1st March 2024
NOMAD MONTHLY ROUND-UP - FEBRUARY 2024 EDITION
Hello everyone!
February was a super-exciting month here at Nomad Games, as we finally announced the secret project we’ve been talking about for AGES at this point! That’s right, Board Game Cafe is our next game, and you can wishlist it on Steam RIGHT NOW.
Not only that, but the very next day after we announced Board Game Cafe, we released the Cities & Knights Expansion for CATAN® - Console Edition, and then over the weekend the 5th Edition of Talisman got revealed! Good thing we’ve got our monthly round-up here to make sure you’re kept up-to-date with everything happening here at Nomad Games in one place!
So without further ado, let’s go through everything that happened to our tiny games studio in February.
The biggest news for us in February (and you too, hopefully!) was that we finally announced Board Game Cafe, coming to Steam Early Access this year. Check out the announcement trailer below!
In the game, you’ll be tasked with running your very own board game cafe, keeping your customers happy and designing your dream cafe full of iconic, licensed board games. As some of our community are already describing it - “It’s like Theme Hospital, but with board games”.
We’re currently working to get the game into a state where we’re confident to launch it into Early Access, so stay tuned for more updates. Oh, and the BEST way to stay tuned for those updates is by wishlisting the game on Steam.
We’ve not shown off a huge amount of the game yet, but over the coming months we’re going to start showing off in-progress screenshots, gifs and more. We’ll also be hosting developer streams over on our official Twitch channel, and posting developer blogs where we’ll go in-depth on the process of making Board Game Cafe so far.
So make sure you follow us everywhere to keep up to date with news and announcements!
On February 21st, we released both The Cities & Knights Expansion and the Bloom & Grow season pack for CATAN - Console Edition. One of the most popular expansions for the physical game (and a definite fan-favourite), we’ve been very pleased with the response from the community when it comes to this expansion.
Check out the official trailer!
Alongside the launch of the biggest expansion for CATAN - Console Edition, Xbox players got the chance to try the game for FREE in February, thanks to Xbox Play Days.
This lead to a huge wave of new players discovering all the joys of CATAN - Console Edition, which we’ve been massively happy to see! We’ve also been pleased with the positive reception that The Cities & Knights Expansion has got so far, as we know it’s a very well-loved expansion among the community!
If you haven’t checked out CATAN - Console Edition yet, take a look here!
With the release of The Cities & Knights Expansion and the Bloom & Grow content pack in February, you’ll be very surprised to learn that last month we spent almost all of our CATAN development time doing one of these two things:
Making sure all that exciting new stuff was ready to be delivered right into your eager, waiting hands.
Working on updates and patches to solve community-raised issues post-launch.
Normally we’d go over all the variety of different things we’ve been developing, working on or preparing as part of our work on CATAN - Console Edition, but So we’ve either been QA testing, submitting builds with fixes to be QA tested, or fixing things that our QA teams here at Nomad Games and Dovetail Games have been reporting!
So for all of you who come to these monthly round-ups for a detailed breakdown of what’s happening behind the scenes, we apologise for not being able to provide more information than that - but hey, you’ve got a ton of new CATAN stuff to play with, so you can’t be that upset!
While we weren’t the ones making the announcement, we know we’d get shouted at by all the avid Talisman fans out there if we didn’t mention that the 5th Edition of the Talisman board game got announced in February!
We can’t wait to get a copy here at the Nomad office so we can properly get our hands on it, and from what we’ve seen so far it looks like a very exciting new version of the game.
We’ve always said that Talisman deserves as much love as it can get, and we already can’t wait to see how much people love 5th Edition!
In February, we rolled out a small update for Fury of Dracula: Digital Edition that gave players the ability to mute other players during online matches, and some updates to the German translation. You can find the full patch notes here on Steam.
The Fury of Dracula community were massively thankful for the update, and we’re just as thankful for the feedback and positive response from the community we received!
