• Rio Grande Games has placed a Q4 2023/Q1 2024 release date on Dice Realms: Trade Expansion from Tom Lehmann.
What awaits inside the box:
Dice Realms: Trade Expansion adds a new die type, nine more die faces, five lines of related die faces, and eight events that modify the fate die, representing the tumultuous late medieval world. New co-operative and solo play options, as well as recommended set-ups, are also provided.
• An expansion for Gaia Project was first confirmed by co-designer Helge Ostertag in November 2019, two years after the game’s release, and the latest update from publisher Feuerland Spiele is that the expansion will be released in late 2024.
• Japanese publisher itten plans to release Tokyo Highway: Rainbow City, an expansion for the dexterity game Tokyo Highway from Naotaka Shimamoto and Yoshiaki Tomioka, at the December 2023 Game Market in Tokyo. The expansion will include “various scenery that symbolizes Tokyo and new rules”.
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I typically group posts around a common thread, often working on multiple posts over many days, but sometimes a post gets stuck in draft mode with not quite enough to merit publishing, yet not enough to ignore either. What follows is from a July 2023 draft, with the info still being relevant now, I think:
• In mid-July 2023, Avalon Hill released HeroQuest: Rise of the Dread Moon Quest Pack, a new expansion for the thirty-year-old HeroQuest that has found a new life in the 21st century. An overview:
• Chris Handy‘s Long Shot: The Dice Game is a racing and betting game that debuted in 2022 from Handy’s company Perplext. Each turn in this game for 1-8 players, the active player rolls two dice to determine which of the eight horses advances on the track and how far it advances, then each player takes an action using the color of the horse die.
With the actions you can place a bet on that horse, mark the concession box in that color (earning a bonus when you complete a line), increase the odds of another horse horse moving in the future, or buy that horse, assuming no else has done so. Once three horses have passed the finish line, players receive payouts for their successful bets and for owning winning horses.
The game comes with three sets of horses, with each horse having a thematic special ability that its owner can use, giving you an extra incentive to buy it. Should you exhaust those horses, Handy has released five mini-expansions — Boot, Hot Dog, Jockey, Trophy, and Barn — that each contain a set of eight new horses. You can use all horses from one set or any eight horses numbered 1-8.
Additionally, the Track Events expansion has you draw two of eight events at random to change the racing conditions.
• Following the release of Small City: Deluxe Edition and the Winter Expansion in early 2023, Alban Viard of AVStudioGames is trying to fund (KS link) two new expansions for release in 2024 — and what better to follow winter but the Spring Expansion and Summer Expansion, which collectively feature more than two dozen new elements that can be mixed into the game.
