by W. Eric Martin

▪️ As far as I know, Czech publisher Albi had a Gen Con booth for the first time, and it used the space mostly to show off upcoming games that will be distributed in North America by Ares Games.

One title being previewed was Uwe Rosenberg's Garden Lake, a tile-laying game for 1-4 players that will be available at SPIEL Essen 25. You want to score the most points, and you score by creating groups of koi or lilypads that have at least seven items in them and by filling rows and columns on your board.

To set up, each player draws sixteen polyominoes composed of seven squares and places them in a U around their empty board. On a turn, you can take the polyomino from either end of the U or the polyomino from the end of your neighbors' U that is closest to you, thereby giving you four choices. Polyominoes are double-sided, with lilypads on one side and koi on the identical spaces on the opposite side.


If you cover one of the four L-shaped patterns on your player board, you immediately take one of the double-sided L-shaped bonus tiles from the perimeter of your board and place it; if you cover one of the five 2x2 square patterns, you take one of the single square bonus tiles and place it.

Additionally, if you fill a row or column, you take the bonus tile from the third of the board that contains that row or column, then place it. (I believe that you can also reserve one of the bonus tile on the "lock" location for placement later.) The game also has decoration tiles — the ones with brown backgrounds — but I'm not sure what those do. Sorry!

▪️ Severton is a 1-5 player co-operative game from Vlaada Chvátil in which you're trying to complete objectives more quickly than the Vonts — the bad guys in this world, which comes from the Rychlé šípy book series set in 1930s Czechoslovakia.

In the game, you have five characters on the game board (no matter the player count), and a constant issue is whether you want to travel together — so that you have more power and abilities for what you confront — or travel separately, so that you can cover more area on the game board and possibly get more done. As the publisher writes, "Uncover the movements of Vont patrols and try to avoid them, sneak your way around them, talk yourself out of trouble, or simply use your fists to get the upper hand."


▪️ Dirt & Dust is a deck-building and dice-placement game for 1-4 players from Petr Čáslava in which you race through five stages of play. An overview:

The player board is a neat design element:


This shows your view of the road as a driver. When you accelerate, the car is in the top row, and when you decelerate, it's in the bottom row. When you're turning, you move the car left or right to represent your location on the track, so if the car is on top, you move left or right more quickly.

During set-up, you combine the starting racing team deck with the five cards in your driver deck, with the game including four unique driver decks. Cards you play stick around on your racing team board for 1-6 turns, and their effects often differ depending on whether you're accelerating or decelerating. You must manage hazard dice and damage, all in a quest for speed points.

Čáslava describes the game as a complex puzzle each turn, with you opting to spend for resources or popularity (a specific type of resource) or to fix hazard dice that otherwise stick around and are rolled with your other dice each turn.

▪️ Asmodee had a large-scale version of Star Wars: Battle of Hoth from Richard Borg, Adrien Martinot, and Days of Wonder in its demo area. I know not every company has the room for such things in its booth, but they are ideal for attracting passersby and giving them a more immediate sense of gameplay.

Plus, us near-sighted folks can actually read the cards for once!


▪️ In the Friendly Skeleton booth, new publisher Creatist Games was demoing Immediate Murder Professionals, a board game based on the Helluva Boss web series that will be crowdfunded at some point.


I didn't get an overview as the previous demo was ending, and I had to head elsewhere as soon as the game was set up again, but here's a short description from crowdfunding pre-launch page: