On display in New York, and at the same time making its way through distribution, was Flea Market ($21), the newest entry in Mayfair’s Fun Fair line. Flea Market is an auction game about buying low and selling high, but with a twist. Bids by individual players are, of a sort, fixed. That is, the players each roll two dice to determine both the priority of their bids and the prices they would have to pay—higher numbers go first but also have to pay more. As the item for sale in a round is selected randomly, the thing purchased by one player may end up resold to others (with the seller earning a bonus from the bank). The winner is the first player to turn a $24 stake in to $45.

Also on display by Mayfair were the rebranded Catan and a Catan Traveler Edition ($45, available in June).

UPDATE: As requested, here is a picture of the Catan cards:

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Under the watchful eyes of Bob & Angus, in a demo area thronged by ribbon-seekers, Mayfair Games gave me the lowdown on a variety of recent and upcoming releases.

Beadpans & Broomsticks, which shipped in June ($35), puts most of the players in the role of old folks trying to escape a retirement home. One player, though, runs the nurses, who try to stop them. Each retiree player gets two tokens, one for the actual patient and one as a decoy.

Villainy (at retail for $50 later this month) is a supers game where the players are up-and-coming bad guys. Starting with petty crimes like putting a kitten in a tree, and working their way up to bigger, nastier plans, such as decaffeinating the world’s coffee, players build skills and recruit henchmen with the ultimate goal of defeating Fantastaman.

Johari is a push-your-luck, set-collection game about buying and selling gems. Counterfeit gems are part of the mix, though players try hard not to get caught selling them.

Catan Collector’s Edition Ancient Egypt (November, $70) builds on Settlers of Catan (obviously) but incorporates the Nile river running through the board. Resources in the game are cattle, papyrus, and stone. With them players collectively build the Great Pyramid. And ten god cards work similarly to the Helpers of Catan scenario, each providing a unique ability to the player who holds it.

Among the games Mayfair has planned for release in 2015 are Extra Extra and Flea Market. The former has players running competing newspapers. They build stories (with a card drafting mechanism), sell adds, and do layout. Somewhere in that mix there’s also supposed to be worker placement and a lot of player interaction. The latter is a quick, silly dice game that has players collecting artifacts, sometimes from the center market and sometimes taking them away from other players.

Participating in Mayfair’s booth was Lookout Games, with whom Mayfair has a distribution arrangement in the United States. Lookout’s Gold Ahoy is a two-player tile-laying game, where the winner is the player with the most gems in a network of connected tunnels. Patchwork is a game about quilting that uses pentomino or Tetris-like pieces with 9×9 player boards. Players try to fill their boards by collecting pieces. Each piece, though, has a time value and a button value. Buttons are victory points but quilting time is limited.

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