Freshly Added to BGG - June 16, 2023

Last night I had a terrible nightmare, haunted by the guilt I have been feeling ever since I skipped the Freshly Added post last week - too much work, he says! You know, I feel like these posts of mine are, very much like the sacrificial rites of the ancient Aztecs, my own way to ensure the course of the universe, to contribute making things go on, just the way they should. And so, here I was, in front of two god-like figures (weirdly enough in the semblance of Athena and JW), and they claimed: "Come and have a word, slackerish little slug: as you are French, so we have something French to offer to repay your unworthy services. Now contemplate the fruits borne by your pastry-fancying culture and hear our final decree to you:"

And down fell the blade. I didn't wake up. The head plummeted into the basket. And when I looked upon my body... it was that of a running, decapitated rooster. In all seriousness, here is The Gods Will Have Blood, a solitaire-only card game about the time period of French History known as the Terror, because people were executed in wide numbers. Horrified by the bloody spectacle of these beheading deaths, the gentleman Guillotin designed an instrument to make the operation sensibly more cleaner and humane - and so the Guillotine was born. In this deck-building game, you play as a young artist navigating the tumultuous post-Revolution times, trying to cut down your rivals while escaping yourself the fate of the échafaud. I do not know how and when this game will get published - maybe it will be made available as a PnP, as the designer's previous game, Bowie.

I know, you came to board games to be oblivious of the gruesomeness of this world... But you cannot shelter yourself forever in the world of colorful kangaroos floating among the stars - that is, unless you become addict to Kao the Kangaroo, a language-independent Polish game advertised as a must-have for all fans of the eponymous video game. I'm unclear about what you are supposed to do in the board game, except that you traverse a modular board to grab some coins. There seems to be dangerous roaming monkeys and pernicious frogs in addition. And kangaroo meeples. Oh, and of course, the kangaroo is boxing stuff. Obligatorily.

The trip goes on with Galactic Cruise, a game that has been parading on top of the BGG hotness for about a week (but, remember, you heard it here last). It has all the trademarks of a Vital Lacerda game, a big heavy Euro with Ian O'Tool as artist and graphic designer, but it's from three unknown designers/publishers. You play as a company manager organizing trips across the universe, because, let's face it, if we want to go to space, it's only to set up more ways to do business and enrich the biggest corporations even more. It's no small consolation however to be given the opportunity to bathe a bit in the thrill and the profit-making dopaminergic titillation thanks to all these economic management games.

I must admit that my imagination pictures space travel in a way more akin to the one depicted in Demon Ship, a tactical game with minis... that comes in a micro box. In the game, you play as the last survivor of a spaceship unfortunately trapped in an interdimensional portal, from which unfriendly demons are pouring out, only to give you a better opportunity to show what you are really made of. By the way, don't expect a light game; even though the box size is only 6x6 inches (or 15x15 cms for international people), the rulebook has 45 pages, so, it might be heavier than it looks.

A bit of Fantasy now! Wizard's Loot is a card-driven dungeon crawling, with dice rolling and loot to plunder as you explore the dungeon of a powerful and wealthy wizard. Very few details have been given, but the game has been designed as fully co-operative, so at least there is no reason to worry about its soloability. The Gamefound page is already up.

Probably planned to be released right when people will start unboxing their big deluxified copy of Kinfire Chronicles across countless over-enthusiastic videos on the Internet, and before they start losing interest after excitedly instagramming the first two scenarios, Kinfire Delve: Vainglory's Grotto might appear on Kickstarter, although this is pure speculation on my part. Designed for 1-2 players by Kevin Wilson, your goal is to face 4 challenges (out of 52 total, to ensure replayability, or at least sell the game as contentful), with the caveat that all challenges are color-coded, and that you may only use skill cards whose color matches that of the challenge. Dice are involved as well, probably to strengthen the dungeon crawler feel.

But enough with demons, grottos, and deadly dungeons: let now Arcade Puzzle Ninja Nin-nin bring in some pop and colorful rhythmic moves! Although the game comes in Spanish, it seems largely language-independent. This is purely a puzzle, with a grid of nine cards to manipulate so that a row is entirely made of ninjas sharing the same pose. To do so, you may swap cards, use the action of hidden ninjas, or randomly draw new ninjas to replace those in your grid. Completed lines are set aside and replaced with new cards, and you play in this fashion until the main deck gets exhausted, trying to maximize your points.

The closest thing I have to ninjas would be smurfs. They are sneaky, and they live in a Hidden Village. What, you never heard of the Ninjas' hidden village? Go figure. Anyway, smurfs - or, in true good French, schtroumpfs. I have once read an essay on smurfs describing how their universe can be regarded as a totalitarian utopia: they blindly follow their leader, reduce the role of women to pleasing the eyes of the other smurfs, and engage on a daily collective work by building a giant dam whose purpose seems to only cement the social bond and the overall obedience towards the authority figure of Papa Smurf, who by the way a wears a very Stalinian name. Anyway, please excuse my digression, but we know absolutely nothing about the game, save the designing team, the French Kaedama collective, already behind the recently crowdfunded Dead Cells. The minimalist BGG description solely mentions resource collection in order to rebuild the village.

You probably heard it already, but Challengers!, no less than one of the three nominate for the 2023 Kennerspiel des Jahres, is already getting a stand-alone sequel, appropriately named Challengers! 2. It comes with seven new factions to replace/mix up with those of the first game, as well as new cards granting players asymmetric starting abilities. There doesn't seem to be much news for the solo player, and the base game did not have the reputation to be particularly interesting when played the solitaire way.

And for today I'm adding a new category: the "not a game" category! Or is it a game? Hard to figure out. It's called Schrödinger, it's only being produced in Brazil, and the only components are five mysterious meeples that represent a black cat, two flasks of poison, and two water drops. Will you pierce the mysteries of the Quantum world?