Explore the Colorado Trail, Live through Eternal Decks, and Try to Survive Meltwater | BoardGameGeek News

by W. Eric Martin

▪️ Erin Lee Escobedo‘s Meltwater: A Game of Tactical Starvation debuted from Hollandspiele in 2018, then left its catalog at the end of 2021 following interest by another publisher in sub-licensing the game. Hollandspiele’s Amabel Holland has described Meltwater as “probably the most important game we’ve published”, both because of what the game says and how it says it and because of Escobedo’s influence on Holland personally.

That new publisher has finally been revealed, with Capstone Games posting the image below in late March 2025. Capstone’s Christopher High tells me that the original plan was to debut the game at Origins Game Fair in June 2025, but with the ever-increasing tariffs on Chinese goods that the U.S. government has imposed, the release date is now…sometime in the future.

As for the setting of this two-player game, here’s an overview:

“Restraint? Why are you so concerned with saving their lives? The whole idea is to kill the bastards. At the end of the war, if there are two Americans and one Russian left alive, we win.” ~Gen. Thomas Power, U.S. Strategic Air Command 1957-1964

19XX: The unthinkable happens. The world is scoured clean in nuclear fire. The oceans are poisoned for generations to come. One last patch of habitable land remains: Antarctica. The remnants of humanity huddle together in a fragile patchwork of research stations and refugee ships. But even here, the Cold War survives. And our civilization may not.

In Meltwater, two players take command of the shattered remains of the superpowers, struggling for control of the ice. Simple diceless mechanisms let players displace, corner, and isolate their opponent’s survivors. Here, hunger is a crueler weapon than gunfire, and the barren tundra can only support so many souls. And every turn, radioactive contamination pushes in from the coastline, shrinking the available space and forcing the belligerents closer and closer together.

In the end, there is only either submission or annihilation, and whatever world is left.

▪️ In January 2024, I wrote about new editions of two trick-taking games — Takashi Sakaue‘s My Favorite Carrera RS Trick Taking Game and Yeon-Min Jung‘s Boast or Nothing — that will be coming from Portland Game Collective. A crowdfunding page for those editions — now titled, respectively, Zoom Zoom Vroom and Best of Neapolitan — has now been previewed…but it’s not clear when the games might actually be available as on April 6, 2025, PGC’s Ryan Campbell wrote: “With the increased tariffs we need to discuss if it will be feasible to launch it still or if we need to delay it.”

Expect to see a lot of that in the coming weeks.

That crowdfunding project will also include an English-language release of Hiroken‘s TRICKTAKERs: Expansion Set, which first appeared in 2021 from Japan’s Joyple Games.

Portland Game Collective also plans to bring out a new edition of Hiroken’s Eternal Decks, which which was crowdfunded in 2024 and released by Tricktakers Games. Here’s an overview:

Eternal Decks is a co-operative game in which players try to complete the stage objectives before any one player cannot take an action. Players start the game with five cards in their deck, but will quickly look to acquire more cards from the various Eternals (characters within the game) who each have their own unique eight-card deck. On your turn, you must perform one action:

• Play a card (on the field, on the river, or by using an ability)

• Generate a jewel

• Give a card to a teammate

There are restrictions when playing a card. All three rows in the field cannot have cards of the same color or same number next to each other. Additional restrictions are applied to a row based on the stage you are playing. Jewels are used to negate the negative effects brought on by the Eternals.

The game has six stages, and the various stages will have you collect points, survive a ghost town, navigate a labyrinth, defeat a boss, and more to win the game!

▪️ In other JP-to-U.S. moves, Pandasaurus Games has teased an English-language edition of Masao Suganuma‘s 街コロライフ, which debuted in 2023 from Grounding.

Here’s an overview of the 2-5 player game Machi Koro: Life:

In 街コロライフ / Machi Koro: Life, the newest title in the Machi Koro series, instead of building up cities, players will use engine-building cards to collect “hearts”, which represent different aspects of life such as hobbies or jobs, in an effort to ultimately exchange these hearts for “dream” points depicted on another kind of cards on display.

The core mechanisms of rolling one or two dice and activating blue/red/purple cards remain essentially the same, and one can either buy another engine-building card or a card with “dream” points after rolling the dice and obtaining the corresponding amount of hearts.

The first player to obtain 8 dream points will have attained their ideal life and wins the game.

▪️ U.S. publisher Tabletop Tycoon has acquired Dan R Rice III‘s Trailblazer game line from Mariposa Games, specifically 2023’s

Trailblazer: The John Muir Trail, 2025’s Trailblazer: The Arizona Trail, and Trailblazer: The Colorado Trail, which will be crowdfunded in 2025 ahead of a 2026 release.

Here’s an overview of that forthcoming 1-4 player game:

Trailblazer: The Colorado Trail takes place over the course of six weeks (rounds) that represent around eighty miles of actual trail distance traveled per week. Along the way, players can experience off-trail adventures such as river rafting, climbing 14ers, hot springs, horseback riding, biking, or even taking a ride on a historic train! The more you adventure, the more columbines — Colorado’s state flower, which are the game’s points — you gain. Columbines can also be acquired by taking in the amazing vistas, going over mountain passes, or spending time by the numerous lakes, rivers, and creeks. The numerous flowers, trees, birds, and animals discovered and observed on your journey can help you earn needed supplies and score more columbines.

Players need to manage their supplies as they journey on the Colorado Trail, gain rungs on the elevation ladder, and move along the unique adventure path. Each player must organize and play their deck of action cards to maximize their abilities, adventures, and actions.