Is it too early for another round-up of games from designer Reiner Knizia, especially since he was in a BGG News post just the other day? Depends on your appetite for those designs, I suppose, but I kept sending myself notes about his new and upcoming releases, then realized that I should just publish them and be done with it…until the next time.
▪️ Hong Kong publisher Kids Logic has released three titles from Knizia, all re-themed versions of earlier releases, with August 2024’s Trading Titans being the newest edition of 1996’s Palmyra, a.k.a. Buy Low Sell High.
In the game, players buy and sell stocks in three abstract categories — oil, retail, and technology — over three rounds. On each player’s turn, they must play a card from their hand onto the game board, with the cards adding or subtracting from the stock’s value and causing other actions. Once the board is filled, you sum the ups and downs, then re-adjust the stock values. Your goal: Buy low, sell high, and end up with the most money.
▪️ Another Kids Logic Knizia release is Battle of Mekaverse, a new edition of 2002’s Clash of the Gladiators in which each player now has four robots that will fill their four programming slots with weapons and other tools, after which you’ll try to take out opponents.
I’ve played Clash of the Gladiators a few times, and while luck definitely plays a role in the outcome compared to other Knizia designs, I found it a fun dice-chucker.
▪️ I guess Ultraman is a thing again? At Gen Con 2024, Tsubaraya Productions demoed <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/430790/ultraman-card–game“>Ultraman card game in a nearly empty booth ahead of its October 25, 2024 release, and I’ve heard nothing about the game since that time — but Kids Logic has given Knizia his shot at an Ultraman game with Ultraman: Spirit of Light.
This game is a new take on Knizia’s 1993 title En Garde, with players being able to use the powers of their Ultraman figure when playing in Ultra mode.
▪️ Plundering Times is the fortieth(!) collaboration between Knizia and U.S. publisher SimplyFun, which focuses on “play-based learning” in the games that it releases.
In this game, 2-4 players take turns placing two numbered pirate dragons onto multiple islands that bear a random number. Once each island is filled, players multiply their pirates, then add 0-3 pirates depending on where they placed their figures. Whoever is the closest to the number on an island takes their pick of the treasure chests and can plunder their opponent’s gems. Get that total exactly, and you earn a bonus gem.
▪️ Shell We?, due out in 2025 from Korea Boardgames, is reminiscent of <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/130603/start-11-the-board-game“>Start 11! The Board game, with players trying to empty their hand of tiles first while playing them in numbered rows.
To start, each player takes seventeen random tiles, which are numbered 0-17 in five colors or which depict one of five starfish; for each person fewer than four, you remove one of the tile colors from play. The double-sided game board has five lines of colored spaces going from 0-17, with the lines wavering so that sometimes two lines are adjacent. Pearls are present on some spaces of the game board or between two adjacent spaces of different colors.
First, each player places a tile from their hand onto the matching colored and numbered space, then the game begins. On a turn, you either draw two tiles from the bag or place up to two tiles on the board. When you place tiles, they must go in the appropriate numbered and colored space, in addition to being adjacent to a tile already in play. (Starfish can be placed adjacent to any tile already on the board. If you have the tile matching the space where a starfish is located, you can swap these two tiles at the start of your turn.)
If you place two consecutive tiles of the same color (whether using starfish or not), take a bonus action, either passing a tile in hand to the player on your left or (if using the “message in a bottle” tiles) carrying out the action on the bottle placed next to this color at the start of the game.
If you place on a lone pearl space — or are the second tile in a shared pearl space — take a bonus action, placing a tile from your hand on the game board without regard for whether it’s adjacent to another tile.
Whoever empties their hand first wins! Alternatively, play a match — one game on each side of the game board — with players tallying their leftover tiles after each game; whoever has the lowest score wins.
▪️ Finally(?), U.S. publisher <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgamepublisher/1009/ape-games“>APE games has announced that it will release both Whale Riders and <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/310031/whale-riders-the-card–game“>Whale Riders: The card game in April 2025, both with the original Vincent Dutrait art used in the 2021 productions by <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgamepublisher/27311/grail-games“>Grail games.
You can read my 2020 overview of Whale Riders <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/blog/1/blogpost/106584/game-preview-whale-riders-or-pearls-before-orcas”>here, but in short 2-6 players take two actions from a choice of five each turn, riding down the coast to pick up items to fulfill contracts before heading back home while still doing the same. In the end, you want more pearls than anyone else, and you primarily get them by fulfilling contracts, which are private to you.
Whale Riders: The card game is a re-implementation of Trendy, with players trying to part of the group that scores each round based on who has played which cards. Event cards change the details of how a round ends and how it’s scored.
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