A very good WP game and something made by a F:ATtie.
First up- Champions of Midgard Review. I'm kind of surprised this game isn't getting more attention here. It's a very fun, very approachable worker placement game in the vein of Waterdeep or Stone Age. It adds some fun monster fighting, dice drafting and lots of good fantasy Viking stuff. It's easy to play, but it lacks a sense of escalation and it may be a bit repetitive for some folks. It's kind of a meat-and-potatoes design, and I quite like that- very on the level, very cut-and-dried. But it also has a few neat tricks, like this awesome "Blame" mechanic where the person who whiffs the troll fight earns the scorn of the village...or if he makes the kill, he gets to effectively point at another upstart Jarl and say "well, where the hell were you?"
Second is Survive! Space Attack!, a review over at the Review Corner. F:AT's own Geoff Englestein and his family are the re-imaginers, and I think they did an outstanding job of preserving everything great about Survive! while gently introducing some new concepts that are totally in the spirit of the original. Stronghold games is definitely doing right by the classic Survive! brand, and although I was iffy about a change in setting I think it succeeds.
Cthulhu Wars is pretty much all I want to play right now. I absolutely love it, and I'm really quite stunned by how good a design it is. It's VERY stripped down, very highly editorial and refined. There is no fat or filler in the design, and it is one of those that doesn't put ANYTHING in the way of having fun. Except that price point. It's definitely a "Cadillac class" game, but at least it is an extremely good one that may actually deserve to be an expensive centerpiece for a collection. The figures actually made me laugh, they're so audacious. Review on this will be next week.
I put in a request at Modiphius for Thunderbirds and without notice it showed up like two days later. It's a new Matt Leacock co-op design, and I think it may be his best game to date. It's really well done, and like a GF9 game it's like he sat down to design and he started with "What does a Thunderbirds fan want to do in this game". Because presumably, everyone would say "pilot the Thunderbird machines around the world, rescuing people and fighting The Hood." The teamwork aspect is pretty neat, you have use the machines to get around and you can pick up anybody. You can also load pod vehicles onto Thunderbird-2 to take to disaster locations. The system is really very simple, has lots of fun die rolls, and I _love_ the way it stages the Hood's schemes so you have three crisis points throughout the game where if he reaches them on his track, the game ends. And you have to handle that while also dealing with the disasters, which can also end the game. It's a neat, colorful game that borrows a major gameplay element from...Life. The board game, not life.
I've also got a couple of new ones from VPG on the pile...one is The Hunt, a new Jeremy Lennert (Darkest Night) piece that sounds a little like Black Morn Manor. Up to six players go into a house hunting a monster, but one of them IS the monster. It's a deduction thing where you have to fight other players using magic weapons to try to deduce who is the monster and what weapon you'll need to use on them. Could be really neat. The other is Wings for the Baron, which is about aeroplane manufacturing in Germany during WWI. It's an esoteric subject, but I like that. It looks to be an economic game where you develop technologies to get contracts from the government, all the while the war is going on and things like morale, inflation and the effectiveness of allied airpower affects what you do. It sounds great, but I have to say that it definitely has a spreadsheet look. Which may be appropriate thematically.