As detailed on its publisher page here on Boardgame News, Valley Games has a half-dozen games in the pipeline that are due to be released in the next few months. Valley Games' Torben Sherwood has passed along the following status updates for these titles:

• Master Builder is due in port this week [i].
• Two by Two and BUGS are due to arrive in mid-September 2010.
• Crows and Liberté are being released at Spiel 2010 in October, with the remaining copies delivered to North America a couple weeks later or so.

These games have been updated on Gone Cardboard.

Néstor Romeral Andrés has released another design through his own nestorgames, and while the game officially bears the title of Ω, we'll call it Omega so that it shows up in expected places on Gone Cardboard and elsewhere.

Romeral Andrés describes Omega as a design "born as an experiment on complexity and intuitive arithmetic feels like a cross between Hex and Go." Omega is played on a hexagonal board ten spaces long on a side that can be sized as desired using spacers included within the game. Each player is a different color – white, black, red, blue – but on a turn a player places one stone of every color in the game onto the board. The game ends when not enough spaces remain for each player to have another turn. Each player's score is the product of the size of each group in his color, and the player with the highest score wins.

Notes Romeral Andrés, "You will soon realize that you don’t need to calculate your score during play (multiplying your group values), but to use an intuitive strategy instead. How? You must figure it out by yourself."

Days of Wonder will release a new smallish expansion for Philippe Keyaerts' Small World before the end of 2010. Here's a description from the publisher of the Be Not Afraid... expansion:

There are many frightening inhabitants of Small World, but to survive you must Be Not Afraid...! This new expansion for Small World includes a nasty lot of five new Races including Barbarians, Homunculi, Pixies, Pygmies, and greedy little Leprechauns. You'll also get five new Special Powers which allows you to leap over regions to conquer new lands. Be Not Afraid... requires the original Small World board game to play.

I've seen an estimated release date of November 2010 listed by retailers, but nothing official from Days of Wonder yet.

Update, Sept. 7, 2010: Still no official release date info, but Days of Wonder has posted a few images from this new expansion. Take a look:

Barbarians (above) and Homonculi (below) – gotta love the little men inside my head...

Finnish publisher Onni Games has two new titles in the queue for 2010: One is the Finnish-language trivia game Arvuutin, about which I'll say no more as my Finnish is a bit rusty these days; the second game, though, is Aether and it will include rules in English and German, in addition to Finnish. (As I mentioned in the Toscana game announcement the other day, I need to add a set of Scandanavian and Finnish flags to the rules section. So many new games from this part of the world!)

In Aether, players try to use the basic elemental powers to claim aether, the fifth element in Greek philosophy and an element not subject to transformation, unlike the other four in our physical world. To set up the game, players place a number of colored tokens and four randomly chosen element tiles behind their individual screen. The hexagonally-divided game board is seeded with aether tiles and a number of randomly drawn element tiles.

On a turn, a player places one of her element tiles on the board in an empty location, then has the option of placing a token on the tile just placed. If placed on a blue tile, the token represents a water elemental; on a green tile, it's an earth elemental; and so on. The strength of that elemental is equal to the number of adjacent tiles of its element (including the one underneath it) minus the number of enemy tiles adjacent to it. Earth weakens water, water weakens fire, and so on. Before placing a tile, the player has the option of swapping tiles for a new set at a cost of one colored token, thereby reducing your opportunities to claim spots on the board.

Once the board is filled, players determine who wins the points for each of the aether tiles, with the player having the most elemental strength (even of different types of elements) adjacent to the aether winning the tile. In a tie, players split the points of an aether tile. Players score an additional three points for each token not placed or sacrificed to enable a swap, and the player with the most points wins.

If you want to try Aether now, you can visit the online browser version of the game, which allows you to add 0-3 AI opponents in case you don't have enough humans on hand to play.

Spanish publisher Homoludicus will publish a new game in October 2010 from designer Toni Serradesanferm. The Spanish edition of the game is 4 Monos, while the international edition – with rules in English, French, German and Italian – will be titled 4 Monkeys.

In 4 Monkeys, you are a monkey in the NASA laboratories and want to demonstrate that you are the smartest monkey in the training program, which means that you deserve to be the next monkey astronaut and go into space! You have your own maze of cards with symbols and colors. On the table, there are different tiles showing many different combinations of colors and/or pieces. Each monkey must manage its cards to fulfill as quick as possible the requirements of the orders on the table.

The game, which was a finalist in the Game Design Contest of Granollers 2010, will be released at Spiel 2010 in Essen, but for now you can watch the game in action in this video:

For those who do know Spanish, you can watch a game demonstration of 4 Monos in that language courtesy of Spanish blog 5mpj (5 minutos por juego = 5 minutes per game). The ilustrations and design for the comercial edition are made by Bascu. Homoludicus is the second Spanish game publisher going to Essen, after Gen-X Games. Good luck!

¡Nos jugamos!

U.S. publisher Steve Jackson Games is working all the angles with its Munchkin series of games, and in April 2011 the publisher plans to release Munchkin Zombies, which like many other Munchkin spin-offs will work as a stand-alone game in addition to being an expansion for any other stand-alone Munchkin game.

