Grey Fox Games today is announcing release dates for anticipated titles Pocket Mars and City of Gears, with the former debuting at Gen Con and the latter set for an Essen release.
A limited number of copies of Pocket Mars, the third of three games originally published by Polish publisher Board & Dice, will be available at this year’s Gen Con with the official retail release date coming later in August.
Pocket Mars, by Michal Jagodzinski, is a 15 to 30 minute game that cleverly compresses the experience of colonizing Mars.
In the world of big games about Mars everybody should have one that fits in their pocket.
Pocket Mars is a fast paced and wildly dynamic card game, but don’t let the short playthrough time fool you. It’s a heavy weight filler! A compressed and easy to understand set of rules combined with cards that you can play in more than one way is what makes this game great! Fifteen minutes is all it takes for you and your friends to set out on an exciting adventure in space!
Your goal is to place as many colonists as you can in the buildings of your Mars settlement. To do so, you will need to choose carefully how and when to play your cards.
The way you trigger actions on your cards is the heart of the game. Everything depends on where you play them from, which is the game’s main strategic element. You could play a project card straight from your hand and trigger its effect instantly or turn it into a module and play it from your preparation zone. This will let you add it to one of the five buildings in your settlement, trigger an action sequence and transport your colonists to Mars.
The Grey Fox Games edition of Pocket Mars comes with upgraded components, including astronaut helmet pieces, and an updated rulebook. It has an MSRP of $14.99 and plays 1 to 4 players, ages 10 and up.
City of Gears, designed by Chris Leder (Roll for It) and Daryl Andrews (Sagrada), will be available at Essen Spiel. It is a 45 to 60 minute game where two to four players compete to uncover and develop a long-lost steampunk 
metropolis.
Each city players uncover in City of Gears is unique as only nine of the 21 city tiles included in the game are used each time. On their turns, players roll resource dice that produce gears, steam and zaps. Gears allow players to draw from a bag of cogs that can be used to either build connections within the city or for unique player abilities. Steam lets you move your automaton workers around the city. Zaps let you travel quickly across your gear links or to disrupt your opponent’s plans and battle for area control. Activating city tiles not only earns you the benefits of those tiles, but special link bonuses using your chain of gears.
Once the final city tile is revealed, four special cogs are added to the bag. When the third one is drawn, the game ends immediately.
City of Gears, once slated to be a part of the Dice Tower Essentials line, was funded through a successful Kickstarter campaign earlier this year. It will have an MSRP of $59.99 . An exact retail release date has not yet been set.