Spin More Pandas, Pepper More Paper, Walk in More Footsteps, and Steam More Ages | BoardGameGeek News

by W. Eric Martin

▪️ Carl Chudyk‘s Panda Spin is an odd climbing card game in which played cards often get upgraded, then returned to your hand for use later as you attempt to shed your hand as quickly as possible. That 2024 release from Moon Gate Design, which I previewed ahead of its SPIEL Essen 24 debut, is getting an expansion in 2025.

When using Panda Spin: Mandate of Heaven, at the start of each round, you reveal one of the twelve “animal mandate” cards, with each of these zodiacal animals introducing a new way to play the game, such as recovering a card from a trick, continuing a sequence of cards played by another player, or taking a card from an opponent’s hand.

Panda Spin: Mandate of Heaven will be crowdfunded in Q2 2025 ahead of a Q4 2025 release.

▪️ Sea Salt & Paper: Extra Pepper — the second expansion for 2022’s Sea Salt & Paper from Bruno Cathala, Théo Rivière, and Bombyx — features the same kind of pitch as Mandate of Heaven.

This expansion features twelve new cards, with a new card revealed at the start of each round. When the round ends, the player with the highest — or lowest! — score claims that card. Maybe you’ll pick up the bonus mermaid card that allows for an instant win with only three mermaids from the deck? These new twists keep coming into play round by round until someone collects enough points to win.

▪️ In the Footsteps of Darwin: Correspondence expands the Spiel des Jahres-nominated In the Footsteps of Darwin from designers Grégory Grard and Matthieu Verdier and publisher Sorry We Are French, with this expansion being due out in French and English in Q3 2025. As for what’s inside:

If you’re not familiar with the base game, you can get an overview from my GAMA Expo 2023 write-up.

▪️ On May 6, 2025, Indie Boards & Cards will launch a crowdfunding campaign for Aeon’s End: Beyond the Breach, a standalone expansion from Sydney Engelstein, Nick Little, Kevin Riley, and Dávid Turczi for the Aeon’s End game line that features new mages, nemeses, supply cards, friends and foes, a new tier of nemesis difficulty, and a “new type of treasure cards players can earn for surviving this gauntlet of challenges”.

IBC had originally planned to launch this campaign in late April 2025, but delayed it to figure out how to handle U.S. tariffs against goods on China. The publisher has now stated that the campaign will show a “tariff tax for U.S.-based backers”, with an estimated price of US$6, but with the final tariff being $0-12 depending on the situation at the time of delivery. If U.S. backers want other items that need to be reprinted, then they’ll pay a tariff tax on those items as well.

Why launch a crowdfunding campaign at all given the uncertainty of what tariffs might be in the future? As IBC wrote in late April 2025, “a significant portion of our ongoing budget planning and funding for our development team is based upon bringing a new crowdfunding project for Aeon’s End every year. Indie Boards and Cards without an annual Aeon’s End release would be a very different company.”

▪️ Rio Grande Games now lists a Q3 2025 release date for Tom Lehmann‘s Dice Realms: Trade Expansion.

▪️ In May 2025, Eagle-Gryphon Games will crowdfund Age of Steam Deluxe: Expansion Volume V and Age of Steam Deluxe: Expansion Volume VI, with each box containing seven more re-Toole‘ed expansion maps for Age of Steam: Deluxe Edition…but with the campaign promo claiming “16 maps in total”. Hmmm…

Amazing to think about how much of a lifestyle game this design is more than twenty years after its debut. Given the 1,000+ expansion listings in the BGG database, you could play nothing else by Age of Steam maps for months or years on end.