The News Shed 2 : 23/02/2023

Welcome Back to the News shed, 

On this weeks episode, our News man Paul brings you all of this weeks juicy Table Top Gaming news & Crowdfunding campaigns we think you need to know about & of course the all important update on the BGG hotness so you are always in the loop of what is the hottest game on the market.

news stories include (but not limited too) 
The closure of Holy Grail Games
The announcement of South Park Munchkin
Cyclades: legendary Edition
Moon River a Kingdomino Game System
Unmatched games system to see new sets
Disney Lorcana
Plus much much more

Transcript

Hello, Hello, Hello, we're so glad you've come back after our first solo outing...

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Brian's happy too, do you need a tissue... I take it there happy tears...

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All good... So what have we been up to this week... 

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Yep, we went gaming with the Dungeon Crawley crew this past Sunday, got plenty of games played didn't we...

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Quartermaster General WW2, yeah that did feel a little weird, what with what's going on at the moment...

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Yeah, that's true, got our first play of Flamecraft in, my minds terrible chap, did I win that one...

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I did didn't I... Then we got into some scraps with Jason and James, along with Adam at the Crawley Gaming Community gig last night didn't we...

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Had to call it a draw in Inis didn't we, it was getting late... Although...

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What do you mean, here we go... I was just saying I should have had the moral victory, it was our first game and coming that close to a win it should have gone to us...! I'm just saying...

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Yeah, yeah, yeah... Right News time, you know what to do little man... Hit it...

NEWS HEADLINES

We're gonna get the bad news out the way first this week as another publisher hangs up it's boots after the ongoing issues resulting from the pandemic.

Rallyman: GT and Museum publisher Holy grail Games announced the closure in a blog post published earlier this week revealing that after 6 short years the company will be ceasing operations effective immediately.

Holy Grail Games, a publisher known for releasing board games such as Rallyman: GT and Museum, has announced that it will be closing down due to delays caused by the Covid-19 pandemic.

Holy Grail Games has cited the impact caused by Covid-19 pandemic as being the main reason for the company’s decision to close its doors. The blog outlined the various events that led to the decision, citing the lockdowns through 2020 leading to “huge delays”. Due to the delays, the company’s production schedule was pushed back – blocking projects that Holy Grail had planned and “wreaking havoc” on the company’s editorial calendar

The delays experienced by Holy Grail meant that it was unable to produce and distribute board games at its usual rate, leading to a loss of retail revenue for “almost two years.” This loss of revenue made the situation surrounding increased shipping costs for tabletop publishers – which has indeed affected every other publisher too.

The company also struggled after the Euro experienced a sharp decrease against the US dollar in 2022. The drop in value on the Euro caused Holy Grail to lose around 200,000 euros over the course of last year. By the end of 2022, the company was faced with the challenge of distributing four titles at around the same time due to the various bottlenecks caused by previous production and shipping delays.

Holy Grail had hired a fulfilment partner, Bolloré Logistics, that it believed would be able to successfully deliver all the board games it had lined up. However, that was a disaster as because of various issues caused by the distributor, namely distribution delays to backers receiving the wrong games – the fulfilment of the various Kickstarter campaigns was, as I said a complete and utter disaster. Though Holy Grail attempted to rectify the situation itself by sending out copies from its spare parts stock and hiring freelancers to help with replying to backers’ queries, the delays and mistakes piled up.

After the Kickstarter campaign for Copan: Dying City “didn’t do anywhere near as well” as the company had hoped it would, Holy Grail was in a “financially fragile” state by the beginning of 2023. Receiving the invoices from Bolloré Logistics – despite the company’s mishandling of Holy Grail’s board game distribution – did not improve the situation, with the fulfilment company refusing to pay compensation for the costs its mistakes had caused to Holy Grail Games. Bolloré Logistics also refused to release Holy Grail’s stock until it had gotten its payment, with another distribution delay causing the publisher’s bank to back out of supporting it.

With the lack of finances needed to continue operations, Holy Grail has now entered the bankruptcy process – with the entire team at the studio being laid off this week. In regard to any backers waiting for their pledge rewards, Holy Grail has commented:

“Please know that we are deeply, deeply sorry, and that we did everything in our power to deliver your pledge to you. Even as the company goes into bankruptcy, we’re trying to find a way to make it right.”

The company hopes that the rights to its various series are picked up by other publishers in the future and has offered the “deepest thanks” to its players and supporters.

We here at the Meeple Minded send our best wishes to every employee over at Holy Grail Games at this time.

Right we need some cheering up now. How about some foul mouthed kids from Colorado forming an unlikely partnership with Steve Jackson Games. Can you see where this is going? Go on have a guess?

If I said we're heading on down to the table, we certainly are gonna have ourselves a time, with friendly faces everywhere, just humble folks without any temptation, yep we're heading on down to South Park Munchkin. Were you expecting that? Well we think its going to be a Munchkin with a built in NSFW Edition.

