Fantasy Flight Games announced at GenCon a partnership with Future Pastimes and Eon Products to revive and update two classic board games, Cosmic Encounter and Borderlands, and will issue a new game employing the Wheels Within Wheels game system from Frank Herbert's Dune.   

 

FFG's CEO Christian Petersen describes its version of Cosmic Encounters as 'a dramatic departure from the previous version.' Cosmic Encounters will be released in summer 2008 and Borderlands in summer 2009.

 

Because the board game rights to Dune are not available from the Herbert estate, FFG will use the Dune mechanics to create a new game set in the Twilight Imperium universe.  Petersen said of the new game, 'We're not going to do a cheap imitation of a sand planet in the Twilight Imperium universe. We're going to do something that makes sense and is original and doesn't seem contrived or copied and pasted into Twilight Imperium.'

 

FFG also announced plans for the Middle-Earth Quest adventure game for summer 2008.  The game is set about 10 years after Bilbo has left the Shire and players represent mundane heroes of Tolkien's Middle-earth whose quests may lead them to meet and interact with well-known characters from The Lord of the Rings story.