Queen Games was showing off two new games at Gen Con:  Rudiger Dorn’s Rune Stones and Daniel Skjold Pedersen and Asger Harding Granerud’s Copenhagen:  Roll & Write, both scheduled to release in October.

Created the designer of Istanbul and Luxor, Rune Stones challenges players to craft the eponymous rune stones that the druids need to power their rituals, ultimately seeking to become the new high druid. 

The game combines elements of board games and deck builder games, with hand management, set collecting, and engine building mechanics.  Players use cards in pairs to acquire new cards for their deck and collect rune stones, which in turn grant them special abilities and points.  But, the higher-valued card played each turn is removed from their deck, forcing them to plan carefully or lose their most important cards.

Rune Stones comes with 1 game board, 4 player boards, 132 cards, 160 tokens and markers, and 1 die.  The game is for 2 to 4 players, ages 12 and up, and takes about an hour to play.  MSRP is $60.00.

Queen is running a Kickstarter campaign to raise funding for the project, which has attracted $124,917 in pledges from 1,590 backers (an average of $78.56 per backer) as of this writing, with 10 days to go.  Backer fulfillment is scheduled for October, with release into the trade to follow.

Copenhagen:  Roll & Write, created by the duo who designed the original Copenhagen game, joins the popular wave of roll and write style games.  Like the original, players compete to build facades for the buildings in the city’s new harbor district. 

In turn, the players roll the dice and select a Tetris-like shape based on their roll, which they draw onto their building facade.  Any dice they do not use allow the other players to mark special ability spaces on their own sheets, which give them advantages later in the game.  Points are awarded for completing rows and columns, with bonuses based on the windows showing.

The game includes 200 player sheets, 50 common sheets, and 5 dice.  Designed for 2 to 4 players, ages 8 and up, Copenhagen:  Roll & Write takes about half an hour to play.  MSRP is $30.00.

Queen raised $32,811 from 674 backers during a Kickstarter campaign to fund the project earlier this summer (an average of $48.68 per backer).  Backer fulfillment is planned for October, with release into the trade to follow.