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W. Eric Martin
United States
Apex
North Carolina
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• Eagle Games has announced three new items, with the first two debuting at the Origins Game Fair in late June 2011 and the third item being released in July 2011:
-----* Railways of the World: Event Deck – a deck of 54 event cards taht can be used with any of the Railways of the World games/expansions.
-----* Railways of the World: The Card Game - Expansion, which adds switchers to change track color, tunnels to connect existing cities and more.
-----* Age of Steam: Moon and Berlin Wall, which is a new edition of two AoS expansions that designer Alban Viard had previously released in limited editions.
• NG International, which releases games under the Nexus brand, has posted a preview in Italian of Micro Monsters, the junior version of Micro Mutants: Evolution from the same designers – Francesco Nepitello and Marco Maggi – that's aimed at players as young as six. No release date is mentioned.
• Steve Jackson Games is crossing the gaming and fantasy streams with the announcement of Munchkin: Conan the Barbarian, a 15-card booster pack for use with any Munchkin base game.
• Dutch publisher Rocks Games is following its 2010 debut of a localized version of Neuroshima Hex! with Dutch editions of Famiglia, Neuroshima Hex! Duel and Upon a Salty Ocean, the latter title in cooperation with Giochix.it, which is releasing this game in October at Spiel 2011.
• Speaking of Neuroshima Hex!, Portal has released a Polish version of Don Eskridge's The Resistance that includes a few changes from the Indie Boards & Cards version of the game, as detailed on the Portal website. To start with, the game board that allows players to track missions has been replaced with five mission cards that are placed face up or face down to track success/failure.
Since Portal is all about storytelling – something Ignacy Trzewiczek has stressed many times in his writing! – the company went on to add five missions to each of the mission cards, which means that leaders are recruiting players for specific missions to play up the story element of the game. What's more, the game includes ten character cards, each with six personality traits. At the start of the game, each player draws a card and chooses a trait at random, giving him something to playact and build on as the game progresses.
• In the category of "not really a game but I'm covering it anyway", Belgian publisher SMART has formed a U.S. subsidiary called Smart/Tangoes USA to release its line of logic and puzzle games in the U.S. In years past the SMART line was licensed by Educational Insights, then Fundex, but now SMART is handling everything itself, which I can attest to by the SMART logo on the new copy of Anti-Virus that I purchased recently. I love this line of logic games, so I'm delighted that they'll be more widely availabe in the months ahead.
To put a game spin on this item, I asked Smart/Tangoes' Jim Whitney about the status of Flixx, a new version of a Kris Burm game released in 1994 as Flix by Milton Bradley. Burm has been testing a new version of Flix at Spiel 2009 (I think – possibly 2008), and I was surprised to discover that the game is listed on SMART's website! Whitney was unfamiliar with the game, but alas, after checking into the situation he told me, "Apparently it has not been successful, and there are no plans to release it in the U.S."
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