Six White Goblin Essen Releases
Posted by James (admin) on August 25th, 2011
I just saw the new games that White Goblin Games will be releasing at Essen in Germany in October. These are looking really good. They’ve also just started taking pre-orders too.
Lost Temple
A game based on the excellent Citadels but this time it’s a race game to be the first one to the temple to plunder its treasures. In Citadels, players select a role/character from a fixed set and pass the rest to the next player to make their choice. Figuring out which role each player has probably selected is a big part of the game as some characters foil others and no-one knows who picked which character until everyone has chosen for that round. Not sure how much of this is in Lost Temple but it sounds very interesting as Citadels is a classic. Plays 2-8 players too.
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Panic Station
This game really interests me as it’s like the movie The Thing with a single player who has been taken over by an alien amongst lots of uninfected players; however, the infection can spread so the infected players start to increase. Each player controls an android and a human trying to stop the evil aliens – well, unless they;re already evil aliens. The reason this interests me so much is that I actually have game design notes going back some years with the exact same premise, so I’m very interested to see how this game compares. Plays 4-6
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Revolver
A 2-player card game where one player plays the gang that robbed the bank and the other is the law bringing them to justice. There’s not much more information yet on their web site but that’s enough to sell me on it already. Plays 2 players
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Rattus: Africanus
Rattus is a fun and very quick game to play about the Black Death. Players place their people into countries and try to have as many survive outbreaks of the plague. Players can manipulate the rat tokens to try and cause plague outbreaks in countries so other players’ people get killed off. Players can take roles to get extra abilities but these have a price because the more roles you have, the more likely a plague outbreak will kill your people. So, you hope other players take your roles off you, or hope the benefits of a role outweigh the risks. The previous expansion added lots of variety so I am very interested to see the new expansion which offers a few new roles as well as some extra gameplay mechanics and material to expand the game to 5 and 6 players too. For more on the base game, read my original review of Rattus
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Singapore
This looks to be the most complex of the White Goblin games and the one I know the least about. Players are merchants that develop land in Singapore and move workers around too. One interesting game mechanic is that players that build or use black market buildings draw a chip from the bag. If it’s black, you keep it; however, if it’s white, the player with the most black chips gets fined for their illicit activity. I love the sound of this push-your-luck game mechanic – and it’s not even the core. Plays 3-4
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Dragon’s Gold
This is a new version of a great and simple old game. Players send some of their heroes to defeat the current dragon. If they have enough strength to defeat it, the players involved must negotiate how to split the gems between them. If they can’t do that within 30 seconds, no-one gets anything. I have the original game and it’s nice to see it being given a new outing. I can’t tell from the description if there any new rules or changes to the original. Plays 3-6
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