Aron West is the creative director of Elzra Corp., a Canadian publisher best known for the Catacombs game line, and in 2022 he launched a new company with his wife Nazila West: Phantom Horizon, which will focus solely on science fiction-themed games.
In July 2025, Phantom Horizon crowdfunded its first planned release: the 1-4 player, co-operative, tactical combat game Phantom Division by Pete Ruth and Mark Thomas, with this being a new version of their 2018 game SEAL Team Flix.
Players go into missions with primary and secondary objectives, working against the game to defeat enemies and deal with any twists that come their way. Combat is resolved by rolling dice or by flicking "bullet" discs at enemies. During a mission, you can discover weapons and equipment, as well as ways to augment your Phantom, with those upgrades carrying over into future missions.
Regarding Phantom Division's release date, West says, "I'm waiting for the molds for the plastic parts to be completed. Other than the final passes for typos through the rule book, the game is ready for mass production."
▪️ With most of that game being finished, Phantom Horizon has now crowdfunded its second release Solarion: Foundation of Empires, another 1-4 player game, with this 4X deck-building design coming from newcomer Tahsin Shamma. "He has developed a great deal of fan content for Tyrants of the Underdark, including a modular map", West tells me. "Solarion has some conceptual similarities with Tyrants." Here's an overview of the gameplay:
It is the far future. Newly emergent space-faring factions have outgrown their star systems. Now, these galactic powers have an eye on new worlds and the acquisition of star systems to expand their civilizations. Among these systems are the coveted Solarion planets that provide an energy source one thousand times more powerful than anything before. These rising stellar empires will come into conflict as they vie to secure their interstellar conquest.
To accomplish this, players will use their empires' technology and strategies to produce resources, position fleet, attack, and establish presence. Players win by buying cards, archiving cards, occupying planets, controlling sectors, and seizing scoring opportunities across three galactic phases, ideally earning points from all they do.
West expects to start production on Solarion immediately after the end of the crowdfunding campaign in early May 2026 and hopes to finish in time for SPIEL Essen 26.
▪️ As for Elzra, in June 2025 the company crowdfunded Catacombs Alpha, a 2-5 player standalone version of Catacombs with new heroes, new items, new monsters, new Lords, and a streamlined rule set that's compatible with Catacombs (Third Edition).
In case you're not familiar with the game, Catacombs is akin to a dungeon crawl, but with the player heroes, monsters, and Lords (the final bosses) represented by wooden discs, with players flicking those discs to move and attack.
West says that production of Catacombs Alpha finished in early February 2026, but that month, during Chinese New Year, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that tariffs imposed on importers by President Trump were illegal, which lead to publishers that had been sitting on goods in China rushing to ship those goods. As West wrote in a crowdfunding update on February 23, 2026, "quoted freight rates were very high (higher than during the pandemic restrictions) and ports in China were extremely congested".
Then on February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel attacked Iran, and the price of oil started shooting up. Says West, "It's been a pretty wild ride with the tariffs last year and now a major conflict in the Middle East this year." Even so, on May 4, 2026, he said he wanted to get the Catacombs Alpha shipment moving. After all, not all obstacles can be flicked away easily, and sometimes you just need to make a move...
