Quote:

We at Evil Corp. have been working for 666 generations to frighten human villages. When it comes to scaring, we’re the best! Every year, we hold a team seminar where each of our managers is tasked with recruiting a team of monsters and competing against their colleagues to prove they’re the best at terrorizing humans. Terrorize two villages successfully, and you win.

In the game, each player has a bag of monster tiles, and you spend turns placing monsters in the half of the village board adjacent to you, recruit new monsters, or activating monsters in play. You want to boost the terror level in your part of the village, manage gold to afford new monsters, attack opposing monsters, etc.

When everyone passes, you adjust each player’s standing in the village, refill your hand with new tiles, collect gold, and otherwise prepare to continue the assault on the minds of these poor humans who are proxies in a larger conflict that they know nothing about.

• A second La Boîte de Jeu title will follow in mid-2024: From the Moon, by designers Johannes Goupy and Gilles Lasfargues, with this game having been crowdfunded in March 2023:

Quote:

Players are representatives of factions trying to complete missions that are departing from our Moon in order to help humankind survive elsewhere in the galaxy. Indeed, the fate of the Earth is sealed, and time is running out!

Three missions await, one each for Europa, Titan, and Mars, and to contribute to them you must hire and train astronauts, develop green houses, construct buildings to acquire resources, and send rovers to terrains on the Moon. Do all this, and you can complete segments of a mission (to score points) or improve part of a mission (also to score points). When all three missions are complete or someone hits the end of the progress track, you compare points to see who will have bragging rights in future generations.

• Survival is also the theme of Vampire Village, a game for up to five players from Maxime Rambourg and Studio H that releases in March 2024, but in this case you’re fine if others fall victim to monster attacks. You might die at their hands later, sure, but for now you rule the village!

The game lasts two rounds, with each round having a day and night phase. During the day, you place buildings to set up the village’s defenses, in addition to recruiting heroes. During the night, creatures attack you, and while you can push some of them into your neighbors’ villages — where they may (or may not) be stopped — you’ll also have to face some of the creatures yourself…along with whatever beasts your neighbors push at you!

Demo game at SPIEL Essen 23

In the end, the player with the highest total of tamed creatures and surviving villagers wins.

• Zombies took center stage in Flashback: Zombie Kidz in 2022, but now Canadian publisher Scorpion Masqué has a new zombie-free title in this line, with designers Baptiste Derrez and Marc-Antoine Doyon being joined by Gabriel Durnerin for Flashback: Lucy, a co-operative game for 1-4 players due out in March 2024:

Quote:

In Flashback: Lucy, you take on the role of a young girl with strange powers who inherits a mysterious mansion in which dark and disturbing events have taken place. Using the Flashback mechanism — that is, examining images from multiple points of views to discover clues — travel into the past through Lucy’s visions, and meet the shadow that haunts the mansion. You will travel from era to era, discovering the mansion at different moments in time.

I’ll note that searches for “Flashback: Lucy” will bring up this LEGO character from The LEGO Movie 2: The Second Part:

I’m not sure whether the similar naming is intentional, but maybe this is a reminder to look your game’s name ahead of announcing it to see whether the search results will be as awesome as you hope.

• Mind Map is a party game for 4-14 players from designers Yohan Goh, Hope S. Hwang, and Gary Kim and co-publishers Funnyfox and Sorry We Are French. The description is brief, but I think we can start there, then interpret more from the gameplay image:

Quote:

Make your opponents guess your secret word by placing your coordinate token in the game zone according to two criteria. Sometimes you’ll push your logic limit, but don’t forget to take the reference word into account! Will you be able to grasp your opponents’ logic and make them understand yours?

Looking at the components—

I would guess that you can play in teams (and must play in teams with more than seven people), with you being randomly assigned one of the cards in the leftmost column, then placing your colored location marker at the intersection of two randomly dealt descriptors. Player will then use their numbered tokens to secretly guess who’s word is whose, scoring points when they’re correct.

Seems straightforward to me, and I’ll be surprised if I’m more than 15% wrong. We’ll find out next year!