Freshly Added to BGG - February 8, 2023

The board gaming world is slowly wakening from its winter torpor... Board games get added to the database at an increasing pace!

It's only fair, then, to start with Myriades, a French yet bilingual production. In the game, you reveal a goal card and must arrange your tiles to form a central island showing up the corresponding requirements. Since this is a speed race (you must be the first one to solve the puzzle), I am dubious as to how this translates for the solo mode. And since there are no rules yet, I am just left with no clue (and so are you).

If you're still reluctant to read the post, I'll try to lure you in with aliens abducting all sorts of stuff ranging from cows to platypus: let me introduce Get In!, an indie game to be Kickstarted by publisher Bright Lemming. You can still register as a playtester if you fancy so. It's basically a dice game with a Yahtzee mechanic: you have dice you can re-roll up to three times, and the result limits your drafting possibilities (e.g. with the dice roll shown on the picture, I guess you could get any item or animal card up to a value of 12?).

Since we are getting cosmic, let us dive in further with Fractured Sky, a weird game of competing over floating islands with an army of ships. The game involves deduction and sneaky strategy to confound your opponents - and I'm also told by our sponsors that it's actually a great solo gaming experience to make devious plots of intrigue and deception, hidden behind your little player screen. The game is published by IV games, so expect something deluxified. Also, if you haven't noticed, it should launch on April 11th - presumably on Kickstarter.

You know how I fancy advertising obscure games from all over the world; today is no different and I have a game straight from Serbia, Stars Arcana, which apparently had been advertised at Essen. The game is described as an engine building with lots of cards in your hand, where the goal is to collect stars and other cosmical stuff, because they are worth points in the end. It's apparently infused with real astronomical science and the artwork offers faithful depictions of space mirabilia. If this sounds appealing to you, you will eventually be able to order the game online, at least according to the publisher page.

Not yet on BGG (what is this game doing here then? whatever), Solar Titans (Gamefound link). This is a tableau-based deck-building card game where you create a custom ship with all sorts of cards, play crew cards to activate the systems, and engage in epic fights against other ships. In the solo mode, you face an AI-manned ready-made ship, whose size depends on the difficulty level.

I guess all this sci-fi galore brings us ever closer to the transhumanists' Singularity; at the very least it gets us at Singularity.exe, a cyberpunk-themed, light campaign, and so-called 'deterministic' card game. The pitch is that humans are trapped in the cyber-world, such that the retrieval of a long-lost relic program, named Singularity.exe, is the sole way to get our bodies back (so we can play real board games again!). Ironically, to play it solo, you need an app to run the AI...

I'll end the post with a re-implementation, a sequel, and an expansion. The re-implementation is the X and Write adaptation of Rüdiger Dorn's Istanbul, Istanbul Choose & Write, featuring one of the worst covers I have ever displayed in these posts (too bad, as the city view was truly beautiful). Each turn, you play cards, choosing either Location or Guild cards: Location cards let you perform an action, Guild ones trigger powerful effects but come at a cost. In Location, you can collect resources that you may trade to get richer - because that's the ultimate goal obviously.

We then have a stand-alone (and actually unrelated) sequel, Heart of Ice. This is the second volume of the series initiated with Storm Weavers, a CYOA book featuring tactical fights on hex-grid maps on the side. The reviews of the previous title were lukewarm at best, but who knows, maybe the Sci-Fi one will offer a better setting and better mechanics than its Fantasy counterpart?

The expansion, in case you have missed it from sitting on the BGG hotness for about ten days now, is Tapestry: Fantaisies & Futures. Apart from bringing basically more stuff, it introduced Sci-Fi and Fantasy themes through 10 new civilizations to play with.

I'll end the post with a free PnP, Ibyron, a 36-card game where you must build a village using resources. Cards double down as either buildings you add to your village or workers you use for resources. The goal of the game is to build as many cards as possible - so it's basically a resource-trading puzzle. You can download the whole of it from the BGG files.