Wild Tiled West, Trailblazers, Masters of the Universe, and More at GAMA Expo

by W. Eric Martin

Even more pics from the GAMA Expo 2023 trade fair, sometimes with meaningful information attached:

• Publisher Dire Wolf had a teaser announcement of Paul Dennen‘s Wild Tiled West in July 2021, but now it’s moving toward release of this 1-5 player tile-laying game in 2023. The game description is minimal, but gives you some sense of what’s going on:

Maybe this image from GAMA Expo 2023 gives you some more info:

And here’s a close-up of the central tile markets, which use d8 and d20 dice:

I wrote down a short gameplay overview when I saw the game on media night, then lost my notebook, so…yeah.

• A couple of retailers were putting Thunder Road: Vendetta from Dave Chalker, Brett Myers, and Restoration Games through its paces, with Kickstarter fulfillment being underway.

• The Op has picked up The A.R.T. Project, a co-operative game from Florian Sirieix, Benoit Turpin, and originating publisher Lumberjacks Studio for release in the U.S.

So many drinks!

• During media night, CMON was demoing Masters of the Universe: The Board Game – Clash for Eternia from Leo Almeida and Michael Shinall.

At a retailer presentation a couple of days later, CMON noted that all of the Masters of the Universe items the base game and five expansions — were part of a single production run and would not be reprinted. I presume that limitation is due to the licensing agreement, but whatever the reason, CMON was telling retailers that if you want to carry the line, order it now because once it’s gone, it’s gone.

• At the close of the Monday game night, Nick Murray at Bitewing Games set me up for a basic solo game of Trailblazers by Ryan Courtney. In each of four rounds, you place six domino-style cards — draw eight cards, place two, discard, draw six new cards, place two, discard, draw four, place two — and at the start of each of the first three rounds, you place one of the campgrounds in play.

Your goal is to create long paths of single colors that begin and end at the matching colored camp. You can overlay tiles as you wish to make connections, but that eliminates old paths, so you want to spread out as much as possible.

You can play with goals that players race to complete, and animals can be added to give you another element to maximize. (You can see animal icons on some of the tiles in play above.) The game also includes a solo campaign that keeps adding new challenges as you meet point thresholds.

Four of the many goals

I had walked up to the table just as a four-player game with goals and animals was ending:

• Adam Rehberg from Adam’s Apple Games had a mock-up box for Supermoon, the upcoming expansion for Planet Unknown, which had had co-designed with Ryan Lambert. Wish I could say more about what this will contain, but that was once again in the lost notebook.

• Here are one-and-two-thirds game boards in the new Renegade Games Studio edition of Richard Garfield‘s [thing=381327Robo Rally]Roborally[/thing]:

• Hachette Boardgames had a giant-sized version of Qawale from Romain Froger, Didier Lenain-Bragard, and Gigamic in order to catch passersby, but this item is also available for purchase by retailers who want to use it in their store attract passersby of their own. When I worked in a game store in the early 1990s, I loved having giant-sized games on display since it was also easy for other people to watch the demo and mentally play along.

• To follow up my overview of Disney Lorcana, here’s a shot of the crowd around the demo table at GAMA Expo 2023, with co-designer Ryan Miller in green on the right and co-designer Steve Warner in Ravensburger blue, also on the right.