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UK Games Expo 2018 Watchlist - Not-so-new Games

It’s not just brand new games I’m hoping to play for the first time this year. Here are a few from 2016 and earlier that I’m still eager to try.

When I Dream

When I Dream belongs to that very special category of board games in which you are actively encouraged to lie to your friends. It’s also one of the very few where someone has to wear a blindfold. The blind player is “asleep”, and the others are drawing cards which depict some aspect of the sleeping player’s “dream”. The picture on the card is described using a single word by each other player, and the dreamer has to guess what the card says. However, among the players are evil spirits, who are attempting to give false clues about the cards. If the dreamer guesses wrong, the evil team gets a point, but remaining in the dreamer’s trust without giving away your allegiance requires some pretty creative thinking.

Roll Player

The name says it all, really. In Roll Player, you are building a character from scratch, assigning the results of die rolls to various statistics. The game is all about drafting dice from a shared pool, and using your character abilities to manipulate the faces in your favour. It doesn’t only come with a huge bag full of dice, but player boards with cute little square homes cut out for them.

Deception: Murder in Hong Kong

This social deduction game has the players solving a murder. One of your number is the murderer, and one other is the forensic scientist, who knows the murderer, means, and motive, but they are only allowed to communicate with other players through a series of clue cards. It’s up to the others to interpret the evidence in order to solve the crime, and for the murderer to mislead the team while attempting to pin the death on a scapegoat. Uniquely for this type of game, it’s not over if the murderer is revealed, as the players still have to correctly identify the means and the motive in order to win.

Flamme Rouge

Racing games have to be pretty special not to bring back terrible memories of awful mass-market games from your youth. In the charming Flamme Rouge, you’re put in charge of a team of cyclists, and must carefully manage a hand of cards in order to push your cyclists along a winding mountain track. You can try to pull out ahead of the pack, but just like in real racing you’ll preserve your stamina if you fall into the slipstream behind someone else. Clever timing, rather than luck of the draw, will see you cross the finish line first.

First Class

I bought Russian Railroads two years ago, and I’ve still not played it. First Class is from the same designer, and has been called the card game version of his earlier work. Perhaps I can use it as a kind of gateway drug, and push this lighter game in order to hook my group onto harder stuff.

Fabled Fruit

I made a promise to myself that I’d start no more legacy games until I’d finished one of the several I’m already involved with. Maybe I can convince myself that Fabled Fruit from Stronghold Games isn’t really a legacy game, despite it starting off each time in whatever state the last game ended. It’s about jungle animals making fruit cocktails, which has to rank as one of the more interesting themes I’ve encountered.

La Granja: No Siesta

I’ll convince someone to play this with me. I’m not sure how, but I will. I love the idea of “Roll and Write” games, where players collectively try to make the best of a common set of dice rolls, but I’m wondering just how much of my group feel the same way. I have La Granja, the crunchy eurogame this dice version has spawned from, and the dice-picking mechanics are one of the more interesting aspects. Interesting enough to spin off a whole other game, it seems.

Cry Havoc

There was a Starcraft board game once, and it was supposed to be pretty good. Fantasy Flight cribbed a lot from it when they made Forbidden Stars. Cry Havoc from Portal Games, however, seems like the rightful heir to the throne here. A series of different races all fighting over the same planet, each behaving in a very different way? Totally Starcraft.

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UK Games Expo 2018 Watchlist - New Games

With the UK’s largest annual board gaming convention less than two weeks away, here are a few new games that I’m excited to see and get a chance to play.

Renegade

Renegade is a cyberpunk-styled cooperative deckbuilder about infiltrating the network of an all-powerful supercomputer in an attempt to bring it down and save humanity from enslavement. There’s something about adding maps to deckbuilders that instantly captures my attention, like the excellent Trains or the Clank! series of games. Publisher Victory Point Games have nailed the neon-future look, as every picture of this game pops with vivid colour. Gameplay videos make it look like a really interesting puzzle to solve, with a good deal of replayability too.

Century: Eastern Wonders

The second game in Plan B Games’ planned Century trilogy, Eastern Wonders follows last year’s hit cube-pusher Spice Road, and sees you ferrying cubes around the famous Spice Islands of Indonesia. Although the first Century game seemed just a little too reminiscent of Splendor to justify picking up, this new one looks like enough of a different beast to pique my interest. Apparently the two games can combine like some kind of cardboard Voltron, to form an even grander gestalt game, so purchasing one makes getting the other an imperative, right? Plus the boxes of both games form a single piece of art when lined up, so that’s great.

Dice Hospital

I’ll be honest with you, I have no idea how this Kickstarter title plays. I’m judging it on appearance alone. In my head I’m imagining some kind of Theme Hospital where dice go to die get better. It’s supposed to come with a bucket of translucent dice, and aside from actual gold and precious gemstones I don’t think there’s anything you could put inside a box which would make me more excited than brightly coloured dice which are partially transparent.

