Welcome to the Gaming Shelf, our new roundup of tabletop gaming news, releases, updates and interesting Kickstarter campaigns — focusing on sci-fi and fantasy games, with the occasional exception of course (Machi Koro is too cute to ignore!).

Seeing as we’re on the heels of GenCon, board game companies have been showing off some of their best and brightest stuff over the past few weeks. Even as we head into mid-August, there’s still a lot of great scoops and news. Here’s a few of the highlights we spotted for this week.