Board Games
The Hot List! Late 2022 to Early 2023!
An update on tabletop games coming soon to retail and crowdfunding.
Hello, my fellow gamers!
Today I will be updating the Hot List with games that are expected to launch on crowdfunding soon or hit retail. Games that have already launched on crowdfunding or hit retail will not be considered for this list. The Honorable Mentions will include games that might be good (but we don’t know much about them yet) and games that might interest others but don’t quite interest me enough to include them in my Top 10.
Honorable Mentions
Ceres
A game of asteroid mining between competing corporations. This has a VERY similar theme to a game higher up on this list, but there is no reason to think Ceres won’t provide its own unique experience.
Ceres is a 1–4 Sci-Fi worker placement game where players take the role of an Asteroid Mining Corporation in the near future and try to outplay their opponents and rule Ceres! The game consists of 3 rounds that represent 3 years in Ceres and the respective full business cycles of the corporations. Players can choose among a variety of actions including launching mining probes to the Asteroid Belt, trading raw materials, constructing and upgrading their core facilities as well as expanding the colony of Ceres, improving their technology through research and liaising with the Mars council in order to exploit their power even more!
Ceres has been co-developed with an astrophysicist for the best possible thematic applications and brings a couple of innovative twists to the worker placement genre!
Patriot
A game by Anthony Kirkham. Little is known about it except that it has betrayal, strategy, and a lot of action. The Kickstarter preview page has beautiful box art. This could be hit or miss.
Sankokushin: Five Sacrifices
The progress toward a release has been slow. I mean really slow. I can’t in good faith call it a most-anticipated for this year when I’m not confident we’ll even see it this year.
In any case, it’s a highly produced Boss Battler game with an active world element where events and quests are “time-sensitive”. The art is something you’ll either love or hate.
Tainted Grail: Kings of Ruin
The sequel to the much-beloved narrative & cooperative campaign game is coming back to crowdfunding with a new twist. If you’ve already gotten through all of the content of T.G., I’m guessing this is an automatic back.
We are the Orphaned Tribes.
We are the Kingless Folk.
Abandoned at the wrong side of Avalon, beyond clouds of Wyrdness and ancient walls of Tutahan.
Yet, we survived, clinging to the strips of desolate land. In the centuries that followed, three great heroes were born out of our struggles. Each of them embodied our pain, determination — and sins.
Claudyne, the Unknighted.
Amberqueen Veneda.
Nonus, Bishop of the Deep.
One by one, they traveled east, following the whispers of the Crimson Crucible and the visions of the sword of legend. Their journey transformed them, imbuing them with powers not intended for humans.
One by one, they failed to find Arthur, the one and true king… and yet, we now have kings of our own. The Kings of Ruin.
Tabriz
Not a lot is yet known about this one but it’s the follow-up after 3 really successful (if not on the lighter side) games by Crafty Games. Let’s see if they can keep up their success after Calico, Cascadia, and Verdant!
In the sleepy English countryside, life continues undisturbed as it has for centuries. It is up to you to travel to every corner of this land, bearing the promise of modernisation, accommodating the oddly specific demands of the locals, and ushering in the age of steam.
In Village Rails, you will be criss-crossing the fields of England with railway lines, connecting villages together, and navigating the complex and ever-changing demands of rural communities. Connect stations and farmsteads to your local network while placing your railway signals and sidings ever so carefully. Meet the exacting standards of cantankerous locals planning strangely specific trips, and weigh their demands against your limited funding. There is much to balance in this tricky tableau-building card game of locomotives and local motives.
#10 Terra Nova
This one might not be for me but I can see the appeal and I think this will be another big hit for Capstone Games. This is to be a more accessible Terra Mystica-style game.
Terra Nova is a simplified version of the strategy game Terra Mystica. In the game, up to four players each control one of ten factions, each with different abilities. Compete against one another to explore new territories in peaceful competition, erect buildings, and achieve certain goals from round to round. Use your faction’s special abilities in a clever way to control the largest territory at game’s end and finish with the most points.
#9 Great Western Trail: Argentina
The next game in the line of relaunched cowboy rondel euros by Alexander Pfister. This one will have some different mechanics and new resources.
In Great Western Trail: Argentina, you own a vast estancia in Argentina at the end of the 19th century, and you will need to travel the plains of the Pampas with your cattle to deliver them to the main train station in Buenos Aries.
Great Western Trail: Argentina features gameplay elements similar to Great Western Trail such as deck management, the rondel mechanism, and the ability to upgrade your player board, along with twists on these elements and new features.
