Freshly Added to BGG - July 7th, 2023

The summer quiet may have touched the KS side of things, but the BGG database is still really hot, with new additions swarming on like an engulfing flow of newly hatched popcorns.

Let us start with la crème de la crème, Avant Carde, a game featuring a new "instant set up device" thanks to its folding board/deck box. Designed by the team to which we owe the Space Invaders-themed Retrograde, Avant Carde is a light deck-building game about purchasing artworks for an exhibit - and the more successful the exhibit, the more money you will make to spend on more artworks, leading to even more stunning exhibits, and so on and so on, probably until an arbitrary fixed number of rounds is reached and the game ends. The game will be on KS on July 17th so, yes, I'm a bit late.

Another crowdfunding that should happen pretty soon is the one for Unreliable Wizard, from Salt & Paper - the game has been announced during their last Gamefound campaign for Witchcraft. This game has been around on BGG for a while, prized by the snobbish connoisseurs who snatched it on the Tokyo game market (and were able to read Japanese), hinting condescendingly to how much an incomparable gem it was that people playing mere mass-marketed games were missing on. Now revenge is at hand! With its stylish pixellated aesthetic, Unreliable Wizards and its lean 32 cards bring you through a dungeon crawl where magic and skills will help you prevail against evil minions. Note aside, it is NOT a new addition to the BGG database. I just included it on a whim.

If Japanese games make you lust after distant islands (sorry I hadn't a better transition), you may want to have a look at Islet, a pretty tile-laying and tile-stacking game about the usual fare of birds, trees, flowers, and whatever. Cute little wooden meeples are meant to draw you in this latest publication by 2 Tomatoes Games, and judging a game by its cover, in each round you will either add new tiles to the island (up to four), and draw back the same number, or move the birds around in search of a good place to spawn their eggs, by paying the required resources. Don't ask me more, this is all that I could find in the game description, which also and unfortunately entails that I have no better info on the solo mode. The game belongs to the same line as Coral, another soloable 3D tile-laying game with similar aesthetics.

Birds and primal nature are one thing, getting out of here is another, and this is why your interest will quickly turn toward Shipyard, a reimplementation of another (eponymous) game by designer Vladimír Suchý. One of the most relevant changes for us is that the game now includes a solo mode, which therefore owes this title a place on this blog. The game is really about building boats in the gloriously industrializing XIXth century atmosphere and seems to tackle the theme with an impressive level of detail, including hiring employees, digging up a canal for the boat to get to the sea, building the boat from bow to stern, fulfilling government contracts, and getting the favor of evaluating committees. I guess we need board games for everyone, including boat construction freaks.

Now if you prefer to turn away from realism and go with some uchronic fanciness, Mutagen depicts an alternative and apparently grimmer "biopunk" version of the 1920s, where biological enhancements are shifting the fate of the world towards a greater depth of chaos and darkness. The mechanics chiefly rely on worker placement where your workers can be bio-engineered to perform the variety of their tasks in a better, more efficient way. This is published by Dranda Games (Solar Storm, Isle of Trains) and set for a Kickstarter release. With some luck, it may be just as affordable as their previous titles.

What's grimmer than a grimmer past? A grim future of course! Which is why Ion Core is here to provide, with a sinister-looking sci-fi aesthetic. Described as a "thematic sandbox game set in a post-apocalyptic dystopian world", the game offers you to lead a desperate faction by exploring a procedurally generated territory in the form of hex-shaped tiles, onboard a ship that is as much your way to salvation as an easy prey for merciless pirates. Actually, in this version of our future, everyone is a pirate, and your very survival hinges upon your own capabilities to plunder and loot. If all of this sounds a bit cryptic and mysterious, then yeah, it is. Just like the release plans for the game.

Going on with a cooperative game about unifying your minds despite communication limits to solve a card-based puzzle... Yes, it's The Brain! Any association with previously exciting games is probably coincidental. It plays solo as well, because apparently, our brain networks are so entangled that communicating proper information from one region to another is just as difficult as coordinating with other people. The best proof of that is how easily we create spurious memories about things that we firmly believe have happened, but that are completely made up by the electrical firing of our neurons. Yep, our mind just likes to play games with us. By the way, back to the point; this is published by 999 games so you will be able to find it everywhere in retail stores in Belgium and the Netherlands. Which makes it all the weirder that the only comment so far comes from a Philippino gamer.

Anyway, where does this lead us? We can't rely on magic anymore (or at least not on magicians, and this has probably always been true). The future looks harsher and more hostile than ever. Our brain may be just as scammy as these spell-making lunatics. But the worst may yet be looming beyond the fragile veil of life... At least if you put any credence into late medieval Italian poetry about the afterlife, and even more in the weird twist the board game Inferno has made on it. The goal of the game is twofold: in Hell, you want to move across the nine circles by scoring infamy points; in Florence, you want to expose and execute sinners for them to be sent to Hell so you can "advance on the Hell registry" and rake in prestige. Wait a minute, this is no late-medieval poetry! Try to score infamy to please the nasty perverse boss, and expose your fellow colleagues' misbehavior to earn even more favor... This is not death, this is the truth of modern corporate life! As for the game, it shall attempt at being crowdfunded through Gamefound.

Now, expansion time! Or fully compatible stand-alone sequel time, if you prefer. Rolling Realms Redux is the sequel of Rolling Realms - except this time, instead of being so self-centric as having each "realm" featuring a Stonemaier Game, the realms will feature other, popular games, that you may only guess for now, hidden under their enticing question marks. You can already join the speculation exercise on BGG, where I believe five games have been found already. Ah! What a better marketing move than celebrating the board game industry in its whole vibrancy!

As for the PnP pick of today, the choice has been easy and I am here to introduce you Road Behind, by Ben Moyrata, designer of the Mechanical Beast, active 1PG member, and also apparently proud owner of a black dog. This game has been designed as a participation in the 2023 Solitaire Print and Play Contest, and can be fully downloaded from the WIP thread. To lighten up the mood, the theme is about raising a toddler during a nuclear winter - and is as such a beautiful and entirely deliberate tribute to the late Cormac Mc Carthy and his key novel, The Road.