• Let's start with Remember Our Trip, a puzzle-y, (sort of) town-building game from designers Saashi and Daryl Chow and publisher Saashi & Saashi. Here's an overview of the setting and gameplay:
In the game, each player has an individual image board, while everyone shares a common map board. Each of the twelve rounds of the game starts with the revelation of a "memory card", which shows one of six patterns that players can build on their image board with image tokens that they draft. Over multiple rounds, you'll compile image tokens next to one another, and if you have the right tokens in the right shape, you suddenly "remember" the building that matches the shape and image, placing that building on the shared common map and scoring points for it. You can additionally score points for completing buildings with image tokens that match buildings remembered by others, i.e., that they placed on the common board earlier. You've now remembered that building, too!
Each player also has objective cards and photo memory cards, and you can score points for satisfying them. If you can't fit all of your image fragments into play, you lose points for scattered thoughts. For more difficult play, you can use the 7x6 area on the Kyoto or Singapore game board instead of the regular 7x7 area.
• Oink Games seemingly releases a new title at each TGM, and for this show it has a new design from founder Jun Sasaki, a 2-4 player titled Fafnir that falls into the bucket of "games in which you trade things to collect things that you might trade again in the future". Some details:
Once a certain number of stones have been discarded in Fafnir, the round ends, and everyone scores for the gems that they've collected. Gold is worth 1 point each no matter how many have been collected, so go for gold if you want to play it safe. As for the five colors of gems, whichever one appears most frequently is worth 3 points each, while the secondmost frequent color gem is worth 2 points each, and all other gems are worth -1 point each.
• To round out this round-up of titles from established JP designers, let's cover two upcoming games from Hisashi Hayashi of OKAZU Brand, starting with Goat 'n' Goat, a card game for 2-5 players with rules that I've roughly translated as follows:
In Goat 'n' Goat, a.k.a. やぎ山, you want to combine your goats to conquer the tallest mountains possible, but goats only like to line up in certain ways. The game includes goat cards in three colors, with numbers ranging from 1-5 and with more low numbers than high; the game also includes mountain cards in three colors, with the values ranging from 3-9.
Players start with 3-5 cards in hand, and six cards are laid face up on the table. On a turn, you play one or more cards from your hand that all have the same number, whether of one color or more. If you don't have cards of this color or all the cards of this color are equal to or less than the number played, then you add these new cards to the stacks in front of you, with each color going into its own stack; if the number played is lower than the top card in a color stack, then you place all previously played cards of this color in front of you face down as penalty points, then start a new stack of this color with the cards just played.
On a turn, after playing cards, you can choose to discard cards of a color to collect a mountain card in the same color that has a lower value. Thus, to collect the 3 blue mountain, you must discard four or more blue goat cards that you've collected in front of you.
Once you've gone through the deck twice (with 3-5 players) or once (with two players), the game ends. You tally all mountain points you've collected, then lose 1 point for each penalty card in front of you. Whoever has the highest score wins!
• The other Hayashi title from OKAZU Brand is the party game Distance from Here, which is for 2-8 players and which appears to have only Japanese rules despite the location cards also having English text. Here's what I know about the game right now:
With only two players, Distance from Here is played as a co-operative game instead of as a competitive one.