At Gen Con, ICv2 spoke with Renegade Game Studios President Scott Gaeta  to hear about the company’s upcoming fourth quarter releases, including the highly anticipated Snow Tails racing game. Other releases include Knee Jerk, Flip the Bird, FUSE, and an expansion for Double Feature.

The dogsled game Snow Tails was announced earlier this year (see “New Edition of 'Snow Tails' Racing Game”); at Gen Con, Gaeta shared the story of how he brought the critically-acclaimed but out-of-print game to market. “I was watching a Dice Tower (Tom Vasel ) video and he made a reference to Snow Tails, saying it was such a great racing game, but it was out of print and good luck finding it, Gaeta said. "Just a week or two after that, I was watching the Shut Up Sit Down guys (Quinns), reviewing a previous game that we’d published called Gravwell, and during that he started talking about his favorite racing game, and made the comment that Snow Tails was a great racing game but, again, it was out of print, so good luck.“

“So I looked into it, tracked down the designers in Scotland and made an appointment to meet with them at Essen last year. We made an agreement to bring the game back on the market. It’s been out of print for about five years.“

Gaeta continued, sharing the history of the designers. “The Fragor brothers, Gordon and Fraser, launch a new game at Essen every year and they pre-sell it. They’re always sold out and they’ll usually do about 1,000 copies.  They set up their booth at Essen just to deliver their game and meet and greet their fans.  This was their release in 2008, and it was picked up by a European publisher then. It was published, won a bunch of awards and kind of went away and didn’t really have very strong distribution in North America at that time. I decided to pick it up and we refreshed all the art. Beth Sobel did new box art for it. Now it’s coming out in October.” MSRP is $55.00.

Gaeta shared information on other upcoming games. “Flip the Bird is also coming out in October. It’s a trick-taking, trumping game by Jeff Bellinger, the creator of Killer Bunnies,” he said. "You’re trumping not just by number but by color, and there’s various bird cards that have all these wacky effects that change the order, change the numeric value, change the order of things that may be trumped, manipulate the piles. It’s a really quick card game that takes about 10 or 15 minutes to play. You play to 200 points, play multiple games and score points and have fun.“  The game is for 2 -6 players, ages 10 and up. MSRP is $12.00.

Knee Jerk is a quick party game where points are awarded for the first player to shout their knee-jerk reactions to a funny situation (see “Renegade Adds Knapsack Games”). The box contains 55 scene cards and a rules sheet. MSRP is $12.00.

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The real-time cooperative dice game FUSE was announced last year (see “'FUSE' Dice Game”). The game is supported by an iOS and Android app. “The app is actually the ship’s computer,” Gaeta said.  “The premise of the game is that we are the crew of a ship and our ship has boarded by hostile aliens, ‘cause there’s no other kind. The aliens have planted bombs all over our ship, and by rolling dice and solving all these dice puzzles, we have to defuse the bombs.  The game is for two to five players and it scales up in difficulty depending on the number of players and the difficulty of the puzzle levels that you want to put into the stack.” MSRP is $30.00.

Renegade will also release an expansion for the John Kovalic movie card game Double Feature (see “John Kovalic's 'Double Feature'”). The Everyone’s a Critic expansion adds new cards for the existing categories, as well as a critic’s pile, which adds a new element to the game and a new way to play. Release is planned for November. MSRP is $12.00.