Did you hear about . . . ? This week in news. 1/26/2020

Hey all! Back again with some board game news. A couple new games coming up that I found interesting. 

Deep Vents

Red Rave Games is coming out with a game called Deep Vents.  I couldn’t find much besides the box art for this, but it looks like it’s designed by Ryan Laukat and Alex Davis.  Ryan Laukat runs Red Raven Games, and does a majority of art for his own games. Deep Vents sounds like it’s going to be an interesting game, as players take the roll of a hydrothermal ecosystem. It’s 2-4 players and plays in around 40 minutes. It looks like it’s a tile laying game with the ability to attack or defend against neighboring ecosystems. This one sounds like it’s coming out in April.

Deep Vents link to announcement.

Sonora

So, to break this one down a bit.  Roll and writes are games that you roll a die or dice, then write the result down on a score sheet. Usually these will have different areas you can use the die or dice.  Yahtzee, VivaJava: The Coffee Game: The Dice Game, and Zombie Dice can be considered Roll and Writes.  Next up, we have flip and writes. These are games that use cards instead of dice to drive the game. Welcome To, Cartographers, and Kokoro Avenue of the Kodama are some examples of Flip and Writes. These types of games have become a major hit lately.  Well, what innovating thing can they do next for the Roll and Write genre?  How about a Flick and Write game?  Adding a dexterity element to a roll and write seems interesting. I do like dexterity games. In this game, players are flicking wooden discs onto a game board during the flick phase. Each zone on the board is a different game on your score sheet. In the write phase, you resolve where you flicked your discs.  This sounds like an interesting game when it combines dexterity and roll and write, then to have different games based on the different zones makes this really intriguing to try. The game is slated to be 1-4 players, and says it takes about 30-45 minutes. This game comes out towards the end of April as well.

Link to Pandasaurus announcement.

There you have it, two games that I heard about this week, and thought it was worth sharing with everyone. I haven’t played them yet, but both look stunning and sound like game mechanics will be interesting as well.