Freshly Added to BGG - July 27, 2023

It's the summer lull on KS so Athena and JW can be true to our slacker nature, but the BGG database is very active in the meanwhile and is buzzing with new additions.

Starting with some hope before the downfall: Light in the Dark is a solitaire-only compact dungeon crawler game where you play as a plague doctor, trying to cure the lands from a brutal epidemic (I have some guesses as to where they drew inspiration from). As you engage in various quests and grow in power, you'll also have to face bandits and monsters that bar your path, relying only on your meager weapons and your wits to defend yourself. This seems to be a shrunk-down version of Pest, by the same designer and publisher.

Allow me a complete change of tone and atmosphere with Jakarta Traffic, a pick-up-and-deliver game of racing through the maze streets of Jakarta, capital of Indonesia. You play as a motor taxi driver and must prove that you are the fastest of them all in fulfilling whatever orders come from the various apps you have agreed to serve. Being intrinsically a race I do not see how the game can play solo, but I trust the BGG player count on that one.

Moving a bit westward in Asia, we reach the Blue Mountains in the Indian state of Kerala in India, where Biomes of Nilgiris takes place. The goal of the game is to earn Ecology points by exploring the nature of these lands and saving it while it's still time. To do so, you will explore the board, discover new species by drawing cards, and use appropriate equipment. The BGG page additionally lists scenario/campaign among the mechanisms, so the game may play over a series of chapters/missions. This is the typical game where everyone is trying to protect nature better than others, so it may just be more enjoyable solo.

Alas, given the mindset of our times, all focused on competition, it may be that the only animals in the future will be the robots we make to replace them... Still, they can be heroes, at least so is the theme of Cyber Pet Quest, a fully co-operative game. It tells the quest of Jane, a "lifelike fully-synthetic cat" (I had written "robot cat" but game descriptions do a much better job at making things sound actually appealing), unsurprisingly trying to find his missing owner, Howard (all Howard are cat lovers, as is well known). The game seems to be an action points management-driven dungeon crawler of sorts, where you can upgrade your characters (Jane has all sorts of friends), engage against enemies like the fiendish Prada and the insufferable Punk Girl, and travel across the city to find back this poor old Howard guy. Set for a Kickstarter relase.

Speaking of pets stealing the spotlight, the famous Final Fantasy Chocobos are getting the titular role in Chocobo’s Dungeon: The Board Game, a card-driven game where you go through a series of dungeon boards by navigating tracks. There are six boards, and two additional "boss" boards to go through. It seems to be a solo game at heart, since there is only one Chocobo meeple in the gamebox. Besides this, I know very little, except that it seems set for a late 2023 release in Japan and March 2024 in the US. And I certainly hope that they did not translated the rulebook in French and German only to fail to distribute it properly there.

The next item in stores is pretty mysterious. Entitled The Calling: A Roguelike Game, it starts with a rather convoluted backstory that seems generated by the AIs of old, with no consistency and weird concepts randomly thrown in you can't quite make sense of. Just be judge: "One day while patrolling the marketplace, you witness a child miraculously healed by an old man. The man speaks gibberish about horde and lava-water, then darts into the alleys. Next thing you know, you're being accused of murder by a Suit. Since Horde-infested alleys are just a fairy tale, and you are apparently being framed for a crime you didn’t commit by a corrupt mercenary, you take off after the man in search of the unknown. In The Calling | A Roguelike Game, you are a Market Man, running through alleys and building your character, in hopes of finding a light in the darkness." Apparently, you manage your stats, fight with dice rolls, and get XP to upgrade your character as you try to escape the dungeon (which seems to be a lava-filled marketplace?). Set for a Kickstarter release.

Now we have something based on a massive IP: if Robert Kirkman is mostly famous for his Walking Dead series, he is also the author of a pretty successful (and in my opinion very enjoyable) super-hero comic series called Invincible, which has recently been adapted in an Amazon Prime TV series. And since adaptations are meant to get further adapted, this series is leading us to Invincible: The Hero-Building Game, bound to be expanded as this only covers the first season. This is a bag-building game about fighting off threats and saving civilians - the usual fare of a super-hero then. It has been designed as a co-operative game and plays through a series of scenarios. It will be a straight to retail release.

We often say that super-heroes are the mythology of our times, and Reign of Hades with its super-hero take on Olympian gods, illustrates well how this trend can come full circle. This is a campaign-based dungeon crawler where you play as the Greek gods, trying to escape the Tartarus where Hades has imprisoned them all to reign supreme in the meanwhile. The game boasts an innovative system of dice manipulation to minimize the luck factor. Experience gained through fighting is used to "regain your divinity", that is, to unlock new powers. Although specifically designed for a 2-players full co-operative experience, there will be a "true solo" option. This will launch on Kickstarter, likely in 2024.

Still in the Greek mythology vein, our re-implementation of the day is Argonauts: The Card Game. The publisher, Alcyon Creative, has apparently decided to re-release most of its titles in the form of smaller card games, and Argonauts, the game about Jason's journey to steal the Golden Fleece from the Colchian kingdom, is no exception. By the way, the Argonauts' story is one of the most formidable cross-over of the Greek mythology and is absolutely fascinating. The resulting board game is a simili-adventure game driven by resource management and character activation, and I unfortunately don't know what changes have been made to this system in the card game. From the game's description, you still have an impressive roaster of characters, and you still need to resolve threat cards one after the other, following the events of the mythological tale.

Finally, our PnP pick: Bumblebee, a 9-card game whose files are fully and freely available from BGG. You play as a bumblebee tasked with the pollination of flowers. Each game, you must visit flowers of specified colors in a given sequence, and you do so by placing cards one by one so as to build a route that go through all of them in the correct order. You win if you can fulfill your mission and go back to your nest before all cards have been used.