We’ve been telling you about it recently – F1 is making a comeback in stores: Formula Dé is dead, long live Formula D! Get ready to push your engine to its limit, to hug the curves in the tight corners, but also to keep up with your opponents to take advantage of the air flow and pass them to win… Taking risks and planning ahead are two qualities you’ll need as a pilot if you want to stand on the highest step of the podium!

Formula D is also the excitement of illegal racing in the streets of big cities – anything goes: custom cars, nitro acceleration, drifting in the curves, dirty tricks… The game mechanics stay the same, but use specific rules, cars and tracks.

You will also discover, in this new edition of Formula D, elements unseen up to now, such as painted race cars, dashboards, pilot profiles, and tracks… Very soon we’ll unveil the new, high-tech elements which have been created in our ultra-secret lab.

Formula D: Circuits 4 – Baltimore & India is an expansion board for the Formula D board game with two new tracks on a double-sided game board.

Designed to be one of the fastest circuits of the championship, the Formula 1 circuit of Buddh, India stretches over three miles. Beware of your opponents as the circuit has improved overtaking possibilities, adding interesting twists and turns to the game! And if you’ve got nerves of steel, you’ll need them as you push the pedal to the metal on the Baltimore street racing circuit. Have fun managing your timing between braking and pushing your car to its limits so you can take-off like a rocket as you come out of corners!

Expansion Tracks for Formula D:

1. Sebring, Florida
2. Chicago, Illinois

Stretching over almost 6 kilometers, the Sebring track in Florida alternates between straight stretches, quick curves and slow, technical turns. Plotted over a former military training camp turned into an airfield, this track has been a staple in North America since the 1930’s. Each year, the 12 hours of Sebring take place there: an endurance race whose slightly uneven course gives drivers the chance to test the resilience of their vehicle in the hot and dry (when is it not humid?) Florida weather.

The second track of this expansion offers street racing fans the chance to drive wildly in the streets of Chicago – in the East Park area, to be precise. This track offers an urban terrain which alternates between curves and straight lines. This mad race in the heart of city traffic will give drivers a chance to drive along the impressive Aon Center, one of the tallest skyscrapers of the city, to cross the Lake Shore East Park and its three tightly woven lanes (be careful about collisions!), and then rush along the inner port before finally crossing two vertigo-inducing bridges.

Expansion Tracks for Formula D:

1. Hockenheim, Germany
2. Valencia, Spain

Discover the splendid circuit of Hockenheim surrounded by forests and the urban circuit of Valence, close cousin of the circuit of Monaco.

Gravitational and modern, the German circuit of Hockenheim was rebuilt with many recoveries before acquiring its single layout supporting the goings beyond. Hockenheim is without question the circuit of the races with large spectacle!

Extending on more than five kilometers, the urban circuit of Valence in Spain is for its part equipped with an exceptional track curving through the ports and the infrastructures of the Cut of America

Expansion Tracks for Formula D

From the publisher:

1. Singapore — this track is a one-of-a-kind nigh-time street race, with a mix of fast turns and slow chicanes that will test your nerve and push your skills to the limit!

2. The Docks — this fantasy track has 3 routes around which one may race. Each route has its own dangers (this track was the winner of the ASM’s track design contest).

From the Publisher:

Are you a fan of Formula D? One of the most renown racing games is about to improve again with the addition of two new circuits in the third extension.

Discover the urban circuit of Singapore by night. It is characterized by tight turns and a new aspect of racing: illumination. A challenge which requires technical virtuosity and maximum adaptability!

The aficionados of street racing will be able to discover a high-risk track on an industrial dock with first light of dawn. A subtle mixture of improvised obstacles and roads for a mortal playing field!

In Quarriors! Quartifacts – the fourth expansion set for the Quarriors! dice-building game – all of Quaxos’ magical items have gone missing and you, mighty Quarrior that you are, must take it upon yourself (with the help of your trusted Squire) to find them!

Quest cards are available in the Wilds for you to send your Creatures to capture the all-new LARGER Quest dice that wield unimaginable power. (No, seriously, we have no idea what these things do.) Quarriors! Quartifacts includes five new Creatures and two new Spells, in addition to a new Basic card (the Squire), twelve Quest cards, and six Quest dice.

