Hasbro is partnering with Epic Games to produce Fortnite-based toys and games. Of course, there’s to be a Fortnite Monopoly (due this fall) but also other unspecified games.

Shinobi 7 announced acquisition of the Conan license for tabletop games. Two products are planned. The first, a miniatures game via Kickstarter project. The second, a direct-to-retail card game.

With a license from Sony Interactive, Steamforged Games is pursuing plans for a miniatures-heavy Horizon Zero Dawn board game via Kickstarter. Pledges already total more than $1 million, though Steamforged estimates delivery not until March 2020.

Things from the Flood is a just-launched Kickstarter RPG project that’s a sequel to Tales from the Loop and based on another of Simon Stålenhag’s art books. The new one from Free League Publishing is more grim and bleak than its predecessor.

Coming to Kickstarter on the 1st of October is The Hunger Games: Mockingjay from River Horse.

Then scheduled for November 13th is Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood of Venice from Triton Noir. The company promises a cooperative miniatures game focused on stealth mechanisms.

WizKids recently announced a licensing arrangement with WWE. The company will add WWE wrestling personalities to HeroClix and Dice Masters and create WWE board games.

Available now from WizKids is Star Trek Galactic Enterprises, a game in which you play as Ferengi.

Also available now at retail is Munchkin Starfinder. It’s the Munchkin grab-the-loot card game from Steve Jackson Games, based on the Starfinder sci-fi RPG from Paizo Publishing.

Next up for Munchkin is Munchkin Warhammer 40,000 based on the property from Games Workshop. I love the meta of this previewed card, Unpainted.

But Steve Jackson isn’t the only company with a new Warhammer 40,000 license. Devir has made a racing game, Gretchinz, out of the property. WizKids has adapted Warhammer 40K to Dice Masters in Battle for Ultramar. Ulisses did Wrath & Glory, a Warhammer 40,000 roleplaying game. And USAopoly has made Warhammer 40,000 Monopoly.

Based on Warhammer Age of Sigmar, PlayFusion recently launched Champions, a collectible card game with an online play option. A non-collectible card game, Warhammer Doomseeker is available from Ninja Division.

EN Publishing, under license from Rebellion, is launching a Judge Dredd and the Worlds of 2000AD roleplaying game on Kickstarter.

IDW will ship to retail this coming February Nickelodeon Splat Attack!, as well as an expansion, Reptar Rampage. The game represents a food fight between teams of characters from various Nickelodeon shows, including Spongebob Squarepants, Hey Arnold!, Rugrats, and Invader Zim.

IDW also signed on with Toei Animation for a series of Dragon Ball games. The first two are due in stores this holiday season. Dragon Ball Super: Heroic Battle has players flicking tokens at each other, while Dragon Ball Z: Over 9000 is supposed to provide a more strategic gameplay experience. In 2019 (after a planned Kickstarter campaign), IDW will release a Dragon Ball Z miniatures game.

Coming this fall from USAopoly is the Dragon Ball Z Power Up Board Game in 3D. Also scheduled to deliver soon is a new Disney Chess Set celebrating 90 years of Mickey Mouse. Available now is one celebrating 25 years of Tim Burton’s A Nightmare Before Christmas. The company’s latest Monopoly games include Five Nights at Freddy’s Monopoly, Ren & Stimpy Monopoly, and BoJack Horseman Monopoly.

Looney Labs recently released Mary Engelbreit Loonacy, a matching card game with the artwork of Mary Engelbreit.

Dog Might Games is now making officially licensed Vampire: The Masquerade dice trays, storyteller screens, and storage boxes, each with a choice of clan symbol. Orders ship with exclusive V5 loresheets tied to the new Geek & Sundry show, LA by Night.

Elderwood Academy is taking preorders for a Vampire: The Masquerade Spellbook gaming box made from walnut and leather. It also ships with LA by Night loresheets.

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Illuminati, Steve Jackson’s 36 year old card game that satirizes conspiracy theories—and still sometimes inspires them!—is out in a second edition. While gameplay remains pretty much the same, the updated Illuminati features a variety of new cards, as well as new art by Lar deSouza.

In Illuminati, players build networks of organizations designed to control society. Cards represent the well-known and secret groups, artifacts, and intrigues popular with conspiracy theorists. The update replaces some from the cold war-focused first edition to better represent the internet age.

