Gen Con 2013 logoIt’ll be difficult for Iello to match King of Tokyo but it’s certainly trying. The company presented at Gen Con a variety of recent releases, hot-0ff-the-press games, and previews of future products.

Titanium Wars, out for a short time, is a card game of planetary conquest for 3-4 players. The goal is to be the first player to control a certain number of titanium resources. (Titanium, in this game, isn’t the metal alloy, but rather an energy source.) To accomplish this, players have to purchase fleets, equipment, and buildings; develop their technologies; and battle over planet cards. A certain degree of diplomacy is also required to do well.

A future expansion for Titanium Wars will allow the game to be played with two players.

The Phantom Society is a ghost hunting deduction game for 2-4 players in two teams—one plays the ghosts, the other the hunters. The game’s board represents a Scottish manor hotel and each space, with slots for hiding ghost tokens, a room. During play, the ghost-hunting team works to find all the ghosts before their rampage destroys the hotel.

With a fairy-tale theme and simple push-your-luck, dice-based play, The Three Little Pigs is a lite strategy title that I think will be popular with families. The goal of the game is to build houses of straw, wood, and bricks by rolling dice. Each die has door, window, and roof faces. With two of the same result, a player can build a straw section, three a wood section, or four a brick section. Some of the dice, though, can also be rolled for wolves. When that happens, the player is supposed to blow on the game’s spinner, which will show which type of section (straw, wood, or brick) an opponent will have to eliminate.

The Phantom Society and The Three Little Pigs were selling in limited quantities at the show. They should be available at retail shortly.

Two additional games demoed at Gen Con but scheduled for fall release were Guardian Chronicles and Heroes of Normandie. The former is a super-hero game that features teamwork among players as a central element, without being a fully cooperative game. The latter is a simple, two-player war game with comic-style art.

Meeting with Iello, I was also able to get an early look at a couple of games still in development. Steam Park is a fast, simultaneous dice-rolling game with a steampunk-fantasy, theme-park theme and three-dimensional pieces. Zombie 15′ is a game about zombies (obviously) that’s supposed to play real-time in 15 minutes. The idea is that the game should feel just as rushed as the teenaged apocalypse survivors would feel while trying to complete each of the 15 included scenarios. Another interesting aspect of Zombie 15′ is that whenever a player eliminates zombies with a weapon that’s marked as loud, those zombies go in to the horde box. Then, whenever a horde card is drawn, all the accumulated zombies attack at once.

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