Unbag Your Guardians, Build a Venn Diagram, and Pass Dinosaurs to Others

The GAMA Expo 2022 coverage continues will still more game pics and announcements. Amazing how I can see so much in such a short time!

• French publisher Catch Up Games had a few upcoming releases on hand to show to potential publishing partners, starting with Frédéric Guérard's Les Gardiens de Havresac, a competitive game for 1-4 players in which you each have a player board on which guardians will rebuild castles, collect fairies, open treasure chests, and defeat monsters.

In each of the five rounds, you pull guardians from your bag one by one; each guardian has their own movement and ability. The first guardian starts at the castle in the center of the board, then the next guardian starts from wherever that first one moved to, and so on. As you rebuild castles, you gain additional starting places for future rounds, which is good since monsters and fairies pop up at random locations and you can't reach everywhere from the center of your board. At the end of a round, you can acquire new guardians, who then get added to your bag to give you a larger group for the future.

Both the player boards and the guardians are double-sided to give you more variety of gameplay. Les Gardiens de Havresac debuted in France on March 25, 2022.

• Each player also their own player board in Orichalque, a design for 2-4 players by Bruno Cathala and Johannes Goupy, the team behind 2019's Queenz: To Bee or Not to Bee (which I previewed here).

Each turn, you choose an action card and a land tile from the display, with the four actions allowing you to recruit hoplites, produce orichalcum (a legendary metal from Greek mythology), construct temples that grant powerful bonuses, or fight monsters infesting your island (and preventing you from placing temples where you want).

You can win favors from titans by creating an area of their favorite landscape; each titan has a bonus ability, but more importantly it also counts as a point while you still have it. Temples occupy four spaces — one of each landscape type — and also grant a point, as do the orichalcum tokens you can forge. Whoever first has 5 points and no monsters on their island wins.

Orichalque is scheduled to debut at SPIEL '22.

• Fabien Tanguy's Cubosaurs seems similar to 2018's CuBirds, but aside from both of them being card games with playful graphics from Kristiaan der Nederlanden, they are not related.

In Cubosaurs, you will build up a collection of dinosaurs, each with their own scoring rules showing positive or negative points based on how many you've collected. On a turn, you have to keep the hand of cards given to you and add those cards to your collection, or you pass them along to your neighbor, but to do so you must add to that hand a card from your collection that doesn't match any of the cards already included. Maybe you'll get rid of a negative card, but will that card be positive for your opponent? Maybe you can pass them a poison hand that they can't pass on since their collection has only the cards already included in the hand?

Cubosaurs is due out in Q3 2022 in France.

• Other titles coming from Catch Up Games include a definitive edition of Masato Uesugi's Paper Tales that includes the base game and two expansions. Yes, two! The second expansion will also be available separately for those who already own everything else for the game.

Les Trésors du Pharaon ("The Pharaoh's Treasures") is an expansion for Sobek: 2 Players from Cathala and Sébastien Pauchon, which debuted in 2021 in France and is due out on May 25, 2022 in the U.S. from Pandasaurus Games.

At the end of 2022, Catch Up Games will release a new character pack for The LOOP from Maxime Rambourg and Théo Rivière, with that pack containing its own deck of cards.

French editions of Brew and Dinosaur Island: Rawr 'n Write are due out from Catch Up Games on, respectively, May 6, 2022 and June 2022.

• I've already covered Smash Up: Disney Edition and Disney Sorcerer's Arena: Epic Alliances Core Set, two splashy IP-based games from The Op, but the company also previewed the lower-profile party game Venn that's playable by two or more people and due out in Q2 2022. My summary of the game:

Quote:

Your goal in Venn is to get your teammates to guess a secret code first. Twelve word cards will be laid out at random, and the code that the cluegivers see has three numbers on it from 1-12.

Three large plastic circular overlays in yellow, blue, and pink are laid out on the table, with the circles overlapping to create a large Venn diagram. Each cluegiver has a hand of cards showing absurdist imagery, and they'll take turns placing cards into various sections of the Venn diagram to try to give clues to their teammates about the words indicated by the code.

I probably don't need to say this, but obviously this game could be played with Dixit cards and Dixit could probably be played with cards from this game. (Someone has created a GeekList for all such games, yes?)

Should you want even more IP-based games, The Op will oblige with Monopoly: The Dragon Prince, Monopoly: David Bowie, and Monopoly: Britney Spears, among other releases.

• In addition to highlighting Uwe Rosenberg's Bohnanza: 25th Anniversary Edition, which was released in the U.S. in March 2022, AMIGO gave a few teasers for future releases, such as the English release of Roberto Fraga's Magnefix in late 2022. (AMIGO released this game in Germany in 2020.)

AMIGO plans to introduce a line of "My First AMIGO" games, presumably including My First Bohnanza, which first appeared in 2015, and it will have a new Saboteur game in which you are once again trying to collect gold, then escape from a situation.

Finally, AMIGO will have a new game from Richard Garfield that the representative described as "King of Tokyo-style" in that you're trying to directly defeat the other players.