Recent releases from USAopoly include Samurai Jack Back to the Past ($35), based on the animated series, Thanos Rising ($50), a Marvel comics cooperative dice game, and Blank Slate ($25), a family-friendly fill-in-the-blank party game.

Coming next month is Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs: A Gemstone Mining Game ($35). Based on Quartz, the push-your-luck game of collecting crystals from Passport Game Studios, this Disney version works with up to seven players, each as one of the dwarfs.

In October, USAopoly ships Harry Potter Codenames ($25), with art from the films and gameplay similar to Codenames Duet but multiplayer.

Later in the fall, we’ll see Fantastic Beasts Perilous Pursuits ($30), a cooperative dice game where the goal is to put the beasts back in the suitcase.

While it wasn’t on display at the show, I was told there would be another expansion for the Harry Potter Hogwarts Battle deck-building game sometime in 2019.

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What I really want is the giant-sized Pylos but Gigamic’s new games look fun too.

Kaosmos ($30, due at retail this fall) is a space-themed reimplementation of Mad City (with was published by Mayfair). Not to be confused with Chaosmos from Mirror Box Games, this title is a real-time tile-laying game, where players assemble individual galaxies of nine planet tiles and score points based on contiguous zones of same-colored planets. Additional points are awarded for the length of asteroid paths the players manage to keep uninterrupted in each of their galaxies.

Squadro ($35, fall) is a simple-looking abstract where players race to get their four pieces back and forth across the board. The twist is that if one player’s piece blocks the path of another’s, the so-called blocked piece jumps ahead and the blocking piece is sent back to the start.

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The next three games in Calliope’s Titan Series games are due later this year.

Everyone Loves a Parade ($25) has players designing parade floats to match the styles and decoration preferences of the crowds. Card play also allows manipulation of the crowds and position in the parade for turn order.

In Spy Master ($30), players control teams of agents, sending them on various missions around the world. To complete a mission and claim its victory points requires playing cards to move agents in to position and to collect specified types of intelligence (surveillance, blueprints, dossiers, or espionage). Each round, the current Spymaster divides available cards for the other players to choose.

Intriguing enough, that’s just the basic game. According to my source at Calliope, not once mentioned explicitly in the rules, there are also instructions for an advanced game hidden and hinted at somewhere in the Spy Master box.

Ship Shape ($30) is a kind of three-dimensional puzzle game in which the players attempt to smuggle the most valuable contraband in the holds of their sailing ships. They bid on crates that are stacked tiles with different gaps. During the bidding process, these gaps provide the players with limited information about upcoming crates. After the auction, they can try to stack these crates to maximize contraband value.

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Show & Tile from Jellybean Games is a picture-making party game, where instead instead of drawing pictures by hand, players create their images using tangram pieces. The idea, of course, is to guess other players’ words from their pictures and to have them guess your word from yours.

Show & Tile should reach retail within a month priced at $25. Jellybean also has a $5 promo pack of extra word cards in four specific categories: world, jobs, sci-fi & fantasy, and adjectives.

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Ten years ago, Monsterpocalypse was a prepainted collectible line. Now it’s being relaunched by Privateer Press as a traditional unpainted, non-collectible miniatures game.

Gameplay is about eliminating your opponent’s giant monsters. Each side gets one large monster figure and a number of smaller units, such as tanks, airplanes, or little monsters. A turn can be taken as either a monster turn or a unit turn. Units are spawned to the board by spending white dice. And in addition to attacking an opponent’s monster, units can also be used to occupy buildings, thereby granting power-ups to a player’s own monster.

At Gen Con, there were two versions of a $50 starter box, each with one monster, five units, dice, card stock apartment buildings, and a paper battle map. Blisters with five additional units were priced at $20-25.

The new Monsterpocalypse is scheduled to hit retail next month. Look for more monsters and building types, the latter of which will provide different kinds of power-ups.

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