All aboard fellow gamers,

IDW Games entered into a partnership with legendary video game publisher Atari to bring some of their classic games to the table. Recruiting Dead of Winter co-designer Jon Gilmour, IDW will create board games of Asteroids, Centipede and Missile Command, to name a few. More to come.

More from IDW, who will be bringing us a new fighting card game called King of the Creepies. The game takes a silly spin on gladiatorial combat where you recruit warriors such as Noctornal Manimal, Sherlock Bones, Edward Tankhands, The Frigid Witch, and Nighty Knight, to name a few. You can upgrade your creepiest to be better prepared for battle, and you can even wager which creepy will wins fight. Find it in stores in June.

WizKids revealed three new games at this year’s GAMA Trade Show, all to be released later this year. First is Dungeon Hustle, a modular dungeon crawler where players pick up room tiles with symbols to complete quests. Then, Approaching Dawn: The Witching Hour is a cooperative card game with witches fighting off supernatural forces. Both are coming out in August. Finally, Fantasy Realms, which comes out in October, is a deckbuilder combat game where you choose military tactics or sorcery to do battle with one another, using the cards you collect to create combos to one-up each other.

USAopoly has announced an expansion for their popular Harry Potter deckbuilding game Hogwarts Battle called The Monster Box of Monsters, which adds 150 new cards to the game, most of them monsters, naturally. No official release date yet, but the press release assures it will be in stores very soon.

Are you lacking a little Magic Dance? Be ready then to get your hands on the Goblins expansion for the Labyrinth board game, based on the much loved Jim Henson fantasy film. The expansion, which comes with five Goblin miniatures, will release late summer.

It may be spring, but we’re all already thinking about Christmas, right? So are the creators of Scrooge: The Board Game, currently available for pre-order. The game has you playing as a classic Charles Dickens’s character, collecting enough gold and cards to challenge Scrooge during his moment of truth. The independently produced game often against a Kickstarter campaign for their pre-order, so you can learn more about the game and its expansions, and pre-order the game here. It should arrive, naturally, by Christmas.

Thames and Kosmos has a busy year ahead of them. The science-based family game company has announced its slate of educational games for kids for 2017, including the undersea search game Lagoonies, a monster hunting game called Monster Trap, a board game/memory game called Jungle Party, a dexterity game called Harry the Hopper, a word guessing game called Next, a vertical maze game called Mag-o-Mag that utilizes magnets, a tile placement game called Kerala, a take that card game called Brutal Kingdom, and a series of games based on the escape room genre. All games are expected to hit throughout the summer.

It’s already been shared a few times now, but it is worth sharing again the stories behind the board games the CIA developed to train its operatives, which came to light during a recent SXSW panel in Austin, Texas. Check out this really fascinating story.

And for any ambitious designers out there, the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco wrapped up last month, and they included a day devoted to a series of talks board game design, which are now available for free through the GDC online vault. View them here.

Thanks for stopping by, and we’ll see you next time!

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