Welcome Giant Bets with Clever Silver Bits

by W. Eric Martin

Not everyone discovers games at the same time, and for those who come to the party years after a game’s original release, publishers are happy to oblige players’ desire to have it all with a special edition or massive collection, as with those in this post:

• Near the end of 2023, Schmidt Spiele released Ganz schön clever: Deluxe, a new edition of Wolfgang Warsch‘s landscape-altering 2018 dice game Ganz schön clever that includes the original game, a new laminated player sheet that features elements from other titles in the series, and a dice tower.

As far as I can tell, this item is currently available solely through Amazon.de.

• Side note related to this game line: The English-language license for That’s Pretty Clever! and Twice as Clever! now resides with publisher CMYK, not Stronghold Games, and the CMYK versions of these titles hit the retail market in early February 2024.

Alex Hague at CMYK tells me that Clever Cubed, Clever 4Ever, and That’s Pretty Clever! Kids will join the first two siblings on the U.S. market, hitting the CMYK website on February 21, 2024, then popping into retail outlets later. Clever: Deluxe, however, is not coming out from CMYK.

• Bézier Games has announced new games in Ted Alspach‘s Silver series for release in 2024, with Silver Eye and Silver Fang both being playable on their own or in combination with any other Silver titles.

Gameplay is along the lines of the public domain card game Golf, with players trying to have the lowest score in the round, but each number (0-13) in a Silver title has a unique power, and you can use numbers from various sets to create new combinations of card powers.

Additionally, Bézier Games is running a Kickstarter campaign for Silver: Big Box Collector’s Edition, through the beginning of February 2024, with backers being able to get only the new sets, all six Silver sets, and various combinations of that material.

• Along the same lines is Ready Set Bet: High Roller Edition, a new version of John D. Clair‘s 2022 Ready Set Bet, with publisher AEG launching a crowdfunding campaign in March 2024 and promising a giant neoprene mat, premium poker chips, Vegas-style dice, and a “table of perfectly sized named horses”…which sounds like a weird thing to promise.