Bizarre 'Board' of Live Arcade

Tyre-burning racing round the streets of London seems to have been put on hold for a while at UK studio Bizarre Creations, which is reportedly set to follow up the success of its Live Arcade game Geometry Wars with three new board games for the online community.

The team, more famous for its Project Gotham series, is translating three German (yes, German) board games for Microsoft. These include Settlers of Catan, Caracassonne and Alahambra. 'What the hell are they!', we hear you yell. Well, certainly not Monopoly, Guess Who and Operation, that's for sure, but we shall do our best to explain...

Settlers Of Catan does actually boast considerable worldwide popularity outside its native land of curled sausages, and challenges players to establish their settler colonies by successfully managing their resources in a sort of table-top RTS. I guess you could say it has elements of Risk about it.

The tongue-troubling Caracassonne, which sounds more like a cheesy pasta dish, is actually a territorial medieval game, where 2-5 players strive to spread their ownership by collecting and placing titles.

And finally, Alahambra is yet another 'build your wealth' type game, this time with cards as well as tiles, and is supposed to be partly inspired by the stock market.

We should hopefully have further details of these projected titles, along with release dates, in the very near future.