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Attend Balls in Bridgerton, Assemble a Team in Fairy Tail, and Beam Down for Star Trek: Away Missions

July 10, 2023

• Star Trek seems like a never-ending source of material for board games, with many publishers taking a crack at one branch of the franchise or another.

Star Trek: Away Missions is the newest such announced game, with Gale Force Nine planning to release this two-player game on August 12, 2023.

The core set of this design from Andrew Haught, Mike Haught, and Phil Yates is subtitled “Federation versus The Borg”, and in it, you either lead Riker’s landing party into the aftermath of the Battle of Wolf 359 to search for information that will defeat the Borg to save Earth, or you join Locutus of Borg and the Borg collective to assimilate your opposition.

To complete your goals, you conduct espionage, fight in battles, or assimilate distinctiveness. Your overall goal is to complete missions that earn you points as the player with the most points after three rounds wins.

Two landing party expansions will be available — Chancellor Gowron: Klingon Expansion and Commander Sela: Romulan Expansion — although it’s not clear from the announcement whether this allows for additional players in the game or simply a choice of who controls which party.

• If you haven’t seen the Bridgerton series on Netflix, which is based on the book series of the same name by Julia Quinn, you should at least look for highlight clips of Golda Rosheuvel in her role as Queen Charlotte because she commands every scene she’s in.

And if you haven’t seen the series, then you’ll have to rely on this short description of this a 3-6 player game from Mixlore to get a sense of what it’s like: In Bridgerton: The High Society Game, you “attend balls, dance with eligible prospects, and vie with others for the affections of suitors based on their prestige, desirability, and love – all with the ultimate goal of an auspicious marriage proposal”.

• Team Kaedama — the design team comprised of Antoine Bauza, Corentin Lebrat, Ludovic Maublanc, and Théo Rivière — has been on a tear this year, with Dead Cells: The Rogue-Lite Board Game announced in February 2023, The Smurfs: Hidden Village announced in June 2023, and Heroes of Fairy Tail announced, well, announced in 2021 with a demo supposedly taking place at SPIEL ’21, but the game has now hit the market in Q2 2023 from publisher Don’t Panic Games, with Japanime Games giving a U.S. release date of Q3 2023.

If you’re not familiar with the Fairy Tail manga written and illustrated by Hiro Mashima, here’s a taste of it in the game description:

Assemble your favorite characters against your rivals to become the greatest heroes of the Kindgom of Fiore!

In Heroes of Fairy Tail, danger is everywhere in the kingdom, and only you can help! Over three rounds, you must recruit heroes by drafting cards and assembling them in the best way possible. Activate actions to fight adversaries, acquire precious advantages, and accomplish quests before the other players to gain prestige.

• Funkoverse Strategy Game: Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas 101 might not be the most appealing title, but I think the Funko Games model with this line is to let the images on the box cover carry most of the weight:

This expansion for any Funkoverse standalone game consists of the three trick-or-treaters Lock, Shock, and Barrel from the film The Nightmare Before Christmas. You can stack all three figures together to treat them as a single character, or separate them and add them to your teams individually as companions.