Orders direct from SJ Games’ Warehouse 23 come with a Fake News promo card.

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Second Look—Munchkin CCG

Launching at retail next week is the Munchkin CCG from Steve Jackson Games. And to jump right away on your first question, no, it’s not just the Munchkin card game in new packaging. The CCG would be better described as Munchkin-inspired. The game features similar humor and artistic style and borrows many thematic elements. It’s still a parody of fantasy roleplaying. Levels and loot are part of the game. And traditional Munchkin-y things show up on various cards—ducks, chainsaws, and gazebos are just a few.

Gameplay, however, is quite different. It is a CCG, so the essential idea is to attack your opponent and reduce their hero’s life points to zero. The way cards work together, too, is an important part of the game. In fact, each player chooses a hero of a specific class (elf thief or dwarf cleric, for example) and the cards of their deck are all supposed to either belong to that class or be neutral. The cards of each class type, of course, build on a common theme. Cleric cards allow the player to resist damage or heal. Thief cards lean toward the Mischief type (special actions or attacks that can be played out of normal order).

All that is fine and good. But what makes the Munchkin CCG outstanding is how brilliantly it pairs serious game with silly humor and take-that attitude. To attack your opponent, you send out one monster at a time with the money to pay for it. The card you put forward, however, goes face-down and need not even be a monster, or maybe you paid too little, or too much. Your opponent then has a choice to make, whether to defend, or runaway, or simply stand and take the hit—all while trying to read your bluff. “Cheating,” as it’s called (attacking without a monster or the money to pay for it), is part of the game, and part of the strategy in getting past an opponent’s defenses.

Bluffing and cheating also makes the Munchkin CCG much more than just playing your cards against your opponent’s deck. You’re really playing your opponent.

At launch, the Munchkin CCG will be available in two-deck Starter Sets (Cleric/Thief, Wizard/Bard, Ranger/Warrior) for $20 and 12-card boosters for $4.

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The Fantasy Trip to Return Under Steve Jackson

The Fantasy Trip, a roleplaying game series from the late 1970s, should return to publication as early as next year. Steve Jackson Games announced that rights to several products in the series—Melee, Wizard, Death Test, Death Test 2, Advanced Melee, Advanced Wizard, In the Labyrinth, and Tollenkar’s Lair—have returned to their original author, Mr. Steve Jackson. Until now, those rights were held by Metagaming. However, an element of U.S. copyright law, allows the author to reclaim rights 35 years after last publication.

While specific plans for publication of The Fantasy Trip are still being considered, Jackson suggested that the first new release is likely to be Melee (via Kickstarter), with minimal rules changes but “a fully modern presentation.”

[Image note: Those are the original games that I played with during my junior high school days.]

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CMON announced this week a deal with Steve Jackson Games to produce board games based on the latter’s Munchkin property. The first title is planned for Fall 2018, inspired by CMON’s adventure game, Arcadia Quest.

Osprey is doing a card game based on characters from the 2000AD comics. The core mechanics for Judge Dredd: The Cursed Earth will be derived from the company’s The Lost Expedition. Additional elements will track radiation and psychic abilities. And the game will play in competitive, cooperative, and solo modes.

Following up on its recent release of The Thing: Infection at Outpost 31, pop culture company Mondo is planning two more movie-tied titles: Jurassic Park and Fight Club. In the Jurassic Park board game, one person plays InGen, creating dinosaurs and developing the park, one person plays the park visitors, sending individuals around to various attractions, one person plays the velociraptors, sneaking around to kill other players, and one person plays the T-Rex, a single figure stomping everything. The only thing revealed so far regarding Figh Club is that it’ll be a card game.

Cubicle 7’s Call of Cthulhu license from Chaosium will expire at the end of December. The company, however, plans to port Cthulhu Britannica, World War Cthulhu, and The Laundry to new RPG systems.

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GURPS on DriveThruRPG

Steve Jackson Games has made GURPS ebook products available through DriveThruRPG. Previously, the company sold exclusively through its own online storefront, Warehouse 23.

GURPS is a multi-genre game (hence the name, Generic Universal Role Playing System) that’s been around since 1986 but still sees good support and regular releases. While the game itself has many fans, its supplements are also highly regarded as source material for people playing other games.