Can you honestly believe that South Park is celebrating its 25th Anniversary this year.

A bit like the video games South Park: The Stick of Truth and South Park: The Fractured But Whole you'll be taking on the role of the new kid at South Park Elementary. 

Featuring hilarious references and characters, you'll need to arm yourselves with things like Kenny's Throwing Star or even whip some arse with Towelie whilst also recruiting allies in the form of Butters, Mr Hanky, Randy, Timmy, and of course the fab four themselves, Eric, Kyle, Stan, and Kenny.

You'll be heading into battle against all manner of baddies that seem to congregate around South Park like the Canadian Beelzaboot, ManBearPig, PC Principal, Mr. Garrison and Satan, all while avoiding curses being thrown at you from other parties as you make your ascension to the famed level 10.

This "totally sweet" collectible Munchkin card game is based on the popular Steve Jackson card game mechanic and it makes a great gift that any South Park fan would love to own. 

We don't know too much about the next title we've heard rumours of but I'm sure it's just a matter of Time...

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C'mon I thought it was good... Time Collectors looks to be a heist game of sorts as you jump back in time to collect the riches from the past.

Collaboratively designed by Florian Sirieix and Mareva Beauchamps and being published by Belgian Publisher Lubee Edition, Time Collectors is due out this March.

How does it work, well the short pitch is: "You use 4 D10's to travel through time!" 

The year is 8052, and time travel is possible now. Should bloody hope so too. Time Collectors invites you to combine dice to travel through time, collect cards, and earn more points than your opponents. 

In more detail, you'll roll your 4 D10's and organize them to select the year to which you want to travel. Use your time crystals to alter your results. Collect the riches of the past on your personal board in order to claim achievement cards and end up with the most beautiful collection of all time. Simples...!

At the end of January 2023, Brandora — a German information site about the licensing and marketing of toys and games — published an article on the industry trends for games and puzzles. It notes that sales among game publishers in the DVSI, or German Toy Industry Association fell slightly by 5% in 2022 compared to the previous year, while still being up 20% when compared to sales in 2019. This segment is interesting to note: 

Pure children's games account for about a fifth of the sales pie, while family and adult games make up about a third. Puzzles and card games approx. 15% each. After years of boom in escape games, they lost momentum in 2022. In return, puzzle and crime games saw a rise. 

Everything old will be renewed, and the latest example of a game given the preverbal makeover for a new market is Cyclades, a game from Bruno Cathala and Ludovic Maublanc that debuted way back in 2009 from French publisher Matagot.

Of course several expansions have been released for Cyclades since 2009, Hades in 2011, Titans in 2014, and Monuments in 2016, along with various promos. 

Now is the time though that Cathala and Maublanc felt it right to rework the Cyclades base game and its many expansions to, in the new publishers own words, "make gameplay more dynamic and fluid" as Open Sesame Games take over the reins for the upcoming title Cyclades: Legendary Edition from Matagot. 

In the Cyclades archipelago, off the shores of a divided Greece, players develop their cities and compete for supremacy under the watchful gaze of the gods.

So what was/is Cyclades: Legendary Edition, well as the original title it features a strategic bidding system that defines the actions available to each player on their turn. So you must balance your finances to optimize the various actions provided by the different gods, with each player gaining the support of only one god each turn.

The new game features a shorter and more dynamic bidding phase than the original Cyclades thanks to a new exponential bidding scale. Six gods are available instead of the five, increasing the variety of actions available:

• Ares allows the movement of player armies and the building of fortresses.
• Poseidon allows players to move their navies and build ports.
• Zeus allows his followers to hire priests and build temples.
• Athena provides her worshippers with philosophers and universities.
• Apollo increases the income of his worshippers.
• Hera provides mercenaries to enforce your troops during battle.

Players now use landscape tiles to assemble the modular game board during set-up, allowing for ever-changing maps and game strategies. New creatures and heroes are available in the base game, offering new strategic opportunities to build metropolises and gain decisive advantages on the battlefield. Your goal is to be the first to control three metropolises, which can be obtained as follows:

• Economic development, by constructing four different buildings.
• Intellectual development, by owning four philosophers.
• Heroic deeds, when sacrificing a hero.
• Military conquest, when seizing an enemy city by strength.

Cyclades: Legendary Edition features three game configurations:

• "Classic" mode for 3-5 players in which each player defends their own interests.
• "Team" mode for 4 or 6 players in which you play in teams of two, co-operating with one another and competing against others.
• An enhanced and refined two-player mode. 

Cyclades: Legendary Edition will hit Kickstarter in the second quarter of this year with fulfilment and retail release sometime on 2024.

