For ages the vile Doom Knights have sought to gather the remaining Thunderstones to fulfill a prophecy of corruption over the lands. Now the first Thunderstone has been discovered in the Dungeons of Grimhold and the Doom Knights have sent their minions to claim the relic. The Villagers of Barrowsdale gather brave souls to face the dungeon and keep the Thunderstone out of the hands of the Doom Knights.

Thunderstone is a fantasy deck-building game much in the style of Dominion. Before the game starts a selection of Village and Hero cards will be randomnly chosen that players may add to their specific decks. Like Dominion, every player starts with a basic deck of weaker cards that they can use to purchase other more powerful cards. In Thunderstone these cards may be different Heroes such as mages, archers, thieves, or warriors or they may be supplies the heroes need like weapons, rations, or light to reach further into the dungeon.

A dungeon deck is also created by combining several different groups of monsters. Certain groups of monsters may be more or less susceptible to different Hero types, so players will have to take this into account when they choose what to buy.

Rather than buying puny Victory Points, players will use their deck to defeat monsters in the dungeon. From the monster deck a row of cards is laid out. Players may on their turn choose to attack a monster in the deck rather than visit town and buy cards. If they do this they play cards from their hand and resolve their abilities in order to boost strength and have enough light to reach a specific monster. Some monsters also have special abilities which may hinder the player. If they have enough strength they defeat the monster and place that card in their deck. This card is worth victory points and often can be used as money to purchase other cards. In addition to this, players are awarded experience points for defeating monsters which can be used to upgrade their heroes into more powerful versions. The game is played until the Thunderstone is revealed from the dungeon and a player is able to claim it. The player with the most victory points in their deck is the winner.

The basic Thunderstone framework was updated in the implementation of Thunderstone: Advance.

Integrates with


Thunderstone Advance: Towers of Ruin
Thunderstone: Dragonspire
Thunderstone: Starter Set

The gameboard of Finca shows the mediterranean island of Mallorca. Players try to crop and deliver the fruits of Mallorca (such as oranges, lemons, almonds, grapes etc.) by means of moving workers on a traditional windmill. Object of the game is to distribute your crop as effectively as possible in order to deliver faster than your opponents.

From the Box: Mallorca, Island of the Wind. A place of golden beaches and a light-blue sea. The almond harvest is at hand, in addition, juicy oranges, lemons, and figs are ready to be picked and taken to the market. Olive trees bewitch the country with their curled branches and sumptuous vineyards invite passers-by to walk among their warm earth. In the midst of this landscape, your centuries-old natural stone farmhouse provides a home and supports your large windmill: your FINCA.
Listen to the wind, which propels your windmill! Then take in the course of the yearly harvest the sweetest and most valuable fruits from the land. Load them on your old donkey cart and travel around the island, selling them everywhere. If you manage this quickly, you will soon be the richest farmer on the island.

Recommendations:

2011 Hungarian Boardgame Prize Winner
2011 Ludoteca Ideale (Italy)
Nominee "Spiel des Jahres 2009"
4th place "Deutscher Spielepreis 2009"
Nominee "Graf Ludo 2009"
Adult Game of the year 2010 (Finland)

You're waking up from the hibernation pods. The hibernation room doesn't look like the one in which you were being sent to sleep. In the nearby pods, other crew members are also slowly emerging from their pods. Your eyes are not yet completely open when alarms start flashing red and a metallic voice shouts from the loudspeakers «Alien presence detected, evacuation in progress, self-destruction in GRRRRZZZRRRRR minutes»...

In Argo, a group of astronauts attempts desperately to survive as they explore a mysterious space station and are besieged by horrible alien monsters. The only hope is to reach the shuttles. However the seats are limited, not everyone will be able to escape. This leads to a frantic every-man-for-itself race, where the others are at best obstacles, and at worst bait to hold the fierce Aliens back while you run...

But be careful: If too many die, the Aliens win! So while this is a competitive game, some level of cooperation will be required, lest everyone lose to the Aliens.

Online Play

Yucata (turn-based)

If you didn't know who designed Draco but were familiar with the works of designer Leo Colovini, you'd likely be able to recognize his style when hearing a description of the game.

Ten dragons start the game on the first square of a movement track, with each space on the track bearing a number from -2 to 8. Four blue and three green scoring spaces are scattered on the track, and four summit spaces are found at the end of the track. Each player is dealt a hand of six cards, with cards coming in ten colors to match those of the dragons; each player also starts with a uniquely-colored card face-up on the table to indicate which dragon the player is riding.

On a turn, a player lays down one card from his hand, then advances the appropriately-colored dragon as many spaces as the number shown on the card. If another player has a card of this color in front of her, the player places the card on that player's stack; if not, the player places the card on his own stack, effectively changing steeds if the color differs from what was on top previously. (Exception: If a dragon not being ridden by anyone is in last place, the player may choose to place the card under his stack instead of on top of it, while moving the dragon normally.)

If a dragon moves onto a blue space, then each dragon on a space valued three or less scores that many points for the player riding that dragon, if any. If a dragon moves onto a green space, then each player scores points equal to the value of the space on which his dragon stands. If a player causes no scoring on his turn or plays his last card in hand, he refills his hand to six cards; if he caused a scoring, then he draws no card and plays with a smaller hand next turn.

When a dragon moves onto one of the four summit spaces, all dragons score points (possibly negative) for their riders. Once three dragons have reached the summit, the game ends after a final scoring, and whoever has scored the most points wins.

Simple movement game themed on Mayan graphics. Players have 7 cards (numbered 1-5 and 2 actions) and leapfrog their stone down the track. There are initial stones laid on the track and you collect them as you pass. According to their color, you throw stones away at the end, most stones left wins. The game has different variants of the initial layout.

Online Play


Yucata (turn-based)

The residents of Huia Street are clearing their closets, looking for unwanted household items for the big community garage sale. A pile is building up on the empty section but there are troublemakers lurking, causing rather unneighborly collapses. And why does little Susie have a blowtorch? Geez, you just want to get rid of your junk!

In Flaming Pyramids, players are building one pyramid together using square tiles, but each player is trying to be the first to get rid of their own tiles.

There are 40 regular tiles with a unique combination of color, number, and material. Except toward the end of the game, players have a hand of five tiles from which to choose, but they are constrained by the building regulations and the luck of the draw. There are also four tiles that can cause fires and one extra-heavy "wild" tile: these can be harder to place without causing extensive damage the later they emerge. If your placed tile causes mayhem (a collapse, fire, or explosion), the damaged tiles go back in your supply.

Flaming Pyramids can be played as a friendly, casual game, an easy starter or filler, or as no-holds-barred multi-round competition.

The first edition (with straw, wood and rocks instead of household items) is available to play for free on the Board Game Arena platform: https://boardgamearena.com/gamepanel?game=flamingpyramids

In Via Magica, a new version of Rise of Augustus, you vie with your fellow players to complete "objective" cards for special powers and ultimately for victory points. Each card has 2-6 symbols which you must populate with tokens in order to complete the card. These symbols are drawn one at a time from a bag, with all players gaining the benefit equally, but interestingly, the bag contains more of some symbols than others.

So the pivotal skill you'll deploy is in making your choice of which three objectives you'll start the game with (you're dealt six) — balancing potential difficulty of completion against value of the reward — and then which of five available objectives you'll add to your plate each time you complete one of your three. The game ends when someone completes seven objectives.

Players have hands of four cards numbered 1 through 19. Play 1, 2, 3, or 4 cards to place a stone on the gameboard, which consists of 36 numbered squares in a non-obvious order. (The yucata implementation allows for alternate arrangements.) The goal is to claim four squares in a line, horizontally, vertically, or diagonally. But multiple stones can be placed on a square, and a square is only safe if a player has two more stones on it than any other player. If four-in-a-row is not achieved within 20 turns, the game ends in favor of the player with the most points.

Fourmation is a version of the game with a modular board published by SimplyFun.

________________________________________________________________
And here the more simple successor of Just4Fun , with colors instead of numbers :
Just4Fun Colours (published by Kosmos in 2010).

Players play cards to occupy coloured fields on a map. A player wins by owning 4 directly adjacent fields horizontally, vertically or diagonally. If no player wins after 20 rounds, the player who owns the largest contiguous area (number of horizontally and vertically related fields) is declared the winner.

The game was also released as a 2-player "Mitbringspiel" in a smaller package (smaller board, smaller cards), with play pieces in same size , but in black and white only :
Just4Fun Colours - 2 Players only.

_______________________________________________________
And here the predecessor from 2005, with numbers instead of colors :
Just4Fun.

Breathe deeply… Let the whisper of thought come to your ear… Harmonize your chakras and let go so that the negative energies will disappear. Meditate on your strategy and let your feelings guide you towards victory!

In Chakra, each player has a board that shows the seven chakras they must fill with gems that represent the energy flowing in their body. To score points, a player must harmonize each of their chakras in the best possible way. To do so, they must take the gems and place three of them of the corresponding color in each of the chakras. During a turn, each player (who starts the game with several inspiration tokens) chooses one of the three following actions:


Take up to three gems from one column and place them on top of their individual board — or by spending a token, place them in a more strategic position.
Spend one token to use one of eight available actions; moving gems up or down by the number of chakra spaces indicated on the action is the key to reaching a perfect alignment.
Meditate to reclaim an inspiration token and secretly look at the point value, which is common to all players, that a harmonized chakra (3 same-colored gems) will score.


When a player manages to align five of their chakras, the last turn is played before you perform the final scoring.

—description from the publisher

Welcome to Santiago, the second largest city in Cuba, home of legendary rum and birthplace of the revolution! The chaotic streets hum with the sounds of bustling crowds and busy commerce. Cargo ships constantly arrive and depart from the port. Demand is continuous, if unpredictable, for a supply of local products such as exotic fruits, sugar, rum, tobacco, and cigars.

In Santiago de Cuba, your business card says "broker", but in reality you're a shady wheeler-dealer who arranges deals with the locals and with corruptible officials to move goods and meet the demand of those ever-present cargo ships – and your ability to procure these goods is only as reliable as your "connections".

At the start of the game, nine locals – the Cubans – are randomly arranged on a path around Santiago, with the port being the tenth location on the circuit. Each Cuban has a different ability: e.g., give a player two tobacco, give a player a good of his choice, force opponents to give you something, give money or victory points (VPs), and seize a building or allow a player to use a previously seized building. What are these buildings? At the start of the game, twelve buildings are randomly placed on the game board in four color-coded groups (white, yellow, etc.) of three. As with the Cubans, these buildings give players a special ability when used: convert tobacco to cigars, change VPs to money or vica versa, increase the value of goods delivered to the ship, render a Cuban inactive for the next round, and so on.

Players will deliver goods to seven ships throughout the course of the game. The demand for each ship is determined via a die roll; the active player rolls five dice – one for each type of good – then chooses four of the values rolled to represent demand for goods of the same color as the die.

All players share a car and travel around the island together. On a turn, the active player can move the car to the next location on the path (whether Cuban or port) for free, or pay one peso for each spot moved beyond that. After taking a Cuban action, the player then must move his player piece to a building of the same color as the flower on that Cuban. If he takes an action in a building owned by someone else, that player earns 1 VP. (One Cuban allows a player to use the same building where his piece is currently located.)

If a player moves to port, players take turns delivering all goods of one type to the ship to meet demand, adjusting the demand dice as needed. A player earns 2-4 VP for each good delivered; a player doesn't have to deliver goods. If the ship's demand isn't met after everyone delivers or passes, the VP bounty per good is increased by one and the ship remains in place – unless the value was already at 4 VP, in which case the ship sails. In this case, or when all the demand is met, a new ship comes into port with new demand values.

After seven ships have sailed, the players earn 1 VP for every three goods still on hand, then tally their VPs. The player with the most VPs wins, with ties broken by goods remaining, then money.

Each game poses new tactical challenges for the players, thanks to ever-changing combinations of buildings, Cuban inhabitants and demand for goods.

Haggis is a climbing game in the same family as Zheng Fen and Big Two. It borrows and recombines elements from its parent games - card combinations, bombs, scoring for cards in hand, scoring for cards collected in tricks - and it mixes in equally distributed wild cards and betting that you'll be the first to empty your hand of cards.

Europe, 1347. A disaster is about to strike. The Black Death reaches Europe, and during the next 4-5 years, the population of Europe will be halved.
The players settle in the various regions of Europe, while the plague spreads throughout all of the continent. The players gain help from the various classes of the middle ages: the Peasants provide population growth, the wise Monks keep the rats away, the rich Merchants flee when the plague approaches, the warfare conducted by the Knights spreads the plague to new areas, the Witches control the spread through magic and witchcraft, whereas the Kings avoid the plague by staying in their fortified palaces. But the plague does not make any distinction: when the rats arrive, no one can feel safe.
When the plague withdraws and the game ends, the player with the highest surviving population wins.

Rattus is a medium-strategy game that takes place in the Dark Ages during the black plague. The players try to hold off the disease.
To do this they get help from farmers, magicians, knights, nobles, ... But nothing helps as long as the rats keep coming.

Arkadia is a game about building the city and castle of Arkadia.

Players use builders, cards, workers, and neutral workers to build houses in Arkadia. Houses are built with the seal of one of 4 families; this family gave the building order and will get the building player its seal.

These seals can be changed for victory points. But seals are subject to changing values. The growing castle (every time a house is built, players also build on the castle) has the 4 seals on it as well, which decides the value of each seal. The castle is also the game's timer: once the second layer is built, the last round starts. The player with the most gold wins.

Released: Essen 2006.

Online Play

Yucata (turn-based)

In Masons, players represent architects, who together establish cities on the landscape of the game board. When a city is completed, all players score points for "guild cards" they play, with the right timing in playing the right card making all the difference.

Each turn, a player first establishes a new wall somewhere on the board. Each wall will be enclosed by two towers, and will have one house placed on each side of it. It's possible for a wall to need only one, or zero, new towers by putting it next to existing towers. It's possible for only one house to be placed, if the wall is placed along the outside of the game board.
After placing the wall, the player rolls three dice to determine the color of one of the towers (the color of a possible second tower may be freely chosen), and that of the two houses (if only one house is placed, then the player may choose which of the dice to pick for the color of the house).
Finally, if the newly placed wall causes a piece of land to be fully enclosed, a new city has been established. If the new city borders one or more existing cities, it may be combined with one of those cities. Two houses of the same color inside the city are upgraded to a palace. A scoring round is now triggered, during which all players get to play one or two "guild cards", and then draw one new card. Each guild card will score a feature of either the just completed city, or outside it. Possible features are the number of houses & palaces or towers of a specified color, the number of fields of the city, the number of houses inside a "district" on the board, the number of palaces inside a city, the different number of colors inside a city, or the total number of completed cities. At the end of a scoring round, whichever player is in last place may discard as many guild cards as desired, and draw new ones to replace them.

The game ends when all pieces of a certain type have been played, and the winner is whoever has the most points.

The players are builders in Ancient Egypt, competing to get the most fame building different monuments requested by the Pharaoh (the Sphinx, the Obelisk, the Temple, and the Pyramid).

The game lasts 5 turns. In each turn, the players place their pawns on the board, along the banks of the Nile, getting the advantages shown on each square. On the right bank there are fixed squares where the players may get workers, improve their mercantile capabilities, influence the floods (and thus the fertility of the fields) and reserve the right to build the monuments (that are built only after all the placements are done). On the left bank the players may take cards that are deployed randomly on the 10 squares at the start of each turn; some of these cards are kept until the end of the game (cultivable fields, stone quarries, deities granting special advantages), while others are discarded after the use and offer multiple immediate advantages.

In Egizia, the twist on the worker placement mechanic is that the players must place their pawns following the course of the Nile, moving northwards (from the top to the bottom of the board, that is seen from the Mediterranean Sea). In this way, each placement not only blocks the opponents from choosing the same square (except monuments, where multiple players are always allowed), but also forces the player to place his remaining pawns only on the squares below the one he just occupied (note that "pawns" are placed, since "workers" are one of the resources of the game, like grain and stones).

When the placement phase is over, the workers of the players must be fed with the grain produced in the fields. The production of each field is based on the floods of the Nile, so some fields may not give grain each turn. If a player has not enough grain for all his workers, he has to buy it with Victory Points (the ratio is better for players with improved mercantile capabilities, recorded on a specific track on the board).

After that, stones are received from the owned quarries and used to build the monuments (if the right to do was reserved earlier) along with the workers.

When the game ends, the points scored during the game (mainly building the monuments) are added to the bonuses obtained fulfilling certain conditions on the Sphinx cards. Whoever has the highest total is the winner.

Online Play


Yucata (turn-based)

As an architect in Welcome To..., you want to build the best new town in the United States of the 1950s by adding resources to a pool, hiring employees, and more.

Welcome To... plays like a roll-and-write dice game in which you mark results on a score-sheet...but without dice. Instead you flip cards from three piles to make three different action sets with both a house number and a corresponding action from which everyone chooses one. You use the number to fill in a house on your street in numerical order. Then you take the action to increase the point value of estates you build or score points at the end for building parks and pools. Players also have the option of taking actions to alter or duplicate their house numbers. And everyone is racing to be the first to complete public goals. There's lots to do and many paths to becoming the best suburban architect in Welcome To...!

Because of the communal actions, game play is simultaneous and thus supports large groups of players. With many varying strategies and completely randomized action sets, no two games will feel the same!

"Illustori" (イラストリー) is a word chain game where players lay down artwork cards in turn and give names to them, such that the start of a card's name overlaps the end of the previous card's name. (In Japanese, they overlap by syllable; in English and other languages, by letter.)

The artwork name that the turn player chooses can be a sentence, a quote, an onomatopeia, or anything. All it needs for chaining is the agreement from the other players.

Every player starts with 5 cards. The rest of the cards are the stack. Gameplay follows a clockwise direction.
The first player draws a card from the stack, place it where everyone can see, and call the first "word". Then the turn moves to the next player.
At every player's turn, they can choose either of the following actions;
1. Place one of their cards and call any chaining "word". The "word" has to be chained to the last letter of the previous "word".
2. Discard one or more cards and draw the same number of cards from the stack.

If the turn player put and call the "word", the rest of the players discuss whether the "words" matches the artwork or not.
When more than half of the players agree, the chaining is succeeded. Otherwise, the card placed in this turn is discarded and the failed player must draw one card from the stack.
Then the turn moves on to the next player.

Once a player has no cards remaining, that will be the last round. If multiple players are able to place all of their cards during the last round, all of them are winners.

-description from designer

Schweinebande (literally "Gang of Pigs") was published in February 2010 by Hans im Glück.

The board depicts a cattle market, on which pigs, goats, donkeys, chickens, and other animals are offered for sale. Each player tries to position his farmers strategically in order to obtain the most favorable prices, or to block his competitors. Once animals are acquired, they must be fed every round. As soon as a player possesses 4 of the same animals, he can sell his herd to gain victory points. Naturally, a set of 4 donkeys is worth more than 4 chickens.

The storyline in Friedemann Friese's Fearsome Floors (aka, Finstere Flure) continues the FFF-saga from Friese's earlier game, with players trying to escape from Fürst Fieso. Story aside, what we have is a wonderful race game in which the players must move through a dungeon as quickly as possible – or at least within 14 turns – before it crumbles over their heads.

Players could reach the exit in only seven turns if everything were peaceful and quiet, but unfortunately the dungeon is also the home of a very hungry monster! Each round, players take turns moving one disk at a time, flipping over the disk after moving it to reveal the movement points available for the next round. They can try to lead the monster, who is always after fresh prey, to opponents' pieces, but they may find themselves eaten instead! Pieces can slide along blood slicks or might be crushed between a boulder and a wall. You can even try to get the monster to teleport to another part of the board, where it will fall upon its next victim!