On The Horizon: the latest Friedemann Friese project...

The ever-strange and creative inventor of Power Grid and Black Friday has decided to create a board game using mechanics from the top ten board games of all time on BGG.  That would include the worker placement from Agricola, the card purchase from Through The Ages, deck-building from Dominion, the card-drafting from 7 Wonders, turn-order from (you guessed it!) Power Grid, and the action selection from Puerto Rico.  Huh.  Okay, I'll bite.  I'm interested to see how all this comes together....

You can see him talk about his schizophrenic design here.

On The Horizon: Fauna (in English!)

Friedemann Friese has become one of the most prolific (and eccentric) game designers alive today.  Luckily for us, his games, whose German titles always start with the letter 'F', tend to be extremely good designs and have become some of my favourites - Power Grid (Funkenschlag), Black Friday (Freitag), and Famiglia are just a few. 

Well, a couple years ago Friese made a trivia game Fauna about betting on facts about animals, specifically on where they live and how big they are.  Like Wits & Wagers before, in Fauna you can win without knowing the exact answers but scoring for playing strategically and guessing close to the answer.  Fauna has been quite well-received but suffered from a bit of a translation issue (who wants to play a trivia game in a language they don't know?)  The great news is that FoxMind, a Canadian game company based out of Montreal, is bringing the English version to us.  Looking forward to it.