Who knew Kingdomino was an actual system, well Blue River actually, as they announce the release of a new game Moon River from designers Bruno Cathala and Yohan Servais and bearing a label 'a Kingdomino Game System' on the box cover.

So Moon River uses the Kingdomino game system but from what we can see without any dominoes.

In the game, you will build a personal landscape of tiles to score points, but instead of tiling dominoes in your landscape, the game uses half-dominoes in which one edge has a jigsaw puzzle-style connection. You combine two of these half puzzle pieces to craft your own dominoes. This mechanism is meant to provide more variability and randomization in each play.

Instead of building your landscape around a central castle, you start from the river and expand away from it. Also, the crowns (i.e., the victory point multiplier) from Kingdomino are replaced by cow Meeples, with players being able to use cowboys to move them. 

It is for 2 to 4 players and will be played in about 45 minutes and is due out at some point later this year.

U.S. publisher Restoration Games has announced that it's clash of heroes title Unmatched will be seeing more sets entering it's vaults.

Joining the Deadpool, Bruce Lee, Jurassic Park and Buffy the Vampire Slayer sets already in the vault will be the popular 4 character set Cobble and Fog along with 2 character set  Robin Hood vs. Bigfoot. 

They will both go out of print this year with no plans to reprint them.

Restoration Games owner, Justin D. Jacobson said in a recent blog post.

"With the success of the line and its continual growth, we find ourselves with an ever more crowded roster. This, in turn, presents challenges for our retailer partners in deciding what to order and for our customers in deciding what to buy. By putting these titles in the vault, we can give more focus to our active and upcoming sets." 

Since then we've had news that 10 sets will be heading to stores over the next 2 years, 5 this year which we know 2 of, Houdini vs The Genie, which came about after a contest run back in 2020.

The contest also saw William Shakespeare and Rosie The Riveter, the cultural icon made famous in America during WW2, representing the women who worked in the factories. They were both confirmed as future characters after the competition, but as yet, no news on when.

Marvel seems to have locked themselves in for the long-haul too with restoration Games as along with their Redemption Row set featuring Ghost Rider, Luke Cage and Moonknight and Hell's Kitchen Set including Bullseye, Daredevil and Elecktra, 2 more sets have already been announced with the set Teen Spirit bringing youngsters Squirrel Girl, Ms Marvel and Clock and Dagger in, alongside the set For King and Country with the characters Black Widow, Black Panther and Winter Soldier.

Despite the several months between now and Disney Lorcana’s official release, promotional collector sets for the trading card game are auctioning at thousands and even tens of thousands of dollars on eBay and related platforms.

Don’t worry - you didn’t miss some secret midnight retail drop. Attendees of the Disney Expo 2023 were the only ones able to acquire the collection of seven promotional cards by visiting the Ravensburger’s booth during Disney’s annual celebration of its own massive brand-owning corporation.

The set included Robin Hood, Captain Hook, Stitch, Cruella De Vil, Elsa and Mickey Mouse cards, along with two commemorative pins, the cards themselves have been confirmed as those that will appear in the initial set, Disney Lorcana: The First Chapter, when it releases. The only difference will be the lack of unique foil treatment and two promotional symbols marking the promotional cards as 1st Edition D23 Expo exclusives.

An undisclosed but limited quantity was given away during D23, and now some of them are popping up on eBay and other online auctioning sites asking for the kinds of money that already established trading card games, such as Magic: The Gathering and the Pokémon TCG are asking.

Many of the listing include individual cards or complete sets graded PSA Gem Mint 10, and successful sales have brought in $19,000 at its peak in January.

First reported by ICv2, the auction prices have fluctuated slightly since the Lorcana card listings first started appearing in the wake of the D23, which took place back in September 2022.

Recently, eBay showed an ambitious complete set of Gem Mint 10 promo cards listed for a whopping $35,000, and single cards (graded 9 and up) were being sold for $600 at the low end and several thousand at the top end. Several signed cards are also mixed within, bearing artist signatures on the grading boxes from figures such as one of the co-designer Ryan Miller.

Specifically the Mickey Mouse, Brave Little Tailor card - appearing at PWCC auctions more than 40 times as of last December, and even grading house PSA reported at least 256 copies (17 of them signed) had been graded around the same month.

We all still have to wait until it's official launch this Autumn but with the sheer collectability of anything Disney at the moment together with the creators maintaining that Lorcana’s mechanics and gameplay will both draw in those new to TCG's while also giving veteran TCG'ers new and satisfying strategies to chew on.

With MagicCon Philadelphia just wrapped, Wizards Of The Coast announced the first details for Lord Of The Rings: Tales Of Middle-earth, a brand-new expansion set featuring characters, locations, and events from J.R.R. Tolkien's massive saga.

Prerelease date is set for 16th June with it launching on Arena on the 20th, before the set launches at retail on the 23rd with Draft, Set, Collector, and Jumpstart booster packs, four pre constructed Commander format decks, a Starter Kit, a Bundle and Gift Bundle, Scene Boxes, and Secret Lair drops. A second release is planned November 3 for the holiday season.