The player board features a new type of worker — farmers — and different paths await on the game board to confront you with more choices. Will you take the road with buildings or a path past farmers? Maybe you’ll have the chance to use your cows — well, the strength on your cow cards — to help farmers, getting them on your side and adding grain, a new type of resource, to your income, with grain being used for boat and city tiles.
Perhaps you can unlock shortcuts that allow you to deliver your herd to Buenos Aires more quickly. Sure, you’ll forfeit the use of action buildings, but maybe you can catch others unaware, with the ships leaving before they deliver. The timing of reaching the central train station to deliver your herd has never been so crucial, and valuable bonuses await on the city’s port tiles.
Money is easier to get in Great Western Trail: Argentina, but you have more to manage in terms of action options, shortcuts, and cards (including the new exhaustion cards), so the challenges won’t let up.
Great Western Trail: Argentina also includes a solitaire challenge in which Pedro is waiting for you to try to beat his score.
#8 Stonesaga
This one really has me intrigued. It has the potential to be a veryunique experience and I’m eager to learn more about how the campaign can play out.
Stonesaga is a cooperative, campaign style, survival crafting board game set in a unique, persistent world shaped by your choices. It is designed by Max Brooke (Star Wars: X-Wing 2nd Edition, Legend of the Five Rings RPG) with Luke Eddy (Star Wars: Legion).
Generational Storytelling
In Stonesaga, you unfold the epoch-spanning story of the people of a remote glacial valley, guiding multiple generations of characters who make a life there amidst harsh conditions, wondrous mysteries, and giant monsters.Each game session covers one generation of people within a society, continuing from the last and permanently changing the valley in various ways based on in-game events and the players’ decisions.
Cooperative Survival
Stonesaga follows a certain rhythm: faced by a new opportunity or crisis, the people of the valley must meet their society’s new needs. Meanwhile, the valley’s other inhabitants — immortal beasts — will seek to fulfill their own needs as their instincts dictate. You will have to navigate both sets of challenges, using might, dexterity, conviction, and awareness to survive as a tribe in the wild.Crafting & Building
Stonesaga introduces a completely new discovery based crafting mechanic. Do you think that a sharpened stone and stick could combine to create a spear? Use the crafting action and find out. You will need to discover the properties of various crafting materials as you expand your crafting “recipe” knowledge.Work together as a community to build your village together. From a simple fire pit and tent to a forge and library, create a civilization that lasts the generations.
Exploration & Discovery
Stonesaga rewards exploration and chooses to let you experience the world in a unique way each play session. Working on the established rules of the world, you will discover unique materials, monsters, and areas of the world that you won’t be directed towards. Stonesaga lets the curious and inquisitive thrive.Persistence
Designed for drop-in, drop-out play and flexible playgroup availability, Stonesaga can be played by one group from start to finish, played with a rotating cast, or even passed between groups seamlessly. Components are sometimes permanently altered, but never removed or discarded entirely.
#7 Horseless Carriage
The newest offering from Splotter Speelen offers a game time of 180–240 minutes!!! This will not be for everyone.
“This year, we want the best, or nothing at all. We don’t want tradition. We want to live in the present, and the only history that is worth a tinker’s damn is the history we make today.” The famous founder is standing in front of his team giving a motivational speech. “You all know our first customer was a lunatic, and the second had a death wish. So they bought our brakeless bangers. So there were a few accidents. But the only mistake is the one from which we learn nothing. This year, customers demand safety. Of course, active safety features include rapid acceleration for safe overtaking! I know it will be hard to add the new motorblock section to the factory, but before you say you cannot do something, try it! To every engineer, every planner, every mechanic, and every salesperson in this great company I say: If I can dream it, you can do it!”
Horseless Carriage is a game about the dawn of the automobile, a time when cars were invented, and no one quite knew yet what this new contraption would look like and what features would be essential. Early cars sometimes used levers or pedals to steer and a wheel to accelerate. Brakes were not always seen as essential, but sometimes an outside spot to take along an onboard mechanic was. This early, super innovative period occurs in the development of many new product categories. Players are cast as aspiring industrialists trying to find out what features the public will value when buying these new, expensive, and utterly unfamiliar horseless carriages.
#6 Millennia
I’m always looking for the “perfect” civilization-builder, and this one has got my attention. We know little at this point beyond a couple of images and this description, but I’d love it to be the next great Civ game!
Millennia is a competitive civilization game for 1–4 players.
