Freshly Added to BGG: July 13, 2023

Today's post is full of distant destinations and travel ideas to fit the vacation atmosphere of these days.

From renowned designer Nestore Mangone (Newton, Darwin's Journey, Autobahn...) and newcomer Andrea Robbigni, Journey Through Italy is a game about the dawn of tourism, featuring the Grand Tour that young aristocrats were undertaking across Europe in the late eighteenth century (and which has contributed to the Romantism artistic movement). The game is powered by deck-building and features resource management, engine building, set collection, and map movement. Several paths to victory await, as you will be rewarded for writing books, traveling afar, or just making money.

Another historical game by Nestore Mangone, Stupor Mundi offers you to revive the reign of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, renowned for his tolerance with respect to the different cultures that had been gathered under his crown. In this game, you will build sturdy castles, engage in diplomatic affairs, and develop a tech tree, all powered by deck-building. Quined Games usually go straight to retail.

From the Brazilian publisher, World Wonders is a new take on ancient city building, powered by polyominoes. Each turn, you receive an amount of gold depending on your city's vitality and can play until you spend it all, purchasing new tiles to make your city grow and reach new troves of natural resources. However, to achieve true glory, you need to erect monuments, but these won't grant you any economic advantage (for revenue from tourism you need to wait until the eighteenth century, remember!).

Express Route, published by The Op but already playable on Tabletopia, is a game about managing a bus company across the US. You can rely on a team of specialists to drive your vehicles across the country to fulfill the never-ending delivery requirements of your customers. The game is played through a series of 20 scenarios, all solo compatible. Games by The Op are usually straight to retail, and can mostly be found in the US.

AEG publisher is releasing a title from a new designer from Ghent (the city where I currently work, and yes, you can queue for getting a waffle in the train station if you are hungry in the morning), Waffle Time. You will draft a series of topplings (berries, cream, butter) and distribute syrup on your waffle grid to fulfill a maximum of patterns and other various scoring conditions.

Hiking awaits in Bear Mountain Camping Adventure, a deck-building driven race to the mountain's summit, across campsites, rivers, and unquiet nights. Beware of the bears as they will make you flee downward. The game is set for an upcoming Kickstarter release, and the solo mode, although hinted at by BGG's player count, has not been revealed yet.

Cargo delivery in space is not an unexciting affair, as Chrono Fall intends to demonstrate. As you try to make your way across the vast and empty expanses of dark outer space, you will need to navigate tightly across rifts that rupture the space-time continuum. Little is known about this abstract Sci-Fi game, and the release plans have not been announced yet. The good news for solo gamers is that this has been designed as a fully co-operative game from the start, so the solo mode should feel like a quite natural expansion of the design.

Ecosystem, the game about drafting animal cards with interacting scoring conditions that will determine how thriving and diverse your grid-like ecosystem ends up, is getting a third iteration: after Forest and Coral Reef, meet Ecosystem: Savanna! The herbivores need trees and water, and the carnivores need prey, so you need to balance all these requirements. On top of this, this new volume introduces scavengers, thanks to the addition of vultures and hyenas. The solo mode is designed by Richard Wilkins (aka Ricky Royal) once again, and pits you against an Automa: when you draft cards, two cards are automatically added to the Automa's ecosystem against which you must compete.

Finally, it turns out that for the blossoming Everdell franchise, the All-In ultimate collector box was not the end, and a new stand-alone sequel Everdell Farshore, will invite you to discover new horizons and meet new critters, all with their corresponding meeples: puffins, crabs, ducks, and beavers. On top of this, they may now navigate the open sea thanks to their little wooden boats. The game features the same mechanics as the traditional Everdell with its mix of drafting, worker placement, and resource management, and the towering tree has been replaced by a cardboard lighthouse. Contrarily to the previous volumes, the game will not be produced through a crowdfunding campaign, but is already available in retail for pre-order, with a price tag of a hundred.