Batman: Arkham City Escape is a two-player game that pits Batman against all of his greatest foes – from The Joker and Harley Quinn to Poison Ivy and The Riddler – as they try to escape Arkham City!

In this game, one player represents Batman, and the other player has command of twenty members of Batman’s rogues gallery, with each villain having abilities exclusive to that character. When Batman and a villain occupy the same space on the board, epic battles ensue as Batman utilizes his Utility Belt and Combat cards and risks retaliation from each villain. The player controlling the Arkham inmates earns victory points by helping the villains escape Arkham, while the Batman player gains points by apprehending his rivals before they make it out of the city, as well as by saving iconic allies by utilizing special gadgets from his utility belt. The first player to earn ten victory points wins!

As the name suggests, 7 Wonders: Wonder Pack includes new wonders for use with the 7 Wonders base game, with the wonders in question being:

• The Great Wall of China, with the owner being able to build the stages of this wonder in any order (since the wall is, of course, a long horizontal wonder and not a primarily vertical one)
• Stonehenge, with the amount of stone you have being important during its construction
• Abu Simbel, in which leaders can be buried and mummified for bonus points
• Manneken Pis, which is a revised version of the 7 Wonders: Manneken Pis wonder first released as a promotional item at Spiel 2010

Behind the façade of the great Gotham City lies an active underworld of criminal activity. In Batman: Gotham City Strategy Game, you’ll play as one of Gotham City’s greatest villains – The Joker, The Penguin, Killer Croc, or Two-Face — and lead your gang of henchmen to try to become the King of Crime in Gotham City! But beware, as your hold on the city increases, so does the chance of your plans being foiled by Gotham’s protector – Batman!

During the game, players collect resources of information, money and threat; threat is used to exert your rule over blocks in Gotham City, and control of blocks allows you to collect income on these blocks of either information or money. Money is used for leveling and to hire henchmen who will help you rule city blocks and fight better against other villains and Batman. Information is used for leveling and moving your villain and henchmen through the city blocks. Leveling works as follows: Each villain has a combat dial with ten levels. Each click of the dial shows a requirement that you will need to advance to the next level: information, money, henchmen, or blocks controlled. The first player to reach level 10 with his villain wins. On every even number level, players will acquire special abilities unique to their villain.

Each turn a player will play a Criminal Plot card which will either produce an income for the ruler of a certain block or trigger the Bat Signal, which calls in Batman! When Batman moves into a block with a Villain, a fight occurs using the two custom Batman dice included with the game. If Batman wins, the villain and his henchmen must flee to their hideout and Batman restores order in that block of Gotham City; if the villain wins, they have defeated Batman (for the time being) and Batman returns to the Batcave, increasing his combat effectiveness as he plans for the next encounter.

In The Cave, a board game from K2 author Adam Kałuża, players take on the role of a speleologist team tasked with exploring a newly discovered cave. Players start from a base and explore a cave, tunnel after tunnel, effectively building the board (the cave). They have to overcome steep descents, underground lakes, and tight squeezes. They will be given a chance to admire the wonders of the underground, like halls full of stalactites. To make it all possible they must take the right supplies with them, like ropes, oxygen and batteries.

Each turn players have five action points to use for moving, discovering new cave tiles, exploring them, and packing their backpacks when they go back to the starting base. They need ropes for descents, oxygen to explore underwater parts, and a camera to photograph underground wonders. Planning what to take with them is one of the most important things in the game. Each turn that their pawn is not in the starting base, players must use (i.e., throw out) one basic supply from their backpack; these costs, along with the expenditure of other supplies during exploration, forces them to return to the starting base a few times during the game. To keep them from having to carry everything, though, players can raise a camp somewhere in the tunnels where they can store some of the equipment.

The cave differs every game, so players have to be prepared for everything or they will lose time. Players earn points for exploring different tiles: underwater, wondrous, descents, and so on – but to win they’ll need to acquire bonus prizes for exploring the most tiles of each type. This make decision-making during trips very difficult.

When the cave is fully explored, the player who made the biggest effort in the most spectacular way wins the game.

