• Are you familiar with The Mind? It’s pretty good, I hear, and publisher Nürnberger-Spielkarten-Verlag has announced the March 2023 release of a spinoff title from original designer Wolfgang Warsch and designer/developer Reinhard Staupe.
Here’s an overview of The Mind Soulmates, which like the original game is for 2-4 players:
In this game, however, in addition to playing numbered cards correctly in ascending order, they must also play all cards face down, revealing them only after all cards have been played. To help them do this, one player takes the role of seer — and the seer knows more than everyone else!
Each round, a specific number of cards are dealt out to players, and the seer is allowed to look at some of these cards in advance of play in order to give the team clues about these numbers on a wipeable board.
After the players have placed all cards face down, the seer checks whether the cards are in the right order, thereby completing the level. If not, the team loses a life, and the seer distributes these same cards again. In addition, the seer gives another hint.
If the team masters all twelve levels, they have won and can now call themselves “soulmates”.
Interestingly — and in line with my commentary from January 2023 — NSV has announced only this one title for release in the first half of 2023, whereas it normally publishes 2-4 titles every six months. Very curious…
• Pegasus Spiele, on the other hand, has continued its usual practice of announcing a large number of titles for release, and in addition to German editions of Revive, Orichalcum, and My Lil’ Everdell, it will release two original titles.
Black Hole Buccaneers is the debut title from designer Peter Langkjær Møller, and this 3-6 player card game, which is due out in the first half of 2023, works as follows:
Black Hole Buccaneers is a fast-playing drafting game which not only offers new situations and a lot of interaction with other players, but also difficult decisions due to various card effects. In each round, everyone at the table plays one card and passes the remaining cards to their neighbor. Whoever can escape the black hole in the scoring phase of a round gets to score their collected items and thus comes a little closer to victory.
• The second original title from Pegasus Spiele is Memo Mission, a game from designers Christopher Garbe and Patrick Russell that’s for 2-4 young players:
Memo Mission is an adventurous fairy tale game with a memo mechanism that includes introductory rules as well as blank missions on which the adventurers can get creative themselves and create their own stories thanks to the enclosed sticker sheet.