New Release Round Up - 19th August 2009

Board Games

There are a couple of new games and a couple of reprints this week. First up is Revolution by Steve Jackson games. This is a euro style game of bidding, area control and espionage for 3-4 players. Each player trying to control the city and save it from the oppression of the other players. Martian Rails by Mayfair games takes the Empire Builder franchise to the airless canal covered planet of Mars. The wraparound map of the red planet adds a level of brain burn as players can link up from the other side of the map which adds to this crayon rail game. Arimaa by Z Man Games is a 2 player abstract strategy game. It may look like chess but has 500 more available moves per turn. The makers believe that this makes is harder for a computer to play, so much in fact that they have put up a reward of $10,000 for the first person who can write a program that will beat a selected Arimaa player before 2020.

Reprints this week are RA, a classic auction game set in ancient Egypt. Players bid there limited supply of sun tokens for collections of tiles. This is a simple game to play but can lead to some tense situations. 1960 The Making of the President is set during the famous American elections of that year. Using mechanics similar to Twilight Struggle players try to control areas of America in order to become president.

RPG's

Gen Con Indianapolis is over, but if you didn't get to go, don't worry we still
have plenty of new roleplaying games on offer including Geist: the Sin-Eaters, an RPG from White Wolf where you play a gatekeepers to the Underworld. Wizards of the Coast also has new offerings for D&D with Adventurer's Vault 2 (presenting hundreds of magic items, legendary weapons and artefacts) and Dragon Annual vol 1 (collecting the best Dragon magazine content from the past year).

Creating a bit of a buzz recently is the newly released Shadowrun 20th Anniversary Edition. This special edition of the popular rule book features a new layout for better usability, full colour art throughout and incorporated errata between the hardcovers. Also for Shadowrun is Dawn of the Artifacts: Dusk - the first in a series of interlinked adventures, taking the runners to the far reaches of the globe to recover priceless artefacts.

Green Ronin has a two new items this week including Peril at King's Landing, an adventure for A Song of Ice & Fire where characters travelling to a Tourney get more than hey bargained for. Freeport: The Lost Island brings the popular Freeport line to the True 20 system. In this series of adventures your heroes must brave a dangerous voyage through uncharted waters to a mysterious island.

Finally from Mongoose, a Traveller adventure set in the Third Imperium - a new duke is appointed in the Jewell subsector and tensions with the Zhodani increase...

Miniatures

This week we have the new D&D miniatures, Legendary Evils this 40-figure set includes monsters of various levels and roles, and each booster pack allows a Dungeon Master to run a ready-to-play encounter right out of the box.

CCG's

This week sees the release of the impressive Supreme Victors expansion for Pokemon, over 150 new cards compatible with previous releases.