Defend Galileo, Guide a Dreamer to Safety, and Rise Again in Celestia | BoardGameGeek News

For those not familiar with the game, Celestia — which was first published as Cloud 9 in 1999 — is a press-your-luck game in which players take turns being captain of the ship and rolling dice to determine which challenges they must overcome, after which passengers decide whether they think the captain can indeed overcome such challenges thanks to cards in hand. If passengers bail, they score based on the height of the ship, but if the captain does overcome the challenges, the ship rises and players can score more next turn.

Of course if the captain can’t overcome these challenges, the ship crashes and passengers still on board don’t score. The game lasts multiple rounds until a player crosses a point threshold.

• While Celestia carries a 2-6 player count, the highest-rated player counts on the BGG game page are 5 and 6…which is possibly why BLAM ! will release Celestia Duo in 2025 from master two-player game designer Bruno Cathala.

No details for now other than this game‘s impending existence, which will still happen even though yes, some of you are tired of two-player-only editions of existing games. Feel free to move on to the next item since any complaints about same will be ignored by pretty much everyone in existence.

• Following the Q2 2024 release of Cartaventura: Les Trois Mousquetaires – Au nom du Roi and
Cartaventura: D-Day, BLAM ! has continued this “choose your own adventure”-style co-operative card game line with the November 15, 2024 release of Cartaventura: Cosmologia from designers Pierre Buty and Thomas Dupont.

In this release, you are one of the disciples of Galileo in 1633 in Padua, Italy. Galileo has called for your help because he is about to be tried in Rome for heresy, and you are challenged to “gather enough elements to convince the actors in this trial to change their minds”, to help them understand that the Earth rotates around the sun and not the other way round, similar to me trying to convince people that the number of two-player-only games will continue to expand on the market despite their protestations.

• Buty is also the designer of Sierra, a BLAM ! title released in Q3 2024 for 1-8 players:

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In slightly more detail, the game is preferably played with at least four people in teams. Each team will have a destination card that gives them a collective goal, with each team member also drawing travel diary cards that they score individually…assuming they score them at all.

During the game, each team builds a shared landscape with mountain cards in four colors with funky cuts across the top. These cards feature six symbols on them, and players have a choice of what to play in their landscape to work toward scoring travel diary cards.

• To round out coverage of BLAM !, in March 2024 the company released Rêvelune, a 3-6 player game from Frédéric Dorne and Christophe Raimbault about which I’d heard nothing until I started working on this post. Even after all these years, I’m still astounded by how many games are quietly released, then fade away.

An overview:

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Rêvelune is a co-operative game of storytelling and deduction. As guides, you take turns imagining the adventures of your teammate, trapped in their dream. Turn by turn, they must deduce the hidden meaning behind each intervention. Will you succeed in freeing your teammate by guiding them wisely to the end of their dream?

In more detail, the game is played over several chapters. During a chapter, the guides take turns inventing the adventures encountered by the Dreamer, respecting the narrative constraints of their guide card, e.g., a simple description, an obstacle, a cute moment, etc. The Dreamer, meanwhile, listens attentively to the story, then — once all the guides have spoken — must find the hidden meaning behind each intervention, with the help of their Dreamer cards, which are identical to the guide cards in play. A certain number of successful associations enables the Dreamer to move on to a new chapter, with changing constraints. Conversely, each failure draws the Dreamer deeper into their dream at the risk of not being able to get out…

If the players all reach the end of the dream together, the Dreamer is freed and they win the game.