Monica Valentinelli at Flames Rising has published a long preview of Munchkin Zombies based on a playing of an early version of the game at a distributor's demonstration day for retailers. An excerpt:

In Munchkin: Zombies you play…a zombie! Immediately, I was struck by how disgusting and wrong the cards were. Class cards cover all the different zombie types from your favorite movies, books and world myths. There are Strong Zombies, Fast Zombies, Plague Zombies — even Atomic Zombies! There’s also also the chance you can pick up different types of zombie Mojo, too, which functions as a special ability.

Czech Board Games has released a bit of information about its 2010 release – Petra Chvala's Verona. Here's a translated description of the game from the publisher:

Welcome to the town that inspired Shakespeare to write Romeo and Juliet – the most famous tragedy of all – and us to create a board game. You will find yourself in the times of the Renaissance, in which Verona has become an important center of commerce and culture, but also of corruption and intrigue. The city is so rich and powerful that both the Government of Italy and the Holy Roman Empire emerged from this site. Its ruler, Prince Escalus, is weak and influential families will fight for control of the government. Who will come to power? The fight is just beginning.

Players compete against one another through auctions and by estimating the planned implementation of intrigue, and secret and public duties. Whoever plans best and rises to an economic and military power will win the game.

Czech site Deskové Hry has published an interview (in Czech) with Verona's designer Petra Chvala, with a couple of prototype images accompanying the text.

Lookout Games' Railroad Barons – previously listed on BGN as Konzern – is an 18xx card game from designer Helmut Ohley, who is co-designer of another 2010 release from Lookout (Poseidon) and whose design history has consisted solely of 18xx titles to date. Railroad Barons breaks from the expected 18xx model by (1) playing in 45 minutes, (2) being for only two players, and (3) being a card game, although Lookout's Hanno Girke says that it plays much more like a board game. Here's a translated description of the game blurb from Lookout:

Railroad Barons belongs to the family of 18xx games, but raised to the meta-level. Individual companies are no longer the focus, with the businessmen trying to add more and more new railways to their portfolios – which is why Railroad Barons comes without a large game board and route tiles.

Girke says that Railroad Barons will be completely bilingual in English and German.

Portugese publisher MESAboardgames has released a number of specialty titles within its own country, but Caravelas appears to be the first title aimed at a world market. The theme, though, is based in Portugese history, specifically the 15^th century when Portugese sailors were traveling the globe.

In Caravelas, you control a fleet of ships, and you want to both acquire goods and claim discovery of various locations. The action takes place on a world map covered with a hex grid, with some ocean currents labeled as to the direction in which the water flows. Thirty-two locations are marked as possible sites to be discovered, and a deck with one card per location is shuffled and distributed evenly among the players. Eight ports, each with a different type of good, are scattered across the world. Each player starts sailing from Lisbon.

Each round starts with a bid for turn order, with players bidding the navigation markers on their fleet. On a turn, a player moves his ship token – which represents his fleet – across the ocean. If a player moves with the ocean currents, he pays nothing; to cross from one current to another or to travel cross-current, the player "spends" a navigation marker. Cross a pirate space, and you spend two markers instead of one. Hit a red event location, and you roll the die to see whether storms wreck one of your ships. On a blue event space, you play one of the event cards you hold, which have both good effects and bad; the idea, of course, is that you suffer the bad events when you have to in order to reach desired locations first. If you hit a discovery location before everyone else, for example, you mark it with one of your tokens. Land on a port and you can claim one good of the appropriate type – as long as that ship is available and not already holding that good. Your turn ends when you run out of navigation markers (which refresh afterward so you have them available next turn), run into certain events, or land in Lisbon.

When you return to Lisbon, you sell all the goods on your fleet. Each good provides 5 or 10 VPs, but naturally there are a few wrinkles in the scoring. If you discard three different goods, then you can activate your fourth ship, which means you'll have twelve navigation markers for the remainder of the game instead of nine. What's more, if you don't activate that fourth ship, you can't load the silver and nutmeg that bring in 10 VPs. If you have pepper, instead of taking 5 VPs, you can discard the pepper to contribute to the building of the Jerónimos Monastery; the Monastery has 3-5 sections, and building a section earns you 10 VPs. (The rules mention that a "pepper tax" existed during this time period, with those funds being used to build the Monastery.)

Why wouldn't you want to build the Monastery when you score twice as many points? Because the game ends once the final section is built. Each player then earns 5 VP for each discovery card that has one of his tokens on it, and the player with the most points wins.

Caravelas will be available at Spiel 2010 in a special edition of 500 copies with a bonus black ship and rules for this ship. In short, you can spend navigation markers to move this black ship on your turn, and if the ship encounters other players, they might be penalized based on the roll of a die. To preorder a copy of Caravelas, whether for shipment or pick-up in Essen, email Tiago Abreu.

So many posts and announcements that I want to get on the site today. Let's see how many I can get out there for you...