Professor Evil owns a time machine, and he’s been ripping off all the best historical items from times both past and future. Your team has been charged with confiscating these items and returning them to their proper locations in time, so you now need to infiltrate the mansion and abscond with four items before Prof. Evil can secrete four of them in locations inaccessible to you. Thankfully the old soul is a bit daft and won’t evaporate you should he catch you lurking through the mansion, but simply scoot you out the front door where he’ll forget about you immediately.
On a turn, you first draw and reveal two cards from your tiny deck, then keep one of the cards based on what you think will help you this turn. You then take three actions, such as open a door in the room you’re in, move from a room (or outside) to another room (assuming the door is open), disable a trap, or grab a treasure; using a card isn’t an action unless it says otherwise. You can repeat actions as desired or needed, but you can’t enter a room with Prof. Evil and you can’t exit the house on your own (in order to run across the grounds to another window) once you enter. You’re now committed to grabbing those treasures!
After you finish your turn, Prof. Evil now moves, but again he’s not all there, so he doesn’t necessarily move in a logical manner. To move him, you roll three dice: One die advances the secondary Prof. Evil figure on the clock on the board either five or ten minutes; the other two determine where Prof. Evil moves and how far. What’s more, as he walks through rooms, he closes the doors through which he travels and reactivates any inactive traps he encounters. If you roll a blue and a 1, for example, he moves through the blue doorway into the next adjacent room; a red and a 3 will move him through three rooms, walking through the red doorway each time. A color and a particular signal will teleport him immediately to the treasure bearing the same colored marker.
Let’s look at these treasures in more detail: Each treasure shows a time value and one or more traps on it. Three treasures are placed on the board, then a blue, red and green token are placed on the treasures, with a matching blue, red and green token placed on the game board clock on the time matching what’s on the treasure. The Magna Carta might say 45 minutes, for example, and after placing a blue token on the Magna Carta, you place a blue token on the clock 45 minutes away from where the Prof. Evil figure is located. If Prof. Evil moves onto this token on the clock, then that treasure is lost — and if you lose four treasures, then you’ve lost the game. Remove it from play and replace it with a new treasure, marking the proper time on the clock.
Note that you can’t just grab a treasure, however. Professor Evil can’t be in the same room (of course), but you also must ensure that all the traps shown on the treasure are currently deactivated. The game board starts with eight traps on it — half active, half not — and you’ll play tug-of-war with Professor Evil over keeping them in this status. Collect a treasure, and a new one will be added to the game board; collect four treasures before Prof. Evil does, and you all win Professor Evil and The Citadel of Time.
Cytosis: A Cell Building Game is a worker placement game that takes place inside a human cell. Players start out with a number of workers and on a player’s turn, they will place one of their workers in any available location within that cell. Some of the locations provide players with resources (e.g., mRNA, ATP); some with actions (e.g., convert resources, collect cards). Resources are used to build enzymes, hormones and/or receptors, which score Health Points. The player with the most Health Points at the end of the game wins!
In Viticulture, the players find themselves in the roles of people in rustic, pre-modern Tuscany who have inherited meager vineyards. They have a few plots of land, an old crushpad, a tiny cellar, and three workers. They each have a dream of being the first to call their winery a true success.
The players are in the position of determining how they want to allocate their workers throughout the year. Every season is different on a vineyard, so the workers have different tasks they can take care of in the summer and winter. There’s competition over those tasks, and often the first worker to get to the job has an advantage over subsequent workers.
Fortunately for the players, people love to visit wineries, and it just so happens that many of those visitors are willing to help out around the vineyard when they visit as long as you assign a worker to take care of them. Their visits (in the form of cards) are brief but can be very helpful.
Using those workers and visitors, players can expand their vineyards by building structures, planting vines (vine cards), and filling wine orders (wine order cards). Players work towards the goal of running the most successful winery in Tuscany.
Viticulture – Essential Edition comes with components for Viticulture, but adds some of the expansions from Tuscany, including 36 Mama & Papa cards, Field cards (previously known as “Properties”), expanded/revised Visitors, and 24 Automa cards (solo variant), along with a couple of minor rule changes.
Card Totals
The Viticulture Essential Edition contains 154 cards at the 44 x 67 mm size and 88 cards at the 63 x 88 mm size.
To play the match-and-memory game Memoarrr!, 2 to 4 players need the power of recollection and the luck of pirates. Only then can they make their escape from the island of Captain Goldfish, their pockets lined with rubies, before the lava swallows them up.