Cavemen: The Quest for Fire is a card-drafting game in which players take the role of tribal leaders. The tribes compete for opportunities to hunt dinosaurs, recruit tribesmen, and discover new technologies, vying to be the first with enough knowledge and prestige to invent fire and usher in the age of modern humanity!

You have two resources to manage: Food and Teeth. You must spend Food each turn in order to keep your Tribe from starving. Teeth indicate prestige among the tribes. Use Teeth to bid for the conch and to acquire Cavemen and Caves.

Each turn, cards are drawn from the deck to fill a common Card Pool. Players take actions based on what is available in the pool. For example, if a Beast is drawn into the Card Pool, you can hunt it for Food and claim its Teeth as a sign of your bravery.

If you hold the conch during the Action Phase, you benefit by taking your Action first and taking a second Action after everyone else has gone once. Players can bid Teeth to take control of the Conch from another player. This can be important to get the first pick of the cards in the Card Pool.

The game features 21 different inventions that allow players to evolve diverse strategies, capitalizing on their tribe’s individual strengths. There are challenging decisions every turn as players must evaluate what resources are available, guess what their opponents will do, and weigh the amount of risk they’re willing to take.

The world you know no longer exists. There is no government. No army. No civilization. The United States have collapsed. And now, thirty years after the war started, new powers finally try to take control over the ruined country, try to establish a new order, try to control others and create a new country, a new State: the 51st State.

51st State is a card game in which players control one of the four powers (mutants, traders, New Yorkers and Appalachians) and try to build their very own new country. Players put new locations into the game, they hire leaders, and send people to work in buildings to gain resources and new skills.

Every card in 51st State can be put into play in three different ways. You can invade a location to gain many resources once, or you can sign a contract with this location to gain one resource every turn, or you can attach the location to your State so you can use its skill. One card, three possibilities. Lots of decisions and choices that matter.

We also got 51st State: Winter and New Era in.

The Sea Creatures around the sinking island of Atlantis have always been dangerous… but now these behemoths can move faster and dive across the seas to attack Swimmers and Boats!

However, friendly Dolphins now can be found in these waters as well! The Dolphins are there to protect your Swimmers, but will they be enough to keep you safe as you try to Survive!

“Survive: Dolphins and Dive Dice“ mini-expansion is compatible with “Survive: The Giant Squid” and “Survive: 5-6 Player” mini-expansions, each sold separately.

NOTE: The red Creature Die is not used with this mini-expansion, but rather is a small gift to those who preferred the engraved red Die from the original blue box edition. Enjoy!

Finally, we also got in all of the expansions for Mansions of Madness! There are a lot of them, so I’m not going to explain them all, because that would take a lot of space.

Ascension: Rise of Vigil is a deck-building game in which players acquire cards from a central pool, then place those cards in their discard pile to be shuffled into their deck for later use; creatures also show up in that shared card pool, and players can combat them to earn victory points (VPs) and possibly other benefits, such as the ability to remove less useful cards from their deck or to banish cards from the pool that others might find useful. The game ends once all the available VPs have been claimed or the shared deck of cards runs out.

Ascension: Rise of Vigil, part of the Ascension deck-building game series, is both a standalone game for 2-4 players and an expansion that can be combined with any other Ascension game to support up to six players.

Rise of Vigil introduces treasure cards to the game system, with all treasure cards in this set being “Energy Shard”. When a treasure card is drawn from the shared deck, you place it in the empty space in the shared pool, then continue to draw until you reveal a hero, monster or construct to cover the treasure. When you acquire or defeat that top card, you also gain the treasure, which is added to your deck like hero and construct cards. When you play a treasure from your hand, you immediately draw another card from your deck; more importantly, you can use the energy on these cards to activate special powers on certain heroes, constructs and monsters. (Non-treasure cards can also provide energy, but they are usually worth VPs whereas treasure is worthless aside from the energy.) Energy available on a turn can be “spent” more than once, so if you have, say, two energy, then you can power up all cards with an Energize cost of two or less.

Zombie Dice is finally back in stock!

Eat brains. Don’t get shotgunned.

