San Diego-based board game publisher, Renegade Game Studios has announced that it will be adapting its award-winning two-to-four player tile laying game, Lanterns: The Harvest Festival to mobile devices later this year.
For those unfamiliar with the game, it is set in imperial China with players taking on the roles of artisans, decorating the palace lake with floating lanterns. Players take turns placing lake tiles which depict different color arrangements. All players then receives lantern cards based on the color arrangement facing them.
There is a nice risk/reward element to the game and high level of engagement as all players are involved in every play of the game and you try to keep from giving the other players the lantern colors that they want while still getting what you need. Sets of lanterns can be traded in to earn honor points and the winner is the artisan who has earned the most honor before the festival starts (the end of the game).
Designed by Christopher Chung, Lanterns: The Harvest Festival, which was successfully Kickstarted in 2014 by Foxtrot Games (yours truly was a backer), went on to be nominated a boatload of awards since its widespread release in 2015 (with co-publisher Renegade) including Golden Geek Family Game of the Year, Geek & Sundry Best Board Game of 2015, won a 2015 Mensa Select Award, and was recently featured as one of the debut games in Barnes and Noble’s new national board game night series of events. I’ve also heard rumblings that it’ll be one of the games on the upcoming season of Wil Wheaton’s Table Top series.
Renegade Game Studios has now re-teamed with Dire Wolf Digital to make a digital version of Lanterns which will be released later this year. The companies previously collaborated on the companion app for Renegade’s cooperative bomb diffusion game, Fuse. Dire Wolf Digital is also developing their own digital strategy card game called Eternal.
This is all we know about the Lanterns digital release so far, we don’t even have a screenshot, so I have no idea how far along they are in development.
However, you can count on more details as we get closer to launch.
If you want to get an idea of how the game plays, check out the video below:
