Sunday Almanac: Odds, Ends and Odd Ends

Lady F and I were at the RA this weekend to see the Dennis Hopper photography exhibit, and were greeted by this installation of U-boats lurking in the entryway. None of the young ticket-rippers working that day seemed to know who the artist was or what the work was called. Sorry about the glare — unlike Mr Hopper I’m a crummy photographer.

This week’s Almanac isn’t a story or a rant; it’s just a clear-out. My sinister office here at PT HQ high atop Mount Hexmap is almost completely papered over with post-its and notes written to myself on the backs of Woolworth receipts and racing forms — I can hardly keep my plans for superweapons straight from my schematics for mind control devices. Intolerable.

After the jump: small updates from developers we care about and stuff that has slipped through the cracks over the last couple of weeks.

• I contacted Belgian board gaming house Repos earlier this month about the status of the keenly-anticipated 7 Wonders for iOS, which was announced for “April or May” back in February, then delayed indefinitely in the spring. To their credit, Repos are always prompt in replying to my requests, but this time the reply was that there were no updates. Mysterious.

• I also spoke to Z-Man recently, who after releasing the exceptional Pandemic for iOS last year (our Board Game of the Year runner-up), have been less productive than a late-period Axl Rose in 2014. “Nothing coming down the pipeline at the moment,” a Z-Man rep told me. “It’s been a weird year is all I can say.”

• Rocco Bowling’s Starbase Annex, a card game set in the universe of his top-notch iOS 4X game Starbase Orion, is due out very shortly. Very shortly. Bowling wrote me last week that it had passed Apple approvals and was launching on September 22nd, which my chronomancers tell me is tomorrow.

• Neumann mentioned the release of Noodlecake’s new iOS puzzler Joinz the other day, and I wanted to mention that it’s really, really good. It’s a little bit Threes, a little bit Tetris, but very original. Fantastic music, too. Joinz is so slight that we’d never be able to squeeze an 800-word review out of it, but it’s a delight and I didn’t want it to go unremarked upon. If you need a new coffee-break puzzler, get Joinz.

• Two very good new iOS game bundles that we missed in Friday’s round-up: a Witching Hour Bundle that gets you both of our Singaporean friends’ single-player tactical games at a discount, and a “Latest & Greatest Bundle” from digital board game specialists Codito that nets you Le Havre and A Brief History of the World.

• When I wrote about Spacewrights last week, I mentioned that there was a Kickstarter on the horizon for that ambitious-looking game that takes FTL and drops it into a big 4X framework — it’s live now.