Machi Koro publisher announces board game equivalent of Tony Hawk’s Pro-Skater

Pandasaurus Games, the studio behind beloved family board game Machi Koro, has revealed its next release - Skate Summer.

Described by a Pandasaurus representative as being “Tony Hawk’s Pro-Skater the board game” Skate Summer challenges players to outperform each other’s skateboarding tricks. In the game, players become rival skateboarders gathering for a summer of skateboarding and trying to impress their friends as much as possible. Taking place across an entire city’s worth of ramps, rails and steps, Skate Summer has players pushing their luck as much as they can, before they eventually have to bail out.

A deckbuilding game, Skate Summer has players using their decks of cards to determine their characters movements and the tricks they want to pull-off. Each trick corresponds to a different coloured hex on the board, with players achieving more success if they match their cards to the coloured hexes. Players have their own boards - which coincidentally, are meant to represent their character’s skateboard - on which they play their cards.

The cards in Skate Summer show arrows pointing to the left or right, which will change which direction the player character is leaning on their board and how far. Playing too many cards with arrows pointing in the same direction can cause the player character to topple off their board and bail out, leading to their board being wiped off all the points they’ve collected from their tricks.

Players can also attempt to collect various letter tokens that spell out the word ‘summer’ in order to upgrade their boards, improving their hand limit and their ability to balance. Whichever player collects the most victory points by the end of the game is named the winner. According to Pandasaurus, a version of Skate Summer featuring miniatures will be included in the game’s Kickstarter campaign, with the standard edition containing meeples - or skeeples.

Skate Summer was created by Randy Reiman, with this being the designer’s debut tabletop title. Alongside Machi Koro and Skate Summer, Pandasaurus has also published Dinosaur Island and its sequel, Dinosaur World, as well as co-op game The Loop and the time-travelling board game That Time You Killed Me.

The Kickstarter campaign for Skate Summer is set to be launched on January 18th, with pledge amounts and estimated delivery dates yet to be confirmed.