 

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Munchkin Spell Skool

Steve Jackson Games’ latest Munchkin product, Munchkin Spell Skool, of course parodies Harry Potter—with Moldy Mort monster cards, various quality of magic wands among the treasure cards, and reference to playing “air hockey” while riding flying brooms. There’s more to it than that, though. For example, as children studying wizardry, players during the game have the opportunity to adopt classes based on their after-school activities: Chess Club, Forbidden Magic Club, Potion Club, and Sports Club.

And as usual, the idea is to kill the monsters, take their treasure, and clawing your way past your friends, be the first to rise to level 10.

Munchkin Spell Skool is playable on its own or combined with other Munchkin games. It comes with 112 cards and a custom die, and retails exclusively at Walgreens for $20.

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Phil Reed, CEO of Steve Jackson Games, published the company’s annual Report to the Stakeholders today. In it, the company revealed that they had a second year of decline from 2014’s high of $8.5 million to $6 million. The main reasons cited for the income slowdown were delays on planned releases of Car Wars Sixth Edition and the Munchkin Collectible Card Game. With the delay on Car Wars, Mr. Reed writes it was due to “an insistence on making the game exactly the way we want it. We would rather not ship the game than ship a game that doesn’t meet our standards.” They are also seeking to get the Munchkin CCG ready to print by the end of the year.

The company looks to have a difficult year ahead for it, with the Ogre Kickstarter campaign from 2012 still not completed. “We are still sinking time into the project,” he writes, even though “we’re seeing real progress; several outstanding pieces of the project are finally coming to a close. Whew.”

Issues with the GURPS line have been problematic for the company as well. Two hardcover books for the GURPS line, Discworld and Mars Attacks, were released but performed poorly at retail. “Today’s cluttered market, combined with our insistence on getting it right, made both books expensive experiments that tell us one thing: Do not produce more GURPS hardcovers until we have guaranteed that the sales are there.” Also tying up resources at the company is the Dungeon Fantasy GURPS introductory box set. Reed writes, “what would have been a profitable project is rapidly turning into a loss.”

But it isn’t all doom and gloom: Munchkin continues to do well with reprints, Guest Artist Editions, and expanding into Walgreens. In the top twenty products sold by dollar volume, all but three were Munchkin related. The company released five new games which appear to have done well at retail, and Zombie Dice had to go back to reprint due to “unexpected demand during the fourth quarter” of 2016. “A game from 2010 that keeps outselling our forecast is good and bad, but we’ll take this situation over the opposite problem any day.”

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Attending PAX East and want to know who is exhibiting at what tables? We’ve been given the list of exhibitors in the tabletop hall, which currently do not show up in the Guidebook app, the only version of the program and show’s floorplan available.

The tabletop booths will be along the right (north) edge of the space, near the skybridge. From the main Queue Room entrance on up to the Lenovo Legion PC Room, the following companies will have a presence in the tabletop hall:

  • Gamewright, Q-Workshop, Asmodee NA
  • Compleat Strategist (local game store), Steve Jackson Games
  • Battleground Games & Hobbies (local game store), Level Up Dice, Fun to 11, Tectonic Craft Studios
  • CMON, Wyrmwood Gaming
  • Burning Wheel, Japanime/Global Games Distribution, Greenbriar Games
  • Modern Myths NY (“local” game store), Armor Class 10 Shirts
  • Pandemonium Games (local game store), Crit Success, Dragoon/Lay Waste Games
  • Atlas Games, United States Professional Mahjong League
  • Drinking Quest, Aviary Games, SFR
  • AdMagic
  • Greater Than Games
  • Foam Brain Games (“local” game store)

Although the PAX 2017 program book that appears in the Guidebook app doesn’t break down the tabletop hall, PAX’s Tabletop Manager has said that this year a detailed map of the tabletop area will appear in the program.

Munchkin CCG Card Previews

Another sneak peek at the upcoming Munchkin CCG was provided by Steve Jackson Games at Toy Fair, just for readers of Purple Pawn.

The Munchkin CCG is a two-player game with both battling and bluffing elements. Due by the end of the year, it pokes fun at both RPGs and CCGs. There’ll be two-deck starter boxes and randomized boosters in some sort of rarity scheme. Boosters, though, will only be available at hobby retail.

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