02 Mar
Posted by David Miller as Card Games, Modern Board Games
In what the company’s PR people at Toy Fair said was a recognition of the growing strategy game market, Spin Master is making a bigger push in to hobby and specialty retail. To feed that push, Spin Master has acquired rights to Santorini from Roxley Games and 5-Minute Dungeon from Wiggles 3D.
Santorini is a three-dimensional abstract-strategy game patterned on the architecture of the cliff-side villages on Santorini Island, Greece. Each turn, players build out or up homes on Santorini island and also may move one of their builder pawns one space over, one level up, or any levels down. Whoever is first able to get a builder to the top of a third-level home, not capped with a dome, is the winner.
Besides the simple but engaging game-play, rocketing Santorini up the BoardGameGeek rankings are its beautiful components. Spin Master promises to keep the game and components the same, and sell it for $30.
5-Minute Dungeon ($20) is a fast-play cooperative card game. The idea is to throw down the matching symbols required to defeat each monster card in-order and go through the whole deck before time runs out.
Both games will be launched by Spin Master at Gen Con, where the company is planning a larger presence this year.