War of the Ring and More from NG International

NG International, which releases games under the Nexus Games and Tenki Games brands, has announced its lineup for 2011, starting with the highly anticipated return of War of the Ring from designers Roberto Di Meglio, Marco Maggi and Francesco Nepitello.

Originally released in 2004 in eight languages, War of the Ring has a huge following among gamers as noted by the success of the enormous (and enormously expensive) Collector's Edition released in 2010. For this new edition NG International will incorporate some of the changes and additions from the Collector's Edition, namely "an improved perfect-bound 48 pages rulebook, a new board with new graphics (70 x 100 cm in size) and large, tarot-sized cards". This game is due out September 2011.

Wings of War, from designers Andrea Angiolino and Pier Giorgio Paglia, will continue to expand in numerous ways, with two new Airplane Packs (one each for WWI and WWII), new Bombers miniatures (again for both WWI and WWII), Winds of Fire and Ground Attack squadron packs (for WWII only) and the WWII-specific boxed set Rain of Destruction.

Piero Cioni's Magestorm – released in Europe but not yet available in North America – will be expanded by the release of Fallen Shadows in Q3 2011. This expansion adds two new mages to the four included in the base game: "the Water Mage, wielding the healing power of this life-giving element, and the Dark Mage, drawing his power from the realms of frost and shadow".

The second title in the Nexus Designers' Series – the first being Ad Astra – will be released in October 2011 at Spiel, that game being Leo Colovini's Aztlan. Here's the description from NG International:

Quote:

In the mythical Aztlan, ancestral home of the Nahuatl people, rival god-kings engaged in a struggle to rule the mightiest empire and the highest civilization. This new Euro-style game for 3 to 4 players develops during five different epochs, where each player tries to conquer the largest realm, using an intriguing highly interactive mechanic based on majorities and card playing.

The tiddlywinks-inspired Micro Mutants has a spinoff for the junior set in Micro Monsters, due out June 2011. Four armies of alien micro-monsters – Autogators, Bigbears, Finbacks and Turboturtles – will battle it out on Nexus to "close the dimensional gate the rival monsters come from, in an exciting contest, based on strategy and dexterity".

Finally, two games on display at Spiel 2010 but not previously available are shipping to stores in February 2011: Gabriele Mari and Gianluca Santopietro's Letters from Whitechapel, in which one player controls Jack the Ripper and everyone else is a detective trying to track him down, and Piero Cioni's Dakota, which designer Bruno Faidutti describes as "the tensest and nastiest heavy German-style resource management game I've ever played, and probably one of the best".