Freshly Added to BGG - July 22, 2023

All aboard! The summer trip goes on this week, with the usual batch of novelties!

Let's start soft with Spellbloom, a tableau building game with a light "magic Fantasy theme", in which you must establish yourself as the best mage of the neighborhood in order to be granted the privilege to see a mystical flower blooming - and it does so only once in a millenium, so you really don't want to miss that. Each round, dice are rolled, which you can use to learn spells, that both grant you knowledge points (the thing that prove you are a good mage) and ways to manipulate dice. The publisher is established in the Baltic states (Latvia/Estonia/Lithuania), and I do not know whether this particular game will be distributed beyond their borders.

Sticking with the thin veneer of Fantasy themes, we've got Portals, an abstract tile-placement game by Uwe Rosenberg. Placing hex-shaped tiles allows you to collect magical energy, which you need to open portals toward mystical lands - the in-game synonym for 'to win'. A threatening "2 players" is plastered on the box, but apparently Good Old Uwe will provide to the solitaire crowd once again, at least if we are to believe the BGG players count. The game will be published by an obscure German publisher, so there should be chances to get it there at least.

Next we have Midnight Guardians, a set collection game with a tower defense twist. You play as a Midnight Guardian, tasked with the protection of the critters that inhabit Shady Valley (is this a veiled easter egg to the Oniverse?). Zumoffa, Lord of Night, incarnated as a devastating Wall of Pain, is sweeping over the valley, consuming the critters it meets. To save them, there is but one way: putting them to sleep while it's still time, and to do so, you need to cuddle and satisfy their needs. Food and comfort items become then the most valuable resources in these dire times. There is so far no info regarding the release model of this title.

In 2014, Medieval Academy got released, an area-majority game driven by card play and drafting, and did achieve some meager success, but was mostly forgotten. Nonetheless, it strikes again with its re-implementation, still named Medieval Academy, with a bigger board, fancier wooden components, and most of all: anthropomorphic cats instead of silly cartoonesque knights. The theme is to get trained in six different disciplines (hence the "Medieval Academy" title) to eventually succeed at the corresponding exams. Apparently it's a French-only retail release, but the game is fully language-independent.

Fantasy in a broad sense is also the overall frame of Storyburg, a game in which you play as a famous character from the children literature: Dorothy, Alice, Peter Pan, or Little Nemo (who, as I have found out, is not a "Junior" version of the ruthless Nautilus captain). The game advertises deck-building, hints of dungeon crawling, and a "pick-your-own-story" feature, whatever that means. This is a fully cooperative game, and solo play looks to be a natural extension of the system. If this game looks up to your tastes, know that it should be Kickstarted at some point.

We shall end our Fantasy streak with Gates of Niflheim, a more savage title set during the Christian faith expansion through the ancient Viking lands. A group of Christian has just unraveled an ancient tomb, re-awakening the evil sealed within it. The Church, alarmed by this new impurity, sends a small force of elite holy soldiers, which will have no choice but to co-operate with the fierce and pagan warriors that desperately attempt to defend their lands from this long-forgotten plague. As for the game itself, it is a skirmish minis game, played on a book which serves both as a narrative support collecting rules specific to each locations, and as a collection of maps on which to wage battle: where you exit a map will determine which page you should play next. The game will likely be crowdfunded through Gamefound.

Designers Adam Kwapiński (Nemesis) and Michał Gołębiowski (Destinies) have teamed up to offer a board game version of one of the most renowned RPG campaign of all times (according to some random BGG user on the game's forum), Horror on the Orient Express. As the train steamrolls at full speed through the Dreamlands, you must fend off hideous monsters, unmask infiltrated cultists, and escape a hunting vampire. To achieve all this, you must develop skills, talk to passengers, gather clues, in a gameplay that intertwines deck-building and narrative choices. The game should be released through a Kickstarter campaign.

After all this Fantasy and Cthulhuesque mad race against insanity, a cozier title will certainly feel like a relief. Sunset Over Water, the peaceful grid navigation game from First Pencil Games, is getting a sequel, Snowfall Over Mountains. I know very little about it, but unless they really wanted to be misleading for that one, we should expect something in the vein of Sunset Over Water, that is, a chill experience with an overall soothing natural theme and light mechanics to give you a relaxed gaming moment. This will be released through a Kickstarter as well.

My final title is Diluvium, from Nuts! Publishing, a light 4X game where you lead the remnants of your civilization after barely surviving the flood: the world is now an unknown archipelago, ripe for you to explore and conquer. Each turn, you choose between four actions, explore, settle, produce, or engage, which echo each of the four Xs of the usual civ-game formula. The solo play offers a branching campaign that will grant you the opportunity to develop your empire over a series of games.

I'll end with PnP time, and today, we have two of them, because last week, there were no PnP at all (and I had promised a bonus title to one of our readers who most accurately noticed there was one game missing from the usual list of ten - sloppy me). The first one is Firedice Island, clearly a shrunk-down version of Fireball Island. It plays with only 9 cards, a bunch of dice and cubes, and all you need to print can be found in the BGG files section.

The second game is also themed around an island: in L'île maudite (yes, it's a French game, and it means "The Cursed Island"), you play as a castaway on a far away island, and you get 18 days (read: rounds) to explore the island and find what you need to build shelter and a new boat in order to escape the curse. The main mechanic is dice rolling, and the files are available (in both French in English) on BGG. You can get the English rules, but the three sheets to print are only found in the French file.