New Year. New Games. We are only halfway through January and there are already some amazing games on the horizon. Let’s have a look!

Return to The Dark Tower

Who remembers the original Dark Tower game? You always had a friend who had it and was immensely jealous of them because of: 1. you couldn’t afford it and 2. it was very hard to find even if you could afford it! Well, Rob Daviau and Isaac Childres are bringing it back! Hope your wallet is ok…

From the publisher:

For an age, the tower lay in ruins. Unbeknownst to the people of the realm, a great evil stirred in its bowels. It started with strange sightings: a flock of crows flying in circles until they dropped from the sky, the lake frozen solid in the height of summer. In time, they could not deny that which they most feared.

The evil had not been vanquished. The darkness would soon fall again. The tower will rise.

A “sequel” to the 1981 grail game, Return to Dark Tower is a cooperative game for 1-4 players who take the role of heroes. Together, they gather resources, raise buildings, defeat monsters, and undertake quests to build up their strength and discern what foe ultimately awaits them. When the heroes face the tower, the game shifts into its dramatic second act, where the players have one chance to defeat the enemy once and for all.

The game features traditional game mechanisms, such as engine building and resource management, paired with a technological interface unlike any seen before in games, including the titular tower, which holds more than a few secrets.

We can’t wait for this one. It’s on Kickstarter right now and doing very, very well. Funded on Day 1. You can check the campaign HERE. the only downer to all this is, it’s not due in our hands until February 2021!

Cosmic Encounter: Duel

A two-player Cosmic Encounter? Hmmm. Not sure about this. As long as it’s not watered down from the original, it might be pretty good. Fingers crossed…

From the publisher:

The Cosmic Citizenship Council has announced it will allow two new alien species to join its ranks, but they forgot to make two copies of the filing form — which means that only one species can join! Now, the two candidates must battle for control of the planets to determine who deserves the right to become a Certified Civilization.

Cosmic Encounter Duel is a competitive standalone two-player game in the Cosmic Encounter universe in which you and your closest frenemy race to be the first to control five planets. Each of twenty-seven alien species comes equipped with its own unique abilities that play with the game mechanisms in some way, offering you an edge in the fight, e.g., the Cheater, who can reserve an additional tactic that they can put toward any fight in the game — as long as their opponent doesn’t call out how they’re trying to “cheat”. How your game of Cosmic Encounter Duel plays out will inevitably be affected by which powers each duelling species has and how they play off of one another.

This is due to hit shops in April of this year!

The Shining

Who would have thought The Shining would get a board game!? Certainly not us.

Not much is known at the moment apart from it’s a 3 to 5 player co-op and it’s from the makers of the Black Mirror: NOSEDIVE game and the upcoming Top Gun Strategy Game.

From the publisher:

All work and no play…

You’ve travelled into the heart of the Rocky Mountains to take charge of the Overlook Hotel while it is closed for the winter — except you aren’t alone. The Hotel’s bloody history has made some of its past guests a permanent addition to the building, and with them come terrifying visions that begin to corrupt your mind. Snowed in, you desperately explore the rooms of the Hotel, attempting to gain enough willpower to withstand the evil influence around you. Worse still, one of you has already succumbed to the terrible forces of the Hotel and secretly acts to keep you here forever and ever…

The Shining is a suspenseful game of co-operation, deception, and terror!

Cosmic Frog: World Eater from Dimension Zero

It’s only January and we possibly have the best title for a game and box art too. Fantastic!

From the designer:

Cosmic Frog is a game of collection, combat, and theft on a planetary scale. Each player controls a two-mile-tall, immortal, invulnerable frog-like creature that exists solely to gather terrain from the Shards of Aeth, the fragments of a long-ago shattered world. The First Ones seek to use the lands from the Shards to reconstruct the world of Aeth, and your frogs are their terrain harvesters.

At the start of the game, your frogs descend from the Aether, the cosmic sea between the worlds, onto a terrain-rich Shard of Aeth. Once on the Shard, you harvest the land and store it in your massive gullet. When your gullet is sufficiently full, you leap into the Aether and disgorge your gullet contents into your inter-dimensional vault for permanent storage, then return to the Shard to collect more land. Although your frogs’ collective mission is to gather as much land as possible for the First Ones, your private goal is to prove yourself to be the greatest of their harvesters by delivering to them the most valuable vault. To do this, you have to fill your vault strategically in a manner that both maximizes linear sets of identical lands and maximizes the diversity of lands in your vault at the end of the game.

Throughout the game, you’re free to keep to yourself and focus on harvesting at your own pace…or you may attack other frogs and try to take lands directly from their gullets. You may even raid another frog’s vault and steal the lands they have gathered if they have been knocked into the dreaded Outer Dimensions. As you are all immortal and invulnerable, no frog is ever wounded or killed — just irritated and inconvenienced.

Sounds interesting. It’s debuting at GenCon 2020 and will be for sale at the event also.

Mariposas

Elizabeth Hargrave is back with another beautiful design. After the massive success of Wingspan, we wondered what her next big box game was going to be and here it is. Mariposas. It’s all about butterflies.

From the publisher:

Every spring, millions of monarch butterflies leave Mexico to spread out across eastern North America. Every fall, millions fly back to Mexico. However, no single butterfly ever makes the round trip.

Mariposas is a game of movement and set collection that lets players be part of this amazing journey.

Mariposas is played in three seasons. In general, your butterflies try to head north in spring, spread out in summer, and return south in fall. The end of each season brings a scoring round, and at the end of fall, the player with the most successful family of butterflies — i.e., the most victory points — wins the game.

Set collection and grid movement. Our type of game.

Look for this at GenCon also.

Quick and easy this week. The news will only keep on rolling in as the days pass by. 2020 is going to be a great year for TableTop.