You are a zombie. You want braaains. More brains than any of your zombie buddies.

Zombie Dice is fast and easy for any zombie fan to learn, even non-gamers. The 13 custom dice are your victims. Push your luck to eat their brains, but stop rolling before the shotgun blasts end your turn!

Two or more can play. Each game takes 10 to 20 minutes, and can be taught in a single round.

Welcome to the Tasty Minstrel universe! Put your Elves, Dwarves and Gnomes to work in the Village and Guilds of Belfort to collect resources and build up the city!

Elves collect wood from the forest while Dwarves collect stone from the quarry. An Elf and a Dwarf together can collect Metal from the mines, and either one can collect Gold. Build buildings in the five districts of the pentagonal city and hire Gnomes to run them to gain their special abilities.

Belfort is a worker placement game with area majority scoring in each district as well as for each type of worker. Buildings give you influence in the districts as well as income, but taxes increase based on your score so the winning players will have to pay more than those behind! Manage your resources and gold well, choose your buildings wisely, and help build the city of Belfort!

Munchkin Apocalypse is a core set in the Munchkin series with an end of the world theme that includes natural disasters, zombie takeovers, Armageddon, alien invasions, nuclear war, etc. And while this is still a standard Munchkin game where you try to level up by killing the monsters, stealing the treasure, and stabbing your buddy, there’s a new “Seal” mechanic that significantly changes the gameplay.

Seals are a reference to the biblical seals of the Apocalypse. They can be opened and closed, although it’s typically more difficult to close them. Once seven Seals are open, the game ends immediately, and the player with the highest combat strength (excluding levels) is the winner. The Seal mechanic adds a sense of impending doom to the game, meant to mimic the sense of impending doom for a real apocalypse. It also tends to create situations where the group works together to close a Seal in order to prevent a player from winning via the Seal mechanic. So there is more teamwork than in a regular Munchkin game.

The balance of the deck is also different than the other Munchkin sets. There are a lot more Disaster cards, which are equivalent to traps and curses, so bad things tend to occur more frequently. Also, there are more monsters, especially high-level monsters. To offset this, however, there are more item enhancers and high-bonus items. It’s been stated in the Munchkin forums that Munchkin Apocalypse is harder to play and is intended more for seasoned Munchkin veterans.

It is the future, and beneath the flickering glow of the sprawling New Angeles skyline, immense corporations seek every advantage in the burgeoning field of synthetic humanoid technology. On the brink of a revolutionary innovation, CyberSolutions Inc. is poised to become the next global powerhouse, threatening the profits of well-established conglomerates Haas-Bioroid and Jinteki – but unfortunately for CyberSolutions, security at their New Angeles branch has just been compromised.

Set in the dystopian future of Android, Infiltration is a tense card game of futuristic larceny in which two to six players take the roles of thieves, competing to steal valuable secrets from a highly secured corporate facility.

The most vital information lies deep within the complex, but each step inward takes you farther from escape. Worse yet, corporate mercenaries are closing in! How long will you push your luck as you avoid security patrols, surpass rival thieves, and try to download the most data before the building is locked down?

Seasons is a game of cards and dice which takes place in two phases:

The first phase consists of a draft: the goal during this phase will be to establish a strategy for the rest of the game with 9 cards that can be selected (Each card has a specific effect and earns victory points).

Once the draft is complete, each player must separate his 9 cards into 3 packs of 3 cards. He will begin the second phase of the game with his first pack of three cards, then gradually as the game progresses, he will receive the other two packets of three cards.

Next comes the second phase of play: at the beginning of each round a player will roll the seasons dice (dice = number of players +1).

These cubes offer a variety of actions to the players:

- Increase your invocation (maximum number of cards you may have placed on table)
- Harvesting energy (water, earth, fire, air) to pay the cost of invocation maps
- Crystallization energy (during the current season) to collect crystals. These serve both as a resource to rely on some cards, but also many victory points in the endgame.
- Draw new cards

Each player can choose only one die per turn. The first player will choose among those launched, then the following among those remaining and so on. At each turn, the dice indicate how many remaining cells (1, 2 or 3 boxes) the marker of the seasons ahead.

