6th December 2023
NOMAD MONTHLY ROUND-UP -NOVEMBER 2023 EDITION
Hello everyone!
This months round-up comes to you directly from the coldest offices we’ve worked in for quite a while! The weather here in the UK has taken a nose-dive in temperatures over the past few weeks, so we’re making sure to wrap up warm while we’re all working from home.
But no matter how low the temperature drops, it’s not going to stop us from bringing you another monthly round-up full of updates, news and more from the team here at Nomad Games! So without further ado, let’s get to it.
By far the biggest thing to happen in November was the official launch of CATAN® - Console Edition onto Nintendo Switch! On November 8th, the game launched onto the eShop for purchase, and you can play it right now! Check it out alongside the Super Deluxe edition on the Nintendo website.
So far the reception to this version of the game has been mighty positive, with us getting a lot of feedback around how much people are enjoying playing the game portably. It’s thanks to all the support you gave us over the past year that we were able to even consider making a Nintendo Switch version of the game. So thank you!
Check out the official trailer below:
You can also find out more about the Nintendo Switch release of CATAN - Console Edition over on the official CATAN - Console Edition website!
The latest season pack arrived in CATAN - Console Edition on Xbox and PlayStation in November too, as we launched the Ice & Snow: Winter Content Pack for the game. Including new characters, dice and a seasonal overhaul for the island, this pack brings a festive overhaul to your game in a big, snowy way! Just like with our previous seasonal pack, we put a ton of effort into capturing the feeling of winter, snow and the cosy vibes that we associate with it!
Check out the official trailer below to find out more:
If you already have the season pass for CATAN - Console Edition on PlayStation or Xbox, you’ll be able to play with all this new festive goodness right now! You can also buy this pack separately, and you can find a full list of everything included in the Ice & Snow pack over on the official CATAN - Console Edition website.
With the Nintendo Switch version of CATAN - Console Edition launching in November, our team have been hard at work on the next patch and update for the game. There are no breaks on the CATAN development train!
Some of the highlights of development in November included:
Adding Dice Selectors
If you’ve played with the Cities & Knights expansion at all, you’ll be familiar with The Alchemist! This card allows you to choose the result of the next dice roll you make will be, something that we’ve not had to ask you to do until now. So in order to make this function within the game, we’ve created a new menu that allows you to choose the results you’d like to see. We’ve also added some snazzy animations to the dice, to make it easier to tell at a glance that those dice have been alchemised!
Making New Tutorials
With a new expansion comes new tutorials! We’ve been working with the team over at Dovetail Games to make sure that the Cities & Knights expansion has the same high quality of tutorials as the base game does. This involves making sure we all have good quality assets, images and other elements of the upcoming expansion to create the tutorials.
Working on Switch Cross-Play Patch
Due to technical issues, the cross-play between the Nintendo Switch version of CATAN - Console Edition and the other platforms wasn’t available at launch. Our team have been working hard to make cross-play available, and we’re making very good progress. Once we’re able to roll out an update that’ll make it available, we’ll make sure to shout very loudly about it!
Figuring out New Buttons
The Cities & Knights expansion adds a bunch of new features to interact with during a normal game of CATAN, such as the progress chart! As CATAN - Console Edition is played with a controller, we need to consider that we’ve got a limited number of buttons that players can use to open menus etc.
Making Sure Information Doesn’t Overlap
With extra features being added, we also have extra information to give to you while you’re playing too. In November, we spent some time making sure that there wasn’t any overlap between the different types of information that pop up during gameplay.
Full games of Cities & Knights
We’ve now reached the point in Cities & Knights development where we can play through an entire game with it enabled from start to finish, which is a massive help for showing the progress of the game to other members of the Nomad team! It also helps our QA team better identify what’s causing issues during games, so it should hopefully speed up our testing process a ton.
With each passing November, Black Friday seems to take up more and more of the month! Not that we’re overly complaining (or should you!) as it means you all get more chances to take advantage of deals across all our games in all the places you can buy them!
In November, we had the Steam Autumn Sale, the Turn Based Tactics Festival and the War Child Armistice sale.
We of course appreciate everyone who makes any purchases from us, but we want to say a special thanks to everyone who made a purchase during the War Child Armistice sale. We’re donating a percentage of all Talisman: Digital Edition purchases that were made during the sale to War Child, to help support the great work they do.
November 12th marked 3 years since we first launched Fury of Dracula: Digital Edition onto Steam!
Since then, the community of Fury of Dracula: Digital Edition players have shown more love for the game than we know what to do with! We’ve massively appreciate the support that you’ve all shown for the game over the last three years, and we hope each year we get more and more hunters joining in the search for Dracula.
November saw a number of important milestones being hit with our upcoming secret project, including talks with publishers, more progress being made on the development side and design documents getting further fleshed out!
We’re gearing up for an official announcement soon though, so keep your eyes focused on this space.
November saw us rolling out a ton of new languages for Ready Set Bet, our official companion app for the AEG board game, which you can check out here!
You can now use the app in Hungarian and Korean, and we’ve also just rolled out an update that’ll mean you can play in Spanish and Greek too. No matter where you’re joining the races from, we hope you have fun!
There was only a single question in our mailbag this month, but we’ve now added a ‘Monthly Mailbag Questions’ channel to our Discord, which you can find here! So if you’ve got a question for our team, you can get in touch there now too.
From Cole G. via email
I am a huge Talisman fan and have all of the goodies that come with it! I heard about it through a friend and now I have also spread it to many others! The friend who introduced it to me has an idea for DLC for the digital edition that he really wants to see come to life and I figured I would share it and see what kind of response I get...
Anyways... it's a pirate/sea themed expansion that would basically add a 1 space thick perimeter to the entire base game board. It would contain artwork of coastlines, lighthouses, coves, etc. As far as other logistics go, I could have him reach out to you. He's a longtime experienced tabletop gamer.
From my perspective, it sounds sick! We need to figure out whether the sea tiles could be implemented differently to also be playable with the dungeon, forest, city expansions, etc.
That does indeed sound sick - sea sick! For real though, we’re glad that you’re such a fan and that you’re coming up with awesome ideas like this as it shows just how many ways you can expand Talisman.
Previously, there has been discussion about adding a new series of spaces between the Highland and Woodland expansions with a sea theme, so clearly the call of the ocean is strong among Talisman players!
(Of course, it could just be because people want to see the Toad in a pirate hat.)
When it comes to actually making an expansion like this though, that very much depends on how big we’d want to make it and having the development time to do so.
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!