In February, we rolled out more updated for our official Ready Set Bet companion app! You can now play with the app in Czech, Russian and Japanese, so we’re hoping that even more people around the world get a chance to play this awesome board game with our equally awesome companion app!
Oh, and while it’s not directly related to the companion app, our good friends over at AEG did reveal that they’re releasing Ready Set Bet: High Roller Edition! Check out how shiny and cool it is:
Of course, you’ll be able to use our official companion app alongside the High Roller Edition too!
As we expected, we got a ton of questions this month all about one particular topic, so we’ve rolled a lot of them into a single answer! ‘Monthly Mailbag Questions’ channel to our Discord, which you can find here!
From EVERYONE via anywhere we could be asked
“Talisman 5?” “When Talisman 5 as digital?” “Where is my Talisman 5th Edition: Digital Edition?” “How come you haven’t done Talisman 5 already?” “How long until Talisman: Digital Edition becomes the new version?” “TALISMAN 5 NOW!!!”
First of all, we massively appreciate the enthusiasm that the Talisman community have shown over the last week or so. It’s great to see the new edition of Talisman has created such a big response, and we can already say we’re just as excited about it as you are. We’re however not yet in a position where we can talk about any involvement we might have or if we’ll be making a digital version of 5th Edition.
However, it has been lovely to see so many people express that they would like to see us do it, that’s for sure!
From a Mysterious Messenger via email
Not sure if this is a question suitable for the mailbag, but here goes anyway.
I wonder if you could explain why the Nomad Discord server now needs phone number verification to post. (At least, I assume that was Nomad's doing.) I can guess it's because someone is abusing the server, though I'd not noticed a lot of nastiness - maybe it was happening in channels I tend not to visit. I do appreciate that validation is not a difficult task, but I would prefer not to distribute my phone number willy-nilly... It's not that I distrust Discord (well, maybe a little), but I don't want to have to rely on them being able to keep bad actors out of their systems. I'm probably being paranoid, but dealing with a leaked phone number is much more inconvenient than handling a leaked email address.
Incidentally, in case anyone is considering verifying and then removing their phone number, you can't do that - once you've given Discord your phone number, that's it. If you remove it, you can't use the service again without providing another.
As the person who turned on phone number verification (hi!), I can indeed explain why we did that. Someone very uncool was indeed abusing the server and generally being a jerk, although this was largely relegated to the Fury of Dracula: Digital Edition segments of the server.
Now that we’ve rolled out the update and the offending party seems to have gotten bored, we’ll be slightly relaxing the requirements for posting in the Discord. We didn’t want to have to implement such a nuclear option in the first place, but we’re hoping that going forward we won’t need to do something like that again.
From ¡¡Milej!! (Not Milei) via Twitter
What's the favorite Talisman character of the team?
We asked the team this, and here are some of the responses!
Rob: Toad
Carl: Thief
Michael: Warlock
Mat: Assassin
Tom: Sprite
Duane: Dwarf
Jethro: I always liked the warrior of chaos (2nd ed) but in DE, maybe Genie, I just like the cloud 🤷♂️☁️
From EsauPrime via Discord
Are there any new DLC in plans? Also how can I submit my own expansion I first worked on 8 years ago? (It hasn’t really been posted anywhere)
First off, we’re going to assume you’re asking about Talisman: Digital Edition! Right now we don’t have any new DLC plans that we can share publicly, but with all the excitement being drummed up by the announcement of Edition 5, we’re more so than ever thinking about cool Talisman stuff we could do in the future, that’s for sure.
And if you want to submit your own expansion, you can share it in our Discord if you’re looking for public feedback!
And that’s the end of this months update! Don’t forget, if you’ve got questions you want to ask the Nomad team, you can always send your questions to questions@nomadgames.co.uk, or fill in the form below! We answer each and every question that comes in, so don’t worry if you want to ask us something weird. In fact, we’d encourage it!
If you’d like to follow us, keep up to date with us and generally just see all the cool things we do, you can find all our social links, games and more over on our Linktree - how handy!