The Mind

It’s recently been announced that the designer of The Mind, Wolfgang Warsch, has had not one, not two, but three of his games nominated for the acclaimed German boardgaming award Spiel des Jahres this year. This guy is clearly going places and from what I’ve heard about this game, it’s easy to see why. Based on a concept so ridiculously simple you’ll struggle to believe that there’s any actual game involved, this little card game has players trying to play cards in sequence without communicating with each other. What happens when people actually sit down to play is supposed to be pure magic, and I can’t wait to try it on my friends.

Azul

If the above image hasn’t already sold you on Azul then I’m not sure what else I can tell you. It’s an abstract game about taking beautiful tiles from little plates and trying to arrange them carefully onto your board, without leaving yourself moves that will force you to smash half of them on the ground. Just looking at pictures of this I get that same feeling I do when playing with those chunky chips from Splendor.

Ethnos

Publisher CMON, having originally cut their teeth on the miniature wargaming market, has in the past couple of years started branching out, and Ethnos is about as far away from the highly-detailed extravagant dungeon crawlers they made their name on as you could get. At its heart it’s a dudes-on-a-map, fantasy-themed area control game, but the only moulded plastic in this box comes in the shape of garishly-coloured discs. What elevates this game, with its drab Tolkienesque tones, into something genuinely exciting, is the interesting cardplay. With a set of races randomly selected at the start, each with their own game-changing set of rules, players compete with each other to form bands of warriors in an attempt to dominate the cramped island they all live on. It looks like a really enjoyable, medium-weight game you could sit anyone in front of, with tons of possibility.

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Exhumed

Typical. You wait years for a new theme park simulator, then three come along at once. Much like the revival of the space combat simulator a few years ago, this fresh genre necromancy seeks to recapture the popularity of classic games from a bygone era, with flashy new titles, reinvigorated with modern mechanics and a lick of HD paint. But unlike Elite: Dangerous and Star Citizen, none of the following games are banking on veteran industry personalities to drum up a following, instead they all seem to be relying on our innate desires to construct gravity-defying vomit-inducing death traps. 

Roller Coaster Tycoon World

The title harks back to 1999′s Roller Coaster Tycoon, but the name is the only heritage RCTW shares with Chris Sawyer’s classic.

Atari is a publisher deserving of its tarnished reputation, and the development of RCTW has seen more than its fair share of troubles under their direction. I can’t think of any game which has had three entirely separate developers, and turned out to be any good in the end. Clearly Atari believe this is a niche worth pursuing though, and Nvizzio Creations, the current developer, seems to be serious about delivering a solid product... eventually. Recent beta tests have spurred fears that RCTW will release in an unfinished state, with many features arriving later, presumably after the first round of customers have reinvigorated the coffers.

What we have seen so far is quite good though. The video above shows off a rather fancy spline-based coaster editor, smart-looking visitor “Peep” AI, and impressively detailed assets, but it’s a wonder if the promised Steam Workshop support is really there to foster community-created rides and scenery, or to make up for a lack of content which should have been there in the first place.

Parkitect

Coming from a developer, artist, musician trio, Parkitect enjoyed a modest Kickstarter campaign last year. This indie title might seems like the underdog entry, but they have built a simulation to rival the others.

Of the three, Parkitect seems to be the one appealing most to our visual nostalgia, with a chunky 3D style reminiscent of Roller Coaster Tycoon’s quaint isometric 2D tile sets. This looks like the game which will feel most familiar to players of Theme Park and its ilk.

They may have a small team, but early footage of the game is impressive, with  tiny little park visitors screaming in all the right places on the custom-built coasters. Rides which may or may not terminate in high-G disasters, which is really what these kind of games is all about.

Planet Coaster

This is a trailer. For a theme park simulator.

Yes.

This is being developed by Frontier. With the success of Elite: Dangerous, it makes sense that they should turn their hands to another neglected genre, but it still feels like the time Rockstar announced their next game was about table tennis. (Edit: almost immediately after posting this, someone tells me Frontier worked on Roller Coaster Tycoon 3, which makes this leap seem a lot less surprising).

This is the title we know least about, but the one I feel has the most potential, given Frontier’s track record. It’s only slightly surprising they haven’t turned to Kickstarter for funding, as having original Elite developer David Braben on board wouldn’t lend much to the campaign, but they are offering similar premium packages, such as paid access to the eventual beta.

So what’s next from the nostalgia graveyard? Hospital Simulators? Restaurant-’em-ups? Massively Multiplayer Online Ant Colonies? The hard part is finding the genres which didn’t die off for a good reason.

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