With the whole country in lockdown, playing board games with friends won’t happen for some while. Luckily there are ways to play board games online with friends. Alternatively, there are also quite a large number of board game-like games than can keep us entertained for a while.

3 Minute Board Games has looked into this for us and published a video about “20 Great Gamess on Steam for board gamers”:

During the video, a beginner’s guide for Tabletop Simulator gets mentioned. Here is the link to it on Reddit.

At the beginning of the week, Asmodee US announced that they would delay all new releases until May.

Now Asmodee UK has followed suit with the following statement (send out as part of their daily stock updates):

As many of our suppliers have postponed or rescheduled upcoming new releases, we will not be sending our regular Coming Soon and New Release updates for the time being. We will alert you to any notable new products as they arrive.

This makes sense, considering that a large number of board game shops and cafes in the UK have to close from today and that a lot of new releases have already been delayed by factory closures in China in the wake of the coronavirus outbreak. But this will very likely mean that a lot of the March/April releases are now delayed until further notice.

Asmodee UK also confirmed in the same email, that stock for restocks is available and orders will be fulfiled as fast as possible. So we won’t run out of games anytime soon 🙂

After yesterday’s announcement, I was wondering what it would mean for non-essential online shopping, but now it has been confirmed/clarified that online shopping is encouraged to stay open with delivery services expected to run as normal.

So following this advice I will keep the online shop for Meeples’ Corner running as long as DHL is still able to come and collect my parcels. If there is any change, I will post an update.

But regarding deliveries, it is important to remember that there could be delays caused by staff shortages in sorting centres, depots or with delivery drivers. So please stay patient during these testing times. We are all in this together!

Links:

• Meeples’ Corner Coronavirus update
• Government guideline about further business and premises closures

We finally have an update regarding Underwater Cities: New Discoveries, but unfortunately it’s not good news: the expansion has been delayed again.

According to my supplier in Germany, he is expecting the expansion to arrive in late February but hasn’t received a confirmation yet from the publisher. We will post any news as soon as we have them and are very sorry for the delay!

At the beginning of the month, we are normally looking back to the top games of the last month. Today we are going a few steps further and instead look at the top games of 2019.

Without further ado, here are the Top 20 of 2019 (based on our sales in copies):

1) Wingspan
2) Underwater Cities
3) The Quacks of Quedlinburg
4) The Quacks of Quedlinburg: The Herb Witches
5) Maracaibo
6) Gloomhaven
7) Second Chance
8) Res Arcana
9) Coffee Roaster
10) Die Tavernen im Tiefen Thal
11) LAMA
12) Dune (2019)
13) Bunny Kingdom: In the Sky
14) Wingspan: European Expansion
15) Chronicles of Crime
16) El Dorado: The Golden Temples
17) Root: Riverfolk Expansion
18) Tiny Towns
19) Little Town
20) Doppelt so clever

These Top 20 include a few surprises (in general games we are importing from Germany are doing very well for us), but also a few games are missing from the list which should be there like Root and Brass: Birmingham. But some of the biggest hits of 2019 were held back by limited availability in retail.

What games would you have expected on the list?

The new games releasing next week have been confirmed.

Releasing on Tuesday are:

• Vindication
• Rune
• Gates of Delirium

And later in the week, Friday is the release day for:

• ECOS: First Continent
• God of War: The Card Game
• Nemesis
• War Chest: Nobility

The good news: Dune will get shipped to use at the end of this week, so it should be here early next week. The bad news: The stock had to be allocated by our supplier. We will only get two-thirds of what we need, so we will have to decide who will get stock from the first wave based on the date the pre-order has been placed.

The cut-off date will be the 31st July. For every order placed after the 31st we, unfortunately, won’t have stock and we will have to wait for the second wave of Dune stock (expected in December) to fulfil these orders. If you are happy to wait until then you don’t have to do anything. If you don’t want to wait and would like to cancel your order instead, please contact us.

The first round of the US vs. China trade war went past us board gamers. But this will change soon: whereas in the first round of the trade conflict between the US and China board games were not included, this looks no longer the case.

The US government published a new set of proposals after the last round of talks with China failed. And in this proposals board and card games are included and would be subject to up to 25% import duty from the end of June.

This could turn into a potential problem for Kickstarters for which the funding phase have already ended but haven’t been delivered to customers yet. But it could also lead to a wide-ranging price increase across the industry.

At moment nobody can say how high the tariffs on games will be and if they will be imposed (there is still the possibility of a last minute agreement between the US and China), but it is definitely something I will follow closely in the next few weeks.

Links:

• Tabletopwire report
• BBC guide to the US-Chine trade war

The UK Games Expo 2019 is less than three weeks away and fast arriving. Time to have a look at all the games available at the show.

Helping with this is Tom Heath’s (aka slickerdrips) Big UK Games Expo list on Boardgamegeek. The list is eleven pages long and lists all the games available to play (as demo / prototype copies) and/or for sale.

Another great tool is Tabletop Together which allows you to make your own list of interesting games.

Links:

• slickerdrips’ Big UK Games Expo List
• Tabletop Together