GAMA Trade Show Day 3 Coverage, Part 2: USAopoly, Cryptozoic, IDW and Level 99

March 22, 2015 - 1:29am

Dice Tower News has been very busy handling all the new information from Las Vegas for the past several days and this first day of Spring is no exception.

USAopoly

The Walking Dead version of Bang! The Dice Game is coming! This reskin is based off the comic... Wait let me back up. The original Bang! card game came out over ten years ago and became popular due the hidden roles component and fun, accessible play. In 2014 a dice version with the same hidden role component but now with a Yatzee-esque push your luck component came out called Bang! The Dice Game. Next with the popularity of the comic series and TV show of same name, Bang!: The Walking Dead arose. Can you guess the natural progression? That's right, enter The Walking Dead version of the dice version!

Too many reskins? Gone the way of the Love Letter? Not in my estimation. Any version that may bring a non-gamer into the gamer world is aces in my book. On top of that, I'm really interested in what some of the die faces will be when taken from the Western theme to now zombie apocalypse. Gatling gun for chainsaw? Dynamite for um dynamite? We (and the zombies) shall see.

Cryptozoic

Portal is a video game phenomenon. I cannot claim full knowledge of this phenomenon but my son sure can. From what I can tell, you walk around, solve puzzles employing technology lying around a testing facility, and are pleasantly threatened by a computer voice that used to be your mom, or something. What I gleam is that it is a smart, well designed pair of video games with a huge fan base. To get a sense of the dry wit of the video games, the title of the board game is Portal: Uncooperative Cake Acquisition Game. And there is indeed cake. Color me very interested in this, I think it will be smart, fun and humorous just like its video game parent. Expect to see this coming at you Q3 of 2015.

IDW

I am going to directly quote Tom's tweet for this one:

IDW announces they have the Godfather license. At least three games coming with that license, including a large "dudes on a map" type.

A mafia Risk? You talkin' to me? I mean, now you are talking to me. According to Nicole Bunge's ICv2 article :

The first game will be a deductive party card game, similar to Werewolf or Mafia, due in August.

The second game will be the area control game that Tom mentioned and there are few details to find about the third planned game. Who can refuse?

Level 99

Level 99 confirmed a Black Box edition of the game Noir is due in April or May 2015. Noir was originally part of the "Minigame Library" Kickstarter back in 2012. This card game is a light deduction game that had 4 modes to play for 2-4 players. With this new deluxe Black Box, you will get all the original box had but now there will be 6 modes of play total and some modes will now accommodate up to 9 players. One of these new modes sounds like a "one vs. many" version. A full content list per the publisher follows: