In the multiplayer puzzle game Railroad Ink, your goal is to connect as many exits on your board as possible. Each round, a set of dice are rolled in the middle of the table, determining which kind of road and railway routes are available to all players. You have to draw these routes on your erasable boards to create transport lines and connect your exits, trying to optimize the available symbols better than your opponents.

The more exits you connect, the more points you score at the end of the game, but you lose points for each incomplete route, so plan carefully! Will you press your luck and try to stretch your transportation network to the next exit, or will you play it safe and start a new, simpler to manage route?

Railroad Ink comes in two versions, each one including two expansions with additional dice sets that add new special rules to your games. The Deep Blue Edition includes the Rivers and Lakes expansions. Increase the difficulty by adding the River route into the mix, or use the Lakes to connect your networks by ferry. These special rules can spice up things and make each game play and feel different. Each box allows you to play from 1 to 6 players, and if you combine more boxes, you can play with up to 12 players (or more). The only limit to the number of players is the number of boards you have!

Sheep Boom Bah is a tile flipping, sheep herding game for 2-4 players. After all your sheep wonder into an active land mine field, it’s your job to safely return the absent minded flock back to your farm safely.

On the players turn, they can use an action to move a sheep onto a field tile. Once there, the player flips the tile over and discovers what’s underneath. Either a field, landmine or barn is revealed. Bonus points are scored for finding a field or barn tile.

Players can use playing cards in their hand to move, steal and revive sheep.

At the end of the game, players score points based on the final positions of their sheep either in the barn or the barnyard.

Score the most points at the end to win the game.

—description from the publisher

Progress! That's what these Dark Ages need, someone with a little get-up-and-go. You've been a serf in this one-pig town long enough, and it's time to shake things up. You've opened a guildhall for like-minded professionals from all over Europe to work together, build their trades, and get some economic stability.

Now if only everybody else didn't have the same idea...

Well, you'll just have to do it faster than those other guys! Gather professionals into chapters, and use their combined might to reach for victory. Collect complete color sets of professions (all five colors of Trader, for instance), which you use to buy victory points (VP). The first player to gain 20 VP on her turn wins.

In Guildhall, each profession grants you special abilities, and these abilities grow stronger the more of the set that you complete. When you cash in the set for victory points, however, you lose the ability until you can build it up again. Which professions are worth risking VP to keep?

In Germany in 1888, Bertha Benz, wife of auto pioneer Carl Benz, undertook the first cross-country drive in an automobile. While making the trek from Mannheim to Pforzheim, her car ran out of fuel in Wiesloch. Mrs. Benz stopped into the city drugstore to obtain the appropriate chemicals to make more fuel, effectively creating the world´s first gas station.

By the year 1928, Germany possessed a dense road network where combustion engines had triumphed over electric and steam engines and where cars were produced via assembly lines. Manufacturers began producing more affordable vehicles for the broader population.

In Kraftwagen, players advance the state of automobile development and production by playing as start-up companies. They must research new technologies and build improved chassis and engines. Early Grand Prix races provide the young companies with prestige and money, but the players must maintain a key balance of fulfilling the demand preferences of buyers at the lowest possible price.

Kraftwagen: V6 Edition includes a new set of tiles, featuring the next technology available at the time, the V6 Engine.

In Roll Through the Ages, players roll dice to obtain commodities and workers to build up their civilizations. Dice can be rerolled twice unless they come up as a hazard. Players use their workers to build infrastructure to support additional works or to build monuments that are worth points. At the same time, commodities are gathered that allow your civilization to develop. Once all monuments or five developments are achieved by a player, the game ends at the end of the round, points are counted, and a victor is declared.

The game takes its name from Through the Ages: A Story of Civilization, although the two games have different styles and designers.

Every day, dozens of birds have a stop on the fences of our countryside. When it is time to leave, all these birds mix together, unable to organize themselves into flocks to fly home. Help them find their way back to their nest.

Players begin each new round of CuBirds with eight bird cards in hand. Some birds also sit on four distinct fences on the table. On your turn, you lay a series of identical birds from your hand on one fence's extremity. These birds instantly gather with any identical bird already present on this fence, making all birds placed in-between them fly into your hand. With enough identical birds in your hand, you can perform a flock, allowing you to add some of these birds in your scoring area.

Your ultimate goal is to be the first player to gather in your scoring area either seven different species, or two species with at least three identical birds in each. Each bird comes with one small and one big flock scores, so you may want to wait to reach a big flock to add more birds at once to your scoring area. Beware, though, as the round ends as soon as a player empties their hand, forcing all players to discard their current hands and plans!

The inhabitants of the villages surrounding a dormant volcano were happily living in peace until — KABOOM! — the old volcano sprung back to life, unleashing rivers of molten lava in every direction and blasting volcanic rock into the sky. The villages, now faced with destruction, must do whatever they can to protect their homes from the incoming surge of lava.

Your village is about to burn up — can you take the heat?

Eruption is a competitive survival game in which each player struggles to save his or her own village from destruction caused by an onslaught of lava from an erupting volcano. As lava enters a village, its temperature increases until it has burned up completely. Players can protect their own villages by placing lava tiles defensively and strategically building walls of various materials to hold back the lava. They are also rewarded with action cards for directing lava to other villages. Action cards allow players to rotate, replace, or remove the hexagonal lava tiles as well as cool down and fortify their own villages. Once the volcano has fully unleashed its fury, the player whose village is at the lowest temperature wins.

Nidavellir, the Dwarf Kingdom, is threatened by the dragon Fafnir. As a venerable Elvaland, you have been appointed by the King. Search through every tavern in the kingdom, hire the most skillful dwarves, recruit the most prestigious heroes, and build the best battalion you can to defeat your mortal enemy!

Each turn in Nidavellir, bid a coin on each tavern. In descending order, choose a character and add this character to your army. Each dwarf class has its own scoring way: blacksmith, hunter, warrior, explorer, and miner. A meticulous recruitment will allow you to attract a powerful hero to your army.

You will also be able to increase the value of your gold coins thanks to the smart "coin-building" system, and get the best of the other Elvalands.

Edited description from Bruno Faidutti's write-up of the game in his Ideal Game Library:

Skull & Roses is the quintessence of bluffing, a game in which everything is played in the players' heads. Each player plays a face-down card, then each player in turn adds one more card – until someone feels safe enough to state that he can turn a number of cards face up and get only roses. Other players can then overbid him, saying they can turn even more cards face up. The highest bidder must then turn that number of cards face up, starting with his own. If he shows only roses, he wins; if he reveals a skull, he loses, placing one of his cards out of play. Two successful challenges wins the game. Skull & Roses is not a game of luck; it's a game of poker face and meeting eyes.

Skull & Roses Red features the same gameplay as Skull & Roses, with the only change being alternate rules that allow each player to control two biker gangs. Both Skull & Roses Red and Skull are playable on their own, with each game containing six different biker gangs. Each Skull or Skull & Roses set can be combined with another to allow for games with more than six players.

A local city has a problem of un-separated trash left by citizens. Each player is a company that does the trash separation and recycling for the city.

Use your truck (hand) to take unsorted garbage (cards) from dump sites and deliver each type to its appropriate recycling center. Every delivery that fills a center's quota earns you payment from the city.

However, your truck has a weight limit (5 items/cards), and, if you overload it, you have to dump the excess illegally (which costs money).

The player with the most money becomes the one and only authorized garbage collector of the city.

Game description from the publisher:

Roll for the Galaxy is a dice game of building space empires for 2–5 players. Your dice represent your populace, whom you direct to develop new technologies, settle worlds, and ship goods. The player who best manages his workers and builds the most prosperous empire wins!

This dice version of Race for the Galaxy takes players on a new journey through the Galaxy, but with the feel of the original game.

We designed Trekking the World for gamers and non-gamers to play together. The goal was to make a game inviting for non-gamers, but with a little subtlety under the hood for gamers.

Gleaming monuments and sunrise vistas await your arrival as you traverse the globe to experience its many wonders. Will you explore ancient ruins deep in the jungle, or go wild on a savanna safari? Build your bucket list of destinations and take a whirlwind tour to visit them all - but hurry, your fellow travelers might just beat you there!

In Trekking the World 2-5 players compete to be the ultimate globe trotter by racing to visit world-renowned locations and collect rare souvenirs along the way. The game spotlights 48 real-world destinations, each beautifully illustrated and accompanied with educational passages to inspire your next getaway.

—description from the publisher

The floodwaters are rising and the animals need to board the ark!

In this deceptively simple game, players move their boats around a steadily deteriorating landscape, matching pairs in order to rescue stranded animals.

Animals that are rare at the end of the game are worth more points than those that are common.

Two by Two is #6 in the Valley Games Modern Line.

In 7 Steps, everything revolves around the number seven, with seven fields in seven colors, and seven discs available to each player each round that can block any number — and by blocking columns on the fields rise higher step by step up to a maximum height of seven discs. Newly placed discs score points for the placer depending on the level where the disc was placed in the column. Only the one who can place his discs cleverly and use the special tiles well will win this game.

Online Play

Yucata (turn-based)

The London Underground is the world's first underground passenger railway, having opened in 1863. Its 11 lines move about 5 million passengers a day to 270 stations, along 400 km (250 mi) of track.

The massive network of London Underground stations makes up one of the most complex transportation systems in the world, and On the Underground challenges you to develop it. Build the most successful lines, connect them to landmarks, and attract passenger traffic!



Gameplay OverviewIn On the Underground, the players build the Underground lines in London or the U-Bahn lines in Berlin. Each player controls 2-4 different lines, depending on the number of players.

On each turn, four destination cards are available, corresponding to stations on the map. You can take up to four actions; an action is either building track by placing one of your track tokens on the board or taking a branch token. A player may use two branch tokens to branch out of an existing line (whereas normally lines can be extended only at the endpoints).

After each player's turn, a passenger token is moved along players' lines, avoiding walking as much as possible, to reach one or two destinations determined at the beginning of the turn. The destination cards corresponding to the visited stations are then replaced by new ones, then the next player takes their turn.

Players score points in two ways:


By building track and connecting their lines to various types of stations, by building a circular line (in London), or at the end of the game if they have collected tiles from specific landmark stations (in Berlin).
By having the passenger use their lines when moving.


After all destination cards have been drawn and all players have taken the same number of turns, the game ends.



Differences from the First Edition of On the Underground
For their first turns only, the player first in turn order takes three actions, and the player last in turn order takes five actions. (Previously, everyone other than the start player had a few points added to their score as a balancing mechanism.)
The passenger is no longer removed from the board immediately when the draw deck is empty.
There is a new Berlin map, along with its corresponding cards and tiles.
On the London map, these single connections have been made double connections: Paddington-Shepherd's Bush, Shepherd's Bush-Goldhawk Road, Goldhawk Road-Hammersmith, Waterloo-Borough, London Bridge-Bank, Stratford-West Ham, and West Ham-Canning Town.
On the London map, this double connection has been made a triple connection: Borough-London Bridge
On the London map, the New Cross station has been removed, as has the connection between Aldgate and Canada Water.

Become the leader of an imp family that has just started a new business – breeding and selling petz. Sound simple and safe? Well, we forgot to mention that those petz are for Dungeon Lords. This means magical, playful, sometimes angry monsters that constantly desire attention and at the very moment you want them to demonstrate their qualities to buyers they are sick or they poop. Sometimes you are even glad that you got rid of them – but the profit is unbelievable.

Dungeon Petz is a standalone game set in the Dungeon Lords universe. The game consists of several rounds in which players use unusual worker placement mechanisms (players simultaneously prepare different sized groups of imps in order to play sooner than others) to prepare themselves for the uneasy task of raising creature cubs and pleasing their different needs (represented by cards) in order to sell them as grown and scary creatures to Dungeon Lords. In the meantime, they also attend various contests in which they show off their pets, scoring additional points.

Key Harvest is the fifth game in the key series of games published by R&D Games.

The object of the game is to score the most points. Players score points by placing tiles on their own country board. One point is scored for each field tile in the player's largest group of connected field tiles and two points for each tile in their second largest connected group.

Points are also scored for the worker tiles a player places on their country board. The number of points scored for each worker is equal to the number on the worker tile. Worker tiles do not count as connecting tiles when calculating the largest group of tiles. When played, a worker enables a player to take a special action. Each player has their own team of six workers, known as farmhands. There are also six townsfolk who can be acquired by any player.

There are usually six field tiles available at any time from the registry. On their turn a player may bid for up to two tiles using crop counters. The field tile being bid for and the bid in crop counters are placed in the player's store. On their turn the other players may match the store owner's bid in both the number and type of crop counters. If they choose to do so, then they place the field tile on their country board and pay the crop counters to the store owner. If no other player has matched the store owner's bid, then on their next turn the store owner may place the field tile(s) from their store onto their country board and pay their bid in crop counters to the general stock.

When deciding how much to bid for a field tile, players will need to consider how important the field tile is to them and whether other players are likely to bid for the tile. It is usually beneficial for a player to place field tiles into their store as that player will either obtain the field tile or receive additional crop counters.

When played, a worker tile must be adjacent to at least the number of field tiles as the number on the worker tile. A worker tile cannot be adjacent to another worker tile. If a player obtains a field tile for a space where they have already placed a worker tile, they must remove the worker tile. However, if the worker tile can be replaced immediately (next to the required number of field tiles), then the player can benefit from the worker's ability again. Getting these extra benefits is one of the keys to doing well in the game.

Players have two actions per turn. There are four possible actions. Each action can only be performed once per turn. As described above, the actions include placing field tiles from the stores onto their country board - action (c), placing field tiles from the registry into their store - action (d), and placing a worker tile onto their country board - action (b). Action (c) cannot be performed after action (d). A player may also harvest crops by turning over some unharvested field tiles on their country board - action (a).

Field tiles taken from the registry are replaced immediately with field tiles from the bag. The bag also contains a number of event tiles. The event tiles, when drawn, affect all of the players, not just the player who drew the event tile. When the tenth event tile is drawn, the game ends after two further rounds have been played.

One point is also awarded to the players who have the most of each of the types of crop counters at the end of the game. No points are awarded for ties. Points are tallied using the scoring track on the town board. The player with the most points is the winner.

Nr. 4 in the QWG Master Print Edition series, as Demetra

Based on the widely-known card game Oh Hell!, players use the deck of zero through fifteen in six suits to bid for a particular number of tricks and then subsequently take exactly that many. Each game consists of ten hands, with the hand size shrinking by one each time, until the final one-card hand. Along the way, trump is randomly determined and can be changed during the hand through the use of special cards. There are also special cards that make the trump not count for a trick, others that can be declared any suit and value when played, and others that will give bonuses or penalties for taking the trick on which they're played. A newer version of this game was released by Amigo in 2000.

In Underwater Cities, which takes about 30-45 minutes per player, players represent the most powerful brains in the world, brains nominated due to the overpopulation of Earth to establish the best and most livable underwater areas possible.

The main principle of the game is card placement. Three colored cards are placed along the edge of the main board into 3 x 5 slots, which are also colored. Ideally players can place cards into slots of the same color. Then they can take both actions and advantages: the action depicted in the slot on the main board and also the advantage of the card. Actions and advantages can allow players to intake raw materials; to build and upgrade city domes, tunnels and production buildings such as farms, desalination devices and laboratories in their personal underwater area; to move their marker on the initiative track (which is important for player order in the next turn); to activate the player's "A-cards"; and to collect cards, both special ones and basic ones that allow for better decision possibilities during gameplay.

All of the nearly 220 cards — whether special or basic — are divided into five types according to the way and time of use. Underwater areas are planned to be double-sided, giving players many opportunities to achieve VPs and finally win.

Hellas, 480 BC. It’s the rise of classic Greek civilization. After the overwhelming victory of Xerxes’ army at Thermopylae, the Greeks return to their country and continue the hard work at the islands. The building and development of large cities is the next step into a new era.

Found settlements on a Greek island and let them grow into large cities. Build statues in honor of the Gods or finish one of the various temples on the island. All this work needs a lot of marble, which can be found in the many quarries. Houses next to a quarry can mine marble, but some quarries produce more marble than others.

Each round in Hellas players choose an action in the display. When choosing to build a house, palace or square on the island, all others can perform that action, too. Deciding to mine marble (to get more money) will also help other players because they'll earn money too through their houses next to mines. Building pillars in temples or raising a statue are the only type of actions you'll perform by yourself, but at the end of the game all players might score points because of your work.

Strategically build your settlements on the island to gain the most profit from quarries. Timing is crucial: most of your chosen actions can also be immediately performed by all other players. Think ahead to outsmart your opponents and score the most points with your cities.