The game’s setting spans a millennia, namely a time span of thousands of years. Players go through eight ages from the ancient, to medieval ages, to the modern age and finally to the near future and the player with most victory points wins. The game features game board and more than 300 cards, with more than 200 unique card illustrations with motifs from different ages.
Each age has several phases. The four most important phases are:
+ Tech phase: In this phase 14 new technology cards from that age are revealed. Players take turns to draft those technology cards.
+ Building Phase: In this phase players take turns to buy newly revealed buildings and wonders from that age.
+ Action phase: In this phase players use their tech cards and buildings to perform actions on the game board. Used cards are rotated by 90 degrees. The action phase can be done by all players simultaneously.
+ Military Phase: The players reduce their position on the military track by the equal number of steps required to make the lowest positioned player land on 0. Then players score their position minus 1 victory point per defeat.
Tech and building cards have an age duration: it indicates during which ages the respective card is active. At the end of an age, players discard all their tech cards that become obsolete and flip their building cards that become obsolete (players keep them for some scoring purposes). This mechanic allows to change your strategic focus in different phases of the game: For example you can concentrate on military in the early-game and later focus on research when your military cards have become obsolete anyway.
After 8 ages the player with most victory points is crowned the winner!
#5 Woodcraft
The next in a line of great Vladimir Suchy games? Sign me up! This one is also a neat theme where you are basically controlling elves in a woodshop making items that you might see in the 1950s made for TV Rudolph movie.
In Woodcraft, you play as elves running competing workshops in the woods, with you gathering wood and crafting goods for your customers. Along the way, you hire helpers, improve your workshop, and buy different types of wood and other tools to create the best workshop you can.
During the game, players complete their projects with wood (dice) that can be cut down to size, glued back together, and adjusted using dice manipulation to be as efficient as possible with their resources.
Whoever builds the best, most successful workshop wins.
#4 Atiwa
Atiwa is the newest Uwe Rosenberg pastoral/worker placement game where players will develop their communities, gather resources, raise animals, and attract fruit bats to help them earn points and domination!
The gameboards look nice and it looks like it will give the type of Euro experience I’m looking for but there are two potential issues I hope are addressed, the first being the box art that is not only very bland and empty but also a failed opportunity to portray Ghana’s culture, Ghana’s people, or anything else besides a green partial map and a super close-up of a fruit bat.
The second concern I have is with replayability, but it’s still too early to tell.
The Atiwa Range is a region of southeastern Ghana in Africa consisting of steep-sided hills with rather flat summits. A large portion of the range comprises an evergreen forest reserve, which is home to many endangered species. However, logging and hunting for bushmeat, as well as mining for gold and bauxite, are putting the reserve under a lot of pressure.
Meanwhile, in the nearby town of Kibi, the mayor is causing a stir by giving shelter to a large number of fruit bats in his own garden. This man has recognized the great value the animals have in deforested regions of our planet: Fruit bats sleep during the day and take off at sunset in search of food, looking for suitable fruit trees up to sixty miles away. They excrete the seeds of the consumed fruit, disseminating them across large areas as they fly home. A single colony of 150,000 fruit bats can reforest an area of up to two thousand acres a year.
Just like that mayor, in Atiwa, you know that fruit bats — once scorned and hunted as mere fruit thieves — are in fact incredibly useful animals, spreading seeds over large areas of the country. By doing so, they help to reforest fallow land and, in the medium term, improve harvests. This realization has led to a symbiotic co-operation between fruit bats and fruit farmers. The animals are kept as “pets” to increase the size of fruit farms more quickly. Tall trees are left as roosts, providing shelter for them rather than hunting them for their scant meat. However, if you have a lot of fruit bats, you need a lot of space…
In the game, you will develop a small community near the Atiwa Range, creating housing for new families and sharing your newly gained knowledge on the negative effects of mining and the importance that the fruit bats have for the environment. You must acquire new land, manage your animals and resources, and make your community prosper. The player who best balances the needs of their community and the environment wins.
#3 Skymines
Finally, a game comes straight to retail. This is the reimagining of Mombasa that I mentioned before. I’m really excited about this one, especially for the double-sided map board and the new modules. This game desperately needed a retheming. Kudos to the designer for taking the time and effort to do so.
Fifty years ago, humanity began mining the Moon and the asteroids, and for decades that task was firmly kept in the hands of the World Government. But the turmoils of recent years have caused this enterprise to collapse. Now, adventurous companies and private investors take to the sky to revive this mining network.
