This summer Catalyst Game Labs embraces hard science fiction in an RPG setting with the much anticipated release of Eclipse Phase. Designed by the core people involved with the best-selling, award-winning Shadowrun Fourth Edition, Eclipse Phase embraces the concepts of hypertechnology and a coming singularity when technology will begin to advance in quantum leaps. This type of setting has been expertly crafted by such authors as Ken Macleod, Richard Morgan, Alistair Reynolds and Charles Stross, and Catalyst Game Labs embraces the challenge.

Infiltration by Bruno Werneck

We humans have a special way of pulling ourselves up and kicking ourselves down at the same time. We’d achieved more progress than ever before, at the cost of wrecking our planet and destabilizing our own governments. But things were starting to look up.

We still survive … divided into a patchwork of restrictive inner system hypercorp-backed oligarchies and libertarian outer system collectivist habitats, tribal networks, and new experimental societal models. We have spread to the outer reaches of the solar system and even gained footholds in the galaxy beyond. But we are no longer solely “human” … we have evolved into something simultaneously more and different—something transhuman.

Beehive by Paul Davies

The core Eclipse Phase rulebook is a hard cover, full-color, lavishly illustrated tome that provides everything a GM and players need to dive into this exciting, hypertechnology universe. A setting where digitization of consciousness allows for a form of immortality as you switch flesh ad synth bodies at will, but the horrors of an alien and un-caring universe might drive you insane long before the last of your forked selves are hunted down.

See EclipsePhase.com for more information.

The cliques. The drama. The social disparity. Who doesn’t want to relive High School? Or at least to play a game that mocks the experience with relish?

Designed by Boyan Radakovich and originally published by Shifting Skies Games, Catalyst Game Labs acquired the rights to this fun and energetic game last year and will be publishing the Varsity Edition this summer.

Players take on the roll of classic student archtypes—emotional vortex to man candy, preppy to 1337 haXx0r—trying to hookup with other students and clubs, while making sure to breakup your rivals. At the end of four school years (because High School is like totally so superficial ya know) players burn off all their bonds they’ve created, turning them into signatures in their yearbook. The player with the most signatures at the end of game is the winner!

The Varsity Edition of High School Drama enhances and streamlines game play, while clarifying various rules based on player feedback from the original edition of the game.

High School Drama, along with Merchants and Paparazzi!, will publish in Catalyst new distinctive packaging. The exterior of the box opens like a book, so anyone can look at more information and art surrounding the game than any back-of-a-box can manage. The smaller, sealed interior box contains all of the components of play; as it’s self-contained it acts as a miniature carrying case when space is at a premium.

Catalyst Game Labs will enter the board game market this summer with Balance of Power. Originally pitched to Catalyst Game Labs at the New York Toy Fair by Brent and Brian Knudson (the game and graphic designers for the project), come to find out they’re both local to Catalyst in the Seattle, WA area. Catalyst immediately fell in love with the game and moved to fully develop it and get it into the hands of players.

It is 1815 and the world has been turned upside down. Napoleon Bonaparte has finally been defeated after nearly conquering all of Europe through years of devastating warfare. Now the Great Powers must deal with the chaos left behind. As each nation eagerly tries to grow, a careful balance of governmental, military and economic interests must be maintained.

In BALANCE OF POWER players carefully create and move Kings, Generals and Bankers as they capture territories and expand their empires. A player’s kill and strategy are all that stand between him and ultimate victory!

Balance of Power brings all the best of the German boardgame-style rules: simple, quick and easy to learn and remember. And like those same award winning games, the depth of strategy and game play is immense.

Balance of Power will include a rules booklet (translated into three additional languages), 6 reference cards, a scoring track and empire tokens, 270 colored wooden playing pieces, as well as a gorgeous, high quality gameboard.