Tales Of Middle-earth is the first full expansion under Magic's Universes Beyond label, which previously introduced The Walking Dead, Street Fighter, Godzilla, and more to the tabletop card game via Secret Lair drops.  A first look at the full Lord Of The Rings: Tales Of Middle-earth set is due around the 14th March.

BGG TOP 5 HOTNESS

Before we hit crowdfunding this week, and as we have some time we thought it would be great to bring you a little top 5 from the Board Game Geek Hotness list once a week. 

So these games on the list may be already out, due to come out, or crowdfunding at the moment, it tends to be a list based on what people are searching for on Board Game Geek right now.

We know it can be a little turbulent so the list is accurate at the time of recording. Here we go

In 5.

Everyone still loves gathering all manner of animal species in a modern and scientifically managed zoo while helping ongoing conservation projects in Ark Nova.

In 4.

Despite the freeze Frosthaven has managed to edge up the list from last weeks 5 to 4.

In 3.

While it's frosty counterpart lingers below, it's defrosted predecessor Gloomhaven jumps back in at no 3.

In 2.

A brand new entry in the top 5 and certainly making it's presence felt on the socials is Inside Up Games new title, Earth. 

In. 1

Steaming ahead of everyone else though and showing theres no end to the industrial revolution is Brass Birmingham.

CROWDFUNDING

Heading on over to Crowdfunding we're heading this week to Gamefound and trying to remember those button mashing joystick manoeuvring combos with the mouthful that is Street Fighter 5: Championship Edition - Legends.

So its for 1-4 players and taking around 45mins. It's been designed by Mitch Schroeder and being published by Kolossal Games alongside Kess and Blacklist Games.

To be honest I've not played much of the Street Fighter series since the behemoth that was Street Fighter 2 hit the Arcades back when I was diddy Paul, pumping money into the cabinet just to hear those immortal words, Hadoken, Yoga Flame or Chunli's Huh, Huh, Huh as she was pummelling someone's body and face with her foot. So the roster and actually the game play of Street Fighter 5: Championship Edition – Legends looks a little unfamiliar.

In this game, you'll still be taking on the role of your favourite Street Fighter characters but now working together to defeat your nemesis and the hoards of minions they will no doubt-ably send in your direction. Build your combos, upgrade your abilities, and create your legend in what resembles another late 80's early 90's arcade classic Final Fight, a side scrolling beat em up I also spent way too much cash on as a kid.

The Four Kings are up to no good and it falls upon the World Warriors to stop them. 

Street Fighter V: Champion Edition Legends is a 1-4 player, cooperative miniatures board game starring your favourite characters from the video game, in an exciting and modular experience. 

Legends is played over a number of turns until the players either win or lose. Players take turns in clockwise order, beginning with a first player of their choosing. At any given time, the player taking their turn is referred to as the active player. During their turn, the active player will perform a Fighter Phase and then a Nemesis Phase. 

Players will perform powerful attacks and build epic combos on their way to defeating the king at the end of each stage. Combining modular style decks and familiar special moves unique to each fighter, there is no shortage of options for toppling the kings, one by one.

So select your character and choose your fighting style. Build your combos and unleash your abilities, create your legend. 

Featuring a huge roster of characters and stages from Street Fighter V: Champion Edition in an all-new cooperative setting, players will be able to experience Street Fighter like never before. Choose fan-favourite fighters, such as Ryu, Ken, Chun-Li and Dhalsim as well as a few more lesser known characters like Sakura, Rashid and Karin from amongst the 12 miniatures contained within the base set.

The roster of heroes can be enhanced with the addition of The Four Kings expansion adding another 12 character minis including fan favourites, Guile, Blanka, M Bison and Vega. Together with more stages and minions.

So the Fighter Tier pledge gets you a copy of the Base game together with the Promo Character Dan and all revealed content associated with the base set and this tier is set at $75 or roughly £62.

The Combo Tier Pledge gets you everything just mentioned as well as the Four Kings Expansion adding 12 more characters to the roster. This pledge will set you back $115 or roughly £95.

So again, that's on over at Gamefound for you to have a good look over.

OUTRO

Street Fighters got me nostalgic now...

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What do you mean you've never played it...

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Think its time to dust those old Arcade Sticks out and see if we can wire the SNES up to the Telebox... Your in for a treat young man...

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Of course I'll go easy on you...

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Yeah right...

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No nothing... Think it's time to say goodbye to these lovely people and you can go practice your Sonic Boom's...

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No, not the ones you produce after a curry, I'll explain later, say goodbye...

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and it's a goodbye from me, keep safe Meeples, keep those dice rolling, the cards shuffling and we'll be right here for you next week...