As investors, you try to earn the most CrypCoin over the course of seven rounds. You do this by investing mined resources in companies and by spreading their outposts. You can improve your earnings by supporting your scientists’ research and by having them collect precious helium-3.
The heart of Skymines is a unique card programming and hand management system that requires careful and clever planning. It provides deep player interaction by letting you invest in any of the four companies as you see fit.
And as the combination of company abilities changes each game, there are endless synergies and strategies to explore.
#2 Unconscious Minds
Fantasia Games is still keeping my attention with their upcoming release Unconscious Mind. A game in which players are early psychologists trying to help their patients recover from psychological problems with action programming and a host of interesting game mechanisms.
Vienna in the early 1900s: The Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud established a revolutionary set of theories and therapeutic techniques called psychoanalysis, which are related to the study of the unconscious mind.
From the autumn of 1902, a number of followers who expressed interest in Freud’s work were invited to meet at his apartment every Wednesday afternoon to discuss psychology and neuropathology. This group was called the Wednesday Psychological Society, and it marked the beginnings of the worldwide psychoanalytic movement. In 1908, reflecting its growing institutional status, the Wednesday group was reconstituted as the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society with Freud as president.
As a member of this society in Unconscious Mind — a game that blends worker placement, engine building, multi-use cards, and action programming — your goal is to master therapeutic techniques, establish a practice, and grow your clientele. By delving into your clients’ dreams — their unconscious minds — you can help them recover from various traumas and complexes. As a result, the people you treat will live happier and more productive lives. You can also publish volumes of your groundbreaking work — which will hopefully get cited by other researchers who come after you, furthering your legacy.
In more detail, each turn you may send a figure to one of the various action spaces on the main board. Then, depending on the row of the action space, you will advance the inkpot on your player board’s rondel a number of steps — triggering the effects of all the tiles you have in the given line. From there, you may use dream cards and Insights (a form of resources)to treat the patients in your office.
There is also a map of central Vienna that features historic locations that you may visit with your professor meeple. These spaces allow you to perform additional actions, gain reputation, and unlock bonuses when you eventually withdraw your figures from the main board. The game has many interconnected systems that flow into each other, making every turn one that results cascading effects.
#1 Septima
Mindclash Games has recently been releasing design diary information about Septima and it has a lot of us excited for a lighter but highly thematic game.
Only in a few corners of the world is the memory of magic still alive, even though a few centuries ago its healing power permeated everything. Witches, its last remaining practitioners, have always been outcasts and could help human society only in strict secrecy. The leader of their people, the Septima, has always been the wisest, most knowledgeable witch. Now, as her time is coming to an end, witches from all over the world gather at Noctenburg to leave their mark on the hostile town and prove to the Septima that they are her worthy successor.
Septima is a competitive, highly interactive strategy game of witchcraft. As the leader of your coven, you must prove your worth in the town of Noctenburg to become the successor of Septima, the High Witch. Practice your craft and gain wisdom by collecting herbs, brewing potions, healing the townsfolk, mastering charms and rescuing your fellow brothers and sisters from the trials. But beware: magic, even if used for good, invokes suspicion in the townsfolk…
Simultaneous action selection with positive player interaction: Septima’s central mechanism revolves around the simultaneous, secret selection of one of nine Action cards each turn: Move, Collect, Brew, Heal, Recruit, Plea, Chant, Rite and Remember. Each Action gets a powerful bonus if it is chosen by multiple players, but performing them together also raises suspicion in the townsfolk and attracts the attention of the Witch Hunters. Decisions of when to do a shared action (and who to do it with) adds a fresh, semi-cooperative touch to a competitive game, and lots of player interaction.
Rescue witches to build your Coven: Heal, enthrall or convince the townsfolk and amass enough support to sway the periodic Witch Trials in your favor. If the hostile witnesses are outvoted, the convicted witch is absolved and joins the coven that rescued them. You start small but you can grow your coven to up to four witches this way, each with their own personality and special ability to help your cause. Reckless Witches caught by Witch Hunters are also put to trial, so with enough support from the townsfolk, even witches from other, less careful players’ coven can end up in yours.
Accessible, intuitive and familiar: Septima is Mindclash Games’ most accessible title to date, with beautiful, hand-drawn art style by Villő Farkas and with the character art of Barbara Bernát, wooden components and intuitive, theme-inspired mechanisms. It is very quick to teach and set up, and takes less than 2 hours to play, even with four players.
Do any of these games interest you? Have I missed one that you are really excited about? Let me know in the comments. Until next time. AlwaysBePlaying!
