Transform a Planet Unknown, Defend Yourself from Curses, and Boop Cats

The game pics and announcements from GAMA Expo 2022 are still dammed up in my phone and notebook, so let me open the gates to relieve some of the pressure:

• Portal Games will follow 2021's Dune: House Secrets with a second title, which might not be a surprise to anyone given that the 2021 Dune film is itself only half the story.

Ignacy Trzewiczek and Weronika Spyra's Batman: Everybody Lies, which like Dune: House Secrets is built on the Detective Investigative System, is due out on May 19, 2022.

Portal expects to have Gutenberg from designers Katarzyna Cioch and Wojciech Wiśniewski on the U.S. market in June 2022. This edition of the game will have revised colors and icons from the original Granna release in 2021.

• The quick take on Planet Unknown from Ryan Lambert, Adam Rehberg, and Adam's Apple Games is that the game is Patchwork in space. Here's a longer take:

Quote:

Our planet has run out of resources, and we are forced to move. We have discovered a series of planets and sent our rovers to test their environment with the hope of colonization. Our rovers have confirmed 1-6 viable colonization options.

Planet Unknown is a competitive game for 1-6 players in which players attempt to develop the best planet. Each round, each player places one polyomino-shaped, dual-resource tile on their planet. Each resource represents the infrastructure needed to support life on the planet. Every tile placement is important to cover your planet efficiently and also to build up your planet's engine. After placing the tile, players do two actions associated with the two infrastructure types on the tile. Some tile placements trigger "meteors" that make all planets harder to develop and prevent them from scoring points in the meteor's row and column.

Planet Unknown innovates on the popular polyomino trend by allowing simultaneous, yet strategic turn-based play via the Lazy S.U.S.A.N. space station in the center of the table.

Adam's Apple Games funded this game on Kickstarter in May 2020, which is possibly the worst time to have done so, and the company is shipping the game to KS backers as of the end of March 2022 with an anticipated retail debut at Gen Con 2022.

• At GAMA Expo 2022, Smirk & Dagger Games was promoting two wildly different games, with one of them being Behext, a deck-building game of wizard combat from Curt Covert, Greg Millikin, Jonathan Lavallee, and Melodee Smith that reinvents the gameplay of Smirk & Dagger's first release, 2003's Hex Hex. Behext was crowdfunded on Kickstarter in March 2022 and due out before the end of the year.

The gist of the game is that you're one of six unique battlemages with a specialized deck of curses, counter-curses, and defenses. One player will attack another with a curse, and this gives the attacked player the opportunity to buy a new card, which goes into their hand immediately, but to purchase it they have to spend cards that they might use for defense. If they do ward off the attack, they direct it to someone else, with players suffering damage along the way, which allows others to score.

The other title is boop. from Scott Brady, with this being a two-player game of cats and kittens jumping on a bed. The game board will be quilted fabric, and each player has eight kittens and eight cats in their color.

On a turn, you can jump on the bed with a kitten, and any kittens in adjacent spaces are booped one space away from the new arrival. If they're on the edge of the bed, they get booped onto the floor because kittens are like that sometimes. If you manage to get three of your kittens in a row, you get to add a cat to the household, and a cat will boop both cats and kittens, but a cat is resistant to kitten-booping because they weigh so much more. Get three of your cats in a row to win.