. I'm happy to let the comics be comics and the movies be movies, and play a game that's not meant to be anything other than a game.
That's right. Turn your backs on me because I'm done with you!
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