In addition, all the dice are different depending on the season. For example, there are not the same energies to a particular season. Throughout the game, players will therefore have to adapt to these changes.

At the end of the game, we add the points of victory on the cards, given the number of crystals possessed. The player with the most victory points wins.

Evil Baby Orphanage is a communal deck party card game for three or more players. Each player takes on the role of a Time Nanny using advanced time out technology to rid the time stream of the world’s worst villains and “prehabilitate” them to be accountants, or ballerinas, or something.

The game consists of two decks; the baby deck and the nanny deck. During your turn play nanny cards from your hand to “adopt” babies from your friends, keep your babies in check, and make your opponent’s babies go nuts. Then each of your babies takes its “unsupervised actions” unless you can calm them down with toys or nap time. Finally, adopt an evil baby from the time stream (three face up babies from the baby deck), draw more nanny cards, and end your turn.

Start your turn with ten mischief and win the game, but be careful, containing the world’s most mischievous babies isn’t easy! Keep your babies from burning down your orphanage as you try to keep the Unabomber away from the arts and crafts table, Kim Jong Il away from the toy rocket ship, and Caligula away from everyone…

In Panic on Wall Street you take on the role of a freewheeling capitalist out to outmaneuver your competitors and earn your place as a great industrialist. Players are divided into landlords and merchants. Your goal is to earn more money than any other landlord (if you are a landlord) or more money than any other merchant (if you are a merchant) by the end of the fifth round. Each round landlords and merchants negotiate with each other in a two minute free-for-all to set rent agreements on the landlords’ properties. Merchants then collect income from the properties they rented but not until a roll of the dice has brought changes to the value of the four colors of properties. Landlords collect rent from merchants, pay taxes on their properties, and buy new properties at auction.

Race for the Galaxy is also back in stock!

Cool stuff this week!

Legendary: A Marvel Deck Building Game is set in the Marvel Comics universe. To set up the game, players choose a number of hero decks – Spider-Man, Hulk, Cyclops, Wolverine, etc. – and shuffle them together; since players use only a handful of hero decks out of the fifteen included, the hero deck can vary widely in terms of what’s available. Players then choose a mastermind villain (Magneto, Loki, Dr. Doom, etc.), stack that particular villain’s attack cards underneath it, then modify the villain deck as needed based on that villain’s particular scheme.

Over the course of the game, players will recruit powerful hero cards to add to their deck in order to build a stronger and more resourceful deck. Players need to build both their recruitment powers (to enlist more heroes) and their fighting ability (to combat the villains who keep popping up to cause trouble). Players recruit heroes from an array of six cards, with empty slots refilled as needed. At the start of a player’s turn, he reveals a villain and adds it to the row of villains. This row has a limited number of spaces, and if it fills up, the earliest villain to arrive escapes, possibly punishing the heroes in some way. Some villains also take an action when showing up for the first time, such as kidnapping an innocent bystander. The villain deck also contains “master strike” cards, and whenever one of these shows up, the mastermind villain (controlled by the game) takes a bonus action.

As players fight and defeat villains, they collect those cards, which will be worth points at game’s end. Players can also fight the mastermind; if a player has enough fighting power, he claims one of the attack cards beneath the mastermind, which has a particular effect on the game. If all of these cards are claimed, the game ends and players tally their points to see who wins. If the mastermind completes his scheme, however – having a certain number of villains escape, for example, or imposing a certain number of wounds on the heroes – then the players all lose.

The cards in Android: Netrunner – Trace Amount – the second Data Pack in the “Genesis Cycle”, with sixty cards (three copies each of twenty different cards) – enable players to dabble with bold new deck configurations, even as they reinforce the core mechanisms and personalities of the game’s seven factions. Runners gain new events while corporate executives look to fund new operations. Players will also find new hardware, resources, icebreakers, ice, agendas, assets, and upgrades. Trace Amount is a perfect Data Pack for fans of bluffing as its many events and operations open new surprises and synergies, and prove in more than one way that a card in the hand is worth two or more actions on the table. And as one might expect, in a Data Pack all about bluffing and surprises, Jinteki features prominently, gaining a new identity.