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• U.S. publisher Pencil First Games has been working in this field for years with titles like Herbaceous, Floriferous, and Sunset Over Water, and in 2024 it’s releasing Snowfall Over Mountains, a solitaire game from Eduardo Baraf, Melissa Caputo, and Scott Caputo that leans heavily into the setting in its description:
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Explore the mountains around your cabin by placing and connecting tiles with different features. Find ways to earn points through goals for arranging animal tracks, ponds, trees, and shrubs in your environment.
Place tiles and chill.
Pencil First Games also plans to release a pocket-size edition of Floriferous, a design from Steve Finn and Eduardo Baraf that I covered in 2021.
• Flowers also take center stage in Windmill Valley, a Dani Garcia design for 1-4 players coming from Board&Dice inspired by the Bloemen Route in The Netherlands:
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During their turn, players choose the action by rotating the wheels on their windmill board. During the game they can:
— Enhance their wheels, by adding enhancements, to build their engine
— Plant tulips in their fields, which will score VP at the end of the game
— Build windmills on the main board to activate rewards from adjacent fields
— Hire helpers that provide bonuses for certain actions
— Get contracts for endgame scoring
— Visit the local market and conduct a foreign trade
• Natera: New Beginning takes a page from After Us for its subject matter, but expands the character roster to include more species. Here’s an overview of this 2-4 player game from Eric Fugere, Hugo Tremblay-Ledoux, and Horizon Games:
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With the help of your unique tribe leader and your explorers, you will explore, build authority, and take control of four distinct areas. Doing so will unlock new, more powerful tiles and allow you to establish settlements to further cement your presence. Improvements with human science will unlock powerful bonuses on a tech tree. Collecting the most venture points after four seasons will prove you are the animal tribe that adapted the best to the new “Natural Era”.
The game includes 150+ basic and advanced exploration cards featuring discoveries, improvements, science, and forty unique specialist cards, allowing each animal tribe to navigate and explore different strategies every single game.
• Competition for control of four areas takes place on a smaller scale in Nestlings, a 1-4 player game from Brandon Ohmie and Tangerine Games:
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Each round, players roll their biome dice, then place the dice in biomes one at a time. If you place first in a biome, you’ll have priority for selecting a resource first and discarding another resource — unless someone else places more dice there. With resources, you can feed your nestlings and add to the resource ring on your player board, which can lead to other effects. You can also shoot for endgame nest goals.
• Rings of a different sort play a role in Gnome Hollow, a tile-placement game from Ammon Anderson of Levity Games that has been picked up by The Op for release in 2024.
Here’s an overview of this 2-4 player game:
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Each turn, you place a tile into the garden, then move a gnome to take a single action. Once a ring is completed, you harvest each mushroom, then eventually carry them to market to sell for treasures. As you grow the garden, some rewards give players access to rare signposts that become unique worker placement spots once placed in completed rings.
Wildflowers can complete any ring, and planting them grants the player a wildflower token. Other players can move to that flower to collect that same token, and in sets these tokens prove more valuable.
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