Pillars of Fate is a 2-player lane battler with a twist of deduction, misdirection, and asymmetric powers, set in the Veiled Fate universe.
Send your champions on quests by playing cards in three lanes, until each player has played three cards in each lane. Each quest has two possible outcomes — gaining or losing points — that are determined by the suits of the cards played in that lane. Play your cards wisely to win (or purposely lose) quests.
Hide your intentions with one face-down card per lane. Use your divine abilities at the opportune time to gain the upper hand. Only one will emerge victorious at the end of three rounds!
TAKE A DEEP BREATH, AND RELAX...
You have come to the lake hoping to see a rare and beautiful sight. The lilies of the lake only open their blossoms in the rain, and only rarely do all eight kinds of lily bloom at once. The goal of A Gentle Rain is to place the lake tiles in such a way to cause all eight types of lilies to bloom before you run out of tiles and the rain ends.
Place each new tile you draw next to a tile already in play, making sure to match the colors of all the tile edges touching the tile you are placing. Each time you manage to complete a square of four touching tiles, a blossom opens between them.
Keep Score, or don’t.
In Tea Witches, tea vendors from across the land must summon and serve lines of witches in order to gain their loyalty, all while sending out magical TeaPups to entice Celebri-Teas and find ways to further enhance their prestige. By growing their loyal fan base, upgrading their hut to maximize service, and collecting all the right tips and toppings they can prove that their tea reigns supreme.
The game lasts four rounds, each representing one day of the Teaquinox Faire. Each day has two phases. In the summoning phase, players simultaneously draw a crowd of witches to their tea hut, being mindful not to push their luck too far as any identical witches will cause a hex, which results in witches leaving the queue.
In the service phase, players take turns sending their adorable TeaPups to various Bootiques in the city to gather toppings and collect tea from the rotating crystal fountain in order to serve witches waiting at their hut. Additionally, TeaPups can help players collect powerful upgrades, attract Celebri-teas, and brew up Special-Teas with bonus abilities. Clever TeaPup placement can also help you complete to-go orders for witches out and about in the city center.
Completing tea orders, attracting celebrities, earning money, and upgrading your tea hut will earn players prestige, and at the end of the fourth day, the player with the most prestige will be declared the greatest tea witch of the Teaquinox Faire!
The Isle of Cats is a competitive, medium-weight, card-drafting, polyomino cat-placement board game.
In the game, you are citizens of Squalls End on a rescue mission to The Isle of Cats and must rescue as many cats as possible before the evil Lord Vesh arrives. Each cat is represented by a unique tile and belongs to a family, you must find a way to make them all fit on your boat while keeping families together. You will also need to manage resources as you:
Explore the island (by drafting cards)
Rescue cats
Find treasures
Befriend Oshax
Study ancient lessons
Each lesson you collect gives you another personal way of scoring points, and 38 unique lessons are available. Complete lessons, fill your boat, and keep cat families together to score points, and the player with the most points after five rounds wins.
The sequel to Scythe sends players on a new adventure into Siberia, where a massive meteorite crashed near the Tunguska River, awakening ancient corruption. An expedition led by Dr. Tarkovsky ventures into the taiga to learn about the meteorite and its impact on the land. Itching for adventure, heroes from the war privately fund their own expeditions to Siberia, hoping to find artifacts, overcome challenges, and ultimately achieve glory. Expeditions has completely different mechanisms than Scythe, though the goal was to capture some of the same feelings that Scythe evokes, with a slightly darker, more supernatural theme.
Expeditions is a competitive, card-driven, engine-building game of exploration. Play cards to gain power, guile, and unique worker abilities; move your mech to mysterious locations and gain cards found among the tiles; use workers, items, meteorites, and quests to enhance your mech; and use power and guile to vanquish corruption.
In Cabo, the goal is to minimize the total value of your cards; however, you don't know what all your cards are at the beginning of the game. By using certain cards to peek at your own card, spy on your opponent's card, or swap a card with your opponent, you can try to minimize the value of your cards. When you think you have the lowest value, you can call "Cabo" to end the round, but everyone else gets another turn.
The Mayor has enlisted some of humanity's greatest visionaries to help build Skyrise: a magnificent city in the sky, dedicated to art, science, and beauty. But only one artisan can be remembered as the greatest!
Prove your genius by using a brilliant spatial auction system to win sites to build in, earning favor across Islands and factions, scoring secret and public objectives, courting mysterious Patrons, and building your own unique Wonder.
Skyrise tells an interactive story of a growing cityscape, hard decisions, scarce resources, and ever-rising stakes that will keep you enthralled until the final scores are revealed.
Skyrise is a brand new game inspired by Sebastien Pauchon's 2008 Spiel Des Jahres recommended Metropolys.
