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Video overviews of many of the games featured in this post will be published on the BGG Express YouTube channel and the individual game pages before the end of February 2020. We're heading to the FIJ 2020 fair in Cannes, France at that time, so we need to clear the "to do" list before adding more to it! Note that the components and artwork shown in the images below is non-final and not necessarily representative of what you'll find in print once these games appear on shelves.
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The short description of Andor Junior by the KOSMOS rep was "Andor, but shorter". The longer description will come in the video overview.
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A short description of Dodo from Frank Bebenroth and Marco Teubner doesn't do the game justice, but here it is: Start the "dodo egg" rolling from the top of the mountain, roll the die to see which components you need to find among the face-down tokens in order to build the first segment of the ramp (with easy and hard modes being possible), then roll for the second segment, etc., until either the egg lands in the boat at the bottom of the ramp or it falls from the path before you can build the next segment.
The magic part of this game is the egg itself, which has an internal mechanism that allows it to roll at a slow and steady rate. When the demo started, Lincoln and I thought that something was wrong with the egg as it lurched forward from the nest, then stopped — and then it moved again, and it kept moving like a child crawling under a bush to sneak up on someone. Words can't convey this experience properly, and the video overview of this game will probably hypnotize you the way that it did us.
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My City is a legacy game from Reiner Knizia, with players laying building tiles on their board to cover areas. Each new tile must touch a tile already on the board, and you have to build around rocks and no part of a building spanning the river. Winners and losers add different stickers to their boards to make things easier or more difficult, and you receive bonuses during play as you surround wells, which can help you fill in gaps.
The back side of the game boards, seen in the lower right, can be used in a non-legacy game for when people just want to play the game without playing through one of the chapters, which all span three games.
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Four Gardens from Martin Doležal and Korea Boardgames features an elaborate four-tier pagoda that provides resources to players during the game based on the sides of the pagoda facing them. As you turn one level of the pagoda, all the higher levels turn as well, so you need to plan for that, while managing your limited resource holding area and trying to complete sets of buildings to score bonuses.
If you jump all the way to the top of one of the scoring paths, then another score in this path pushes everyone else down one level since you can't rise any higher. You can even bump someone's marker off the bottom of a path to keep them from scoring in that color at all!
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Lincoln and I played a game of Zen Garden from Queen Games when we unexpectedly found ourselves with twenty minutes to spare ahead of our lunch break. In the game, you draft a tile from the market for 0-2 coins, then place it adjacent to other tiles already in your display, trying to score points based on whichever scoring tiles are placed where in this particular game. The scoring pagoda comes in multiple layers and allows you to add additional ways to score if you want to tie yourself in knots over exactly which tile might be best.
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In Way 2 Go, one player on each team tries to draw a line that stays on the path, but they're blindfolded and being directed by someone else on their team, who might be directed by someone else, etc. Think TEAM3, but with teams of up to seven players and with a variety of ways for players to communicate in unusual ways.
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