Rio Grande Games, one of several companies specializing in adapting sophisticated European board games for the American market, has a full slate of releases scheduled for May.  One of the most eagerly awaited of Rio Grande's releases is Reiner Knizia's Palazzo, a building game set in the Italian renaissance.  Knizia's fourth game for Alea (Royal Turf, Ra and Taj Mahal are the others), Palazzo is a culturally rich, but accessible game with an Alea complexity rating of '3' (Puerto Rico is a '7').

Rio Grande also plans to ship two games from Phalanx, one of the Netherlands' top board game companies, in May: World War I and Go West.  Two games designed by Franz-Benno Delonge are also planned:  Fjords, a strategy game in which players first create a map of the fjord, add house and claim land; and Transeuropa, a European version of the Transamerica railroad-building game.