Freshly Added to BGG - August 10th, 2023

Games keep arriving like a galloping flock of gnus about to stomp over Simba. I salvaged whatever news I could.

And with start with conflict, competition, pettiness! Bone Wars depicts one of the most infamous episode of paleontology, the feud between two scholars, avid of fame and glory, that plunder as many dinosaur fossils they could to add to their own pile of discoveries. I guess it's fitted for a merciless worker placement game. Published by the Game Brewer, so expect high levels of production and a matching price tag during the upcoming Kickstarter.

Did you miss Elizabeth Hargrave, peaceful nature-themes, and classy Beth Sobel art? Fortunately for you, AEG is making the magic formula again, adding their own home designer Mark Wooton to the dream team. Undergrove is described as a 3X (you wouldn't want direct conflict and extermination in your games, right?), and offers you to play as a Douglas-fir tree that uses symbiotic mushrooms to spread its seeds all over the forests. It almost sounds like a scary SF picture. To be Kickstarted.

Another peaceful game about domination: I introduce you Cargo Empire, by Taiwanese publisher Moaideas Game Design (which should arrange nonetheless for a worldwide distribution). In this game, your goal is to build a network to deliver goods all over the country, and get rich in the process. What intrigues me is that the game's description states that there is only one action in the game (Transporting cargo), yet you are supposed to build a complex network and manage resources. So, I am not too sure how it works, and there is no info about the solo mode - but to quote them: "Only one can become the king of commerce!"

Next we have Nucleum, another game about achieving supremacy through economic competition. It's set in an "alternate timeline Industrial Revolution" (way to give a fun look to one of the bleakest times of our history), and they came with some convoluted backstory to justify yet another highly complex Euro games about optimizing actions and resources. Designed by Simone Luciani (Tzolk'in, Barrage, Golem), with a really robust and reliable solo mode, since it's due to the man that should make them all, namely the great and only Dávid Turczi. Unsurprisingly BGG has been vivid red hot about it for two weeks by now. It's published by Board&Dice, so a retail release is likely.

Another favorite theme of mine: mercilessly competing with your fellow colleagues to best fulfill the whims of a regal leader. In The Queen's New Capital, the Queen wants a new capital (quite expectedly), and it's up to you to call upon your anthropomorphic animal task force to erect the best city, by balancing wealth, morale, might, and influence. The game is fueled by deck-building mechanics, and features one of the most curious aesthetics I have seen of late (I like all of its components separately save the graphic design, and the cover is quite powerful, but I think they clash with each other rather fitting together satisfyingly). If competing to be a successful lackey appeals to you, you'll have to wait for the upcoming Kickstarter launch. No info on solo, but I suspect an AI, given the racing-for-objectives nature of the gameplay. I may be wrong though.

I can't say I'm much fonder of the next theme, another glamour take on organized crime. Fictions: Memoirs of a Gangster, published by Ludonova (The Siege of Runedar, Shinkansen) is an intrinsically co-operative game set in the 1920s/1930S and about ensuring the success of your honorable family by achieving to be elected the city's new mayor. The game is played through a series of independent scenarios, and each seems to rely on their own objectives, components, and mechanics. At least this one seems to be quite a one-of-a-kind.

After this fanfare of gunfights, what about an alien orchestra? Philarmonix, published by Archona (Small Samurai/Star/Railroad Empires, Magna Roma), sets you as a band manager in space, moving across the galaxy, and performing on interplanetary scenes by splendidly rolling your set of custom dice. It's mostly a worker placement game though. A colorful worker placement game. As usual, you compete with other bands to become the most famous/prestigious/rich/glorified/successful one of them all.

The next game, Shakespeare's First Folio, is actually a bit puzzling as it puts together facts and ideas that I wouldn't have expected to find together. First of all, it is designed by Kevin Beltram, to which we owe a number of war games. But this game is about a competition between printers over the privilege of printing Shakespeare's First Folio (because, due to some temporal paradox, he was already incredibly famous for the centuries to come before writing its first piece). And this is a trick-taking game... which, one resolved, transition into a worker placement game, with dice rolls and resource management. On top of this it has a solo mode. Weird stuff happens.

Weird themes as well. In Purloin, to quote the game's description, "you are a felonious feline who can traverse the space-time continuum". So, what do you do with that? You steal art, obviously, so that you may become the richest cat of the entire timeline! Which draws the attention of the Paw Time Patrol, unfortunately. At the end of the game, the player with the most loot gets caught, so you want to be the second - which, playing solo, is a challenge in its own. This game has not been picked up by a publisher, so it may only belong to a branching future that I just missed this morning, who knows.

Next we have another worker placement game, namely Harvest, which is actually a re-implementation of a 2017 TMG games. The whimsical Fantasy elements have been replaced by smuggish anthropomorphic animals. The goal is to gather resources to build a farm, manage your fields, and ultimately, harvest them - to get money and become the richest of the neighborhood, obviously. The main difference with the original, for us, is that it adds a solo mode. On its way to Kickstarter.

But why struggling and toiling when you can loot and plunder? In Pirates of Maracaibo, a spin-off to Pfister's Maracaibo, you will live the buccaneer life, exploring, hiring a crew, transporting cargo, and burying treasure (weirdly enough this seems to be the only significant difference with regular sea trade). It's a completely new and independent game, only sharing some "concepts" with the original. Retail release.

I'll end with a set of rules to play with a standard deck of cards and a printable grid (here). In Game of Drone, you play cards to move a drone over a grid, by balancing numbers adequately, until you reach your target goal. The game seems chiefly co-op, relying on limited communication in the vein of the Mind and the Game, but offers a dedicated solo mode where you are forced to play all cards of a hand of five adequately. I know, I know, it seems like a very poor taste theme at the light of the times we live by. But I guess if you live in Korea, you don't have the death toll of the latest drone attack on Ukrainian settlements for breakfast.