In turn order, players reveal locations that are connected via the animal or the landscape to the most recently revealed location. If someone reveals a location without any connection, that player is out of the round. The last remaining pirate grabs one of the valuable treasures. Then, all revealed locations are turned face down before the search can start afresh.
As the cards do not change position during a game, players collect more and more information each round, enabling them to reveal new connections — but sometimes a little bit of luck is all it takes to get that treasure.
For advanced players, each animal comes with an additional special action that is triggered when a connected location is revealed — and they make Memoarrr! even more exciting and fun to play.
Heart of Crown: Northern Enchantress is the second expansion for Heart of Crown. It requires either the base game or the Fairy Garden expansion to play and may be integrated with other Heart of Crown expansions.
The set contains 72 cards:
1 new Princess Card: Anastasia, Witch of the Northern Limits
13 new types of Common Card (5 of each type)
1 Revised Princess Card from the Far East Territory expansion (Ouka, Far East Mathematician Princess)
1 Revised Common Card from the Far East Territory expansion, Samurai (5 copies)
The prosperous Kingdom of Green Gully, ruled for centuries by the Forever King, has issued a decree to its citizens to colonize the vast lands beyond its borders. In an effort to start a new village, the Forever King has selected six citizens for the task, each of whom has a unique set of skills they use to build their charter.
In Charterstone, a competitive legacy game, you construct buildings and populate a shared village. Building stickers are permanently added to the game board and become action spaces for any player to use. Thus, you start off with simple choices and few workers, but soon you have a bustling village with dozens of possible actions.
Your journey through Charterstone’s many secrets will last twelve games, but it doesn’t end there. Your completed village will be a one-of-a-kind worker-placement game with plenty of variability.
Destination X is a different kind of game experience: One player takes the moderator role as a spy on the run, while the remaining players are detectives who must cooperate and use their deductive skills and geographical knowledge to track down the spy and identify their secret destination.
At the beginning of each round, six destination cards are placed face up on the table. The spy secretly chooses one of the destinations, and flips to the chosen country’s page in the handbook. Each detective is given three informant cards, and in turn each detective must play an informant to get information about the spy’s secret destination. The spy must find the relevant information in the handbook and answer truthfully. The informants may provide information on various aspects such as population, industry, religion, history, economy, and so on. After a detective has played an informant, the detective must also eliminate one of the destinations on the table.
At any time, the detectives can decide to guess on the spy’s destination. If they guess correctly, the detectives win the round; otherwise the spy wins. The spy also wins if the detectives run out of informant cards, so the detectives must manage their resources well and not spend too much time or else the spy will manage to get away. The first side to win three rounds wins the game.
No prior geographic knowledge is needed to play. Since Destination X is a team-based game, it can be played in groups of any number of players.
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 city-scape.
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 48 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.
Burgle Bros. is a cooperative game for 1-4 players. Players are unique members of a crew trying to pull off a robbery of a highly secure building — without getting caught. The building has three floors (4×4 tiles), each with its own safe to crack. Players start on the first floor and have to escape to their helicopter waiting on the roof.
Players each have three stealth tokens. Whenever they are on the same tile with a guard, they lose one. If any player is caught without a stealth token, the game is over. If players can open all three safes, and escape through the stairs to the roof they win.
Mankind has long been confined to travel by land and sea, but a new technology has emerged from the greatest minds in Eastern Europa: airships. These steam-driven behemoths sail freely across the sky, aiding their empire’s expansion through innovation and confrontation. As the years pass, the world has come to understand that no single faction will rise above the rest for any span of time. In the hope of decreasing the conflict and increasing the peace, leaders of Europa begin to gather each year to declare a new way for the factions to resolve their differences.
Scythe: The Wind Gambit, an expansion for Scythe, adds two new modules that can be played together or separately at any player count and with either the base game on its own or with other Scythe expansions:
• Airships: (1 miniature per faction; 16 tiles) An airship is a new type of unit that is distinctly different from characters, mechs, and workers. Unlike those units, airships never control territories. Airships are moved via a Move action, and rivers and lakes do not constrain their movement. Each airship has two randomly combined abilities (1 aggressive and 1 passive ability; same combo for all players).
• Resolutions: (8 tiles) The resolution module changes the way a game of Scythe ends. If you play with this module, ignore the standard end-game trigger (when a player places their sixth star, everything stops and the game ends). Instead, the resolution tile for the current game will determine when and how the game ends.
