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.
You have finally reached the archipelago of Scoundrel Bay! Here, amidst treasures and dangers, fortune awaits any crew daring — or foolish — enough to seize it.
In Fortunes of Scoundrel Bay, players are pirate captains who try to collect the most gold by conquering harbors, seeking hideouts, delivering crates, digging up treasures, and gaining reputation by fighting monsters. During the game, each player builds up their crew to unlock stronger actions such as digging for treasure, invading hideouts, and picking up and delivering crates. On your turn, play one card from your hand and choose one of three actions for it:
Recruit
Sail and shoot monster
Invade
You may not pick the same action you took on your previous turn. The deck contains 84 unique, multi‑use cards, and every card works with all three actions. After each of five reefs, you resolve an event and feed your crew. The game ends as soon as a captain crosses the fifth reef. Sailing quickly shortens the game, but racing ahead might leave your engine too weak to claim victory.
In the box, you'll find unique player power tiles, asymmetric player boards, screen-printed captain figures, screen-printed pirate ship figures, 108 pirate figures, event cards, and a lot more.
Fortunes of Scoundrel Bay is a high interaction game in which players compete to gain area‑majority over lucrative islands, outpace foes in an open draft of crew cards, race to engage monsters before others can, and outwit captains in tense blind bids — all without resorting to negative or take‑that attacks.
—description from the designer
Play as trolls rebuilding your abandoned kingdom under the mountain in In the Hall of the Mountain King. With muscle and magic, you'll unearth riches, dig out collapsed tunnels, and carve out great halls as you raise the toppled statues of your ancestors to their places of honor at the heart of the mountain. Gameplay is driven by the innovative cascading production system. Timing and tactics are key as you work to restore your home to its former glory and win the crown!
Working on the same game board with the other players (but beginning at your own entrance), you'll dig a competing network of tunnels by spending increasingly valuable materials to lay polyomino tiles onto the map. You want to extend your tunnels to connect with buried gold and materials, with workshop locations that can transform resources, and especially with toppled statues. Statues are key to scoring, and you'll spend carts to move them through the tunnels to prime scoring locations near the heart of the mountain.
A major aspect of the game is the cascading production. You begin with a line of four trolls, and every troll shows the combination of resources — gold, stone, iron, marble, carts, runes, and hammers — that it produces. When a new troll is hired, place it above two other trolls, forming a "pyramid". The new troll activates, gaining its resources, and any trolls beneath it ALSO activate, gaining any resources that they have room to carry. In this way as you hire more trolls, you gain bigger and bigger windfalls of resources as the end of the game nears. The timing of your hiring turns versus your building turns is important as you try to maximize your cascades while making sure you get the trolls you want from the shared market and also stay competitive on the map.
The game ends shortly after the last player hires their sixth troll, then the player with the most honor (earned for digging tunnels of increasing quality, for excavating great halls, and for moving statues closer to the heart of the mountain, especially onto matching pedestals) is crowned the Mountain King and wins!
Trickerion is a competitive Euro-style strategy game set in a fictional world inspired by the late 19th century urban life and culture, spiced with a pinch of supernatural.
Players take on the roles of rival stage illusionists, each with their own strengths and characteristics. They are striving for fortune and fame in a competition hosted by a legendary magician, looking for a successor worthy of the mighty Trickerion Stone, which is fabled to grant supernatural power to its owner.
Using worker placement and simultaneous action selection mechanisms, the Illusionists and their teams of helpers — the Engineer, the Assistant, the Manager, and a handful of Apprentices – obtain blueprints and components for increasingly complex magic tricks, expand the team and set up performances by visiting the Downtown, Dark Alley, Market Row and Theater locations on the main game board depicting a late 19th century cityscape.
The tricks are stored and prepared on the Magician's own Workshop game board, while the performances themselves take place at the Theater in the form of a tile placement mini-game with lots of player interaction. The performances yield Fame points and Coins to their owners based on the tricks they consist of. Fame points have multiple uses, but they also serve as a win condition - After turn 7, when the last Performance card is revealed, the game ends and the illusionist with the most Fame points wins.
The game offers 48 different Tricks to be learned from the Optical, Spiritual, Mechanical and Escape categories, over 90 character abilities, and 40 Special Assignment cards that influence the actions taken at the various game locations. The base game can be expanded with two optional rule modules to add further strategic depth to the game.
The "Dark Alley" expansion included in the base game adds a new location to the game. It also comes with 48 new Special Assignment cards, a new tier of Tricks, and 27 Prophecy tokens that can alter certain game rules turn by turn, giving the game additional variety.
