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Welcome friends, welcome, to the inaugural BoardGameWire weekly newsletter - a free roundup of all the most important board game industry news of the past seven days.
Mythic Games has managed to persuade enough of its frustrated Kickstarter backers to cough up extra cash to get the financially-troubled game intro production. Only supporters who caved in to the demand for a “contribution” will get the game, however - backers refusing to pay extra won’t receive a copy, and the queue for refunds is apparently LONG.
Exclusive: Troubled Rainbow Six board game receives enough extra cash from backers to go into production
Polygon had the best coverage of the Star Wars: Unlimited reveal, with Charlie Hall managing to bag a very insightful interview with co-designer Jim Cartwright, rather than just rehashing the press release like most other websites:
With the Star Wars: Unlimited TCG, Fantasy Flight is putting all its cards on the table
Terraforming Mars is getting a sequel to its best-regarded expansion, with publisher FryxGames confirming a Kickstarter campaign for Prelude 2 will launch “soon”. Some grumbling that this will feature cross-expansion cards for the less popular Turmoil and Colonies add-ons, which might not appeal to everyone, but personally I’m keen to see if the extra cards help those expansions to sing a little more:
Terraforming Mars is getting a second Prelude expansion
Sticking with expansions, Ark Nova’s first big box expansion has been revealed as Marine Worlds, and will be available at the Essen games fair in October this year. Sounds like designer Mathias Wigge has listened to gripes that there aren’t enough ways to dig through the giant animals deck to find what you need, with the expansion featuring mechanics to drill through for specific animals and to shift through the visible animal cards more quickly. I’m interviewing Mathias next week - if you’ve got any questions for him, let me know on mike@boardgamewire.com
Ark Nova expansion named as Marine Worlds, will be available at Essen
One of last year’s biggest board game hits, motor racing game Heat: Pedal to the Metal, should finally be back in stock in the US by the end of May after surprising its publisher with the speed it sold out. Frustratingly, I had this as an exclusive, and then Days of Wonder head Adrien Martinot posted all about it on BoardGameGeek to trump me. Gah! (I don’t think he did it on purpose).
Heat: Pedal to the Metal reprint should hit US shelves by end of May
Other news:
Pax Renaissance publisher Ion Game Design set to reveal new game involving dinosaurs
French publisher Funforge inks North American distrubution deal with Flat River Group
Heat: Pedal to the Metal, Cat in the Box lead BoardGameGeek Golden Geek Award winners
And finally…
Check out this gorgeous custom Dune board someone on Reddit has loving crafted:
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