Every morning Odin sends his ravens, Huginn and Muninn, across the entire world to bring back news of what life is like on Earth. Naturally, after thousands of years, they've gotten a little competitive. Race through the landscape in opposite directions to be the first to return to Odin. Focus on speed, or enlist the help of the trickster god Loki to create shortcuts and hinder your opponent. Can you be certain Loki's changes won't help your opponent instead? There's only one way to find out!
The revised second edition of Thorsten Gimmler's award-winning Odin ravens has been completely redesigned, with new rules and a beautiful new art style inspired by Norse mythology.
Paint the Roses is a 2-5 player cooperative logic deduction game that automatically adapts to your skill during play.
Set in the puzzling world of Alice in Wonderland, you and your friends are the newly appointed Royal Gardeners. You are working together to finish the palace grounds according to the whims of the Queen of Hearts. Use strategy, logic, and teamwork to finish the garden whilst staying one step ahead of the Queen, otherwise, the last thing you hear will be, "Off With Their Heads!".
The Queen's whims are shared via cards, secret instructions each player is given into how the garden should be arranged. Her whims are always changing, so as soon as you solve one, a new one is in your hand.
Every turn, together as a team you must guess at least one of these secret whim cards. You can't say what your card shows, but by carefully placing a new shrub tile into the garden (taken from those available in the Greenhouse) you are able to reveal clues, tokens that will show any matches between the arrangement in the garden and the secret whims each player holds in their hands.
Although you can't discuss your own secret whim card, you can openly discuss other players'. Share your theories at the table and then make a guess. Correctly guessing a whim will move you forward on the score track, but the Queen is always following and her speed automatically adjusts based on your current score. Guess incorrectly and the Queen moves twice as fast, her axe ever closer to your neck.
Working from the shadows, Mind MGMT once used its psychically-powered agents to put a stop to global crises. However, absolute power corrupts absolutely, and Mind MGMT is now rotting from the inside. To tighten its iron grip on the world stage, Mind MGMT deploys covert operatives around the world to recruit other psychically-attuned individuals to their side. How can this enigmatic organization, hell bent on global domination, be defeated?
Thankfully, a few renegade agents have figured out that Mind MGMT has been compromised and have defected, turning their backs on the syndicate. They now use their own psychic abilities to prevent Mind MGMT from achieving its nefarious goals.
In Mind MGMT: The Psychic Espionage "Game" one player controls Mind MGMT and must scour the city for new recruits. They move around on a secret map, trying to visit locations that match one of their three randomly drawn feature cards. They can also use their four Immortals to protect locations from being exposed.
All other players control the rogue agents who must try to stop Mind MGMT before it's too late! They ask questions to the Recruiter and deduce their whereabouts from the answers they receive. Rogue agents can use dry-erase "mental notes" to track all the information they're given.
Mind MGMT wins by either collecting twelve recruits or surviving sixteen turns. The rogue agents can win only by capturing Mind MGMT, which they do when they believe they're on the same block as Mind MGMT.
You have successfully led your class to victory... but the battle of ideologies is far from over! The old world is in crisis, and the new world struggles to regain control. Now is the time to make a difference!
Crisis & Control offers new challenges and additional game modes that will test your governance skills like never before! Crisis Response cards and Alternative Events add more diversity to your games, class-specific Hidden Agendas incentivize new politico-economic strategies, and the Automas provided allow you to experience all of the game’s roles, no matter the player count!
—description from the rulebook
Crisis & Control contains all the gameplay material that was given in the form of stretch goals during Hegemony's Kickstarter campaign. All that content was included in the Extended Edition of Hegemony which is what the campaign's backers received.
A War of Whispers is a competitive board game for 2 to 4 players. Five mighty empires are at war for the world, but you are no mighty ruler. Instead, you play a secret society that is betting on the results of this war while pulling strings to rig the results and ensure their bets pay off. A War of Whispers is a game of deep strategy, hidden agendas, and shifting loyalties.
You start the game with five loyalty tokens, each corresponding to one of the five different empires, bet randomly on a loyalty value. Your primary goal is to ensure that when the game ends, the empires you are most loyal to control the most cities across the globe. Gameplay consists of turns broken down into four phases:
Deploy agents phase: In player order (starting with the first player and proceeding clockwise), each player removes, then deploys agents to empire councils, the positions on the board marked Sheriff, Steward, Marshall, and Chancellor.
Empire turns phase: Each council position on each empire council will take an action. If a player has acquired cards, they may play them during this phase.
Cleanup phase: Add the turn marker to the next space on the turn tracker, then each player discards down to the hand limit of five cards.
Swap phase: In player order, each player may swap two of their unrevealed loyalty tokens. If you choose to do so, you must reveal both of the swapped loyalty tokens. They remain revealed for the rest of the game.
Gameplay repeats itself in this order four times. When the last space on the turn track is filled, the game ends immediately and scoring commences. The player with the most points based off their empire loyalties and the cities they control wins.
