The fifth major expansion to Carcassonne, Abbey & Mayor adds 3 new wooden piece types, 6 abbey tiles, and 12 landscape tiles. The Abbey tiles act as Cloisters but do not have to match adjacent tiles and they complete adjacent features when placed. Mayors can be placed only in cities, with their strength determined by the number of pennants in the city. Barns allow players to score fields during the game rather than just at the end. Wagons are placed on roads, cities, or cloisters, and can move to an adjacent open feature when their current feature is completed.
In Monster Lab you play as a Mad Scientist trying to defeat your fellow Scientists by collecting Spare Parts to Build Terrifying (Or Terrible) Monsters, equip them with Items like the Pig ‘O Nine Tails and send them off to fight your Opponents Monsters in order to collect enough Specimens to win the game.
Monster Lab is a funny card game based around the horror trope that plays quickly, with mad cap back and forth action as players build ridiculous (or incredible) sounding Monsters by combining parts as they try to win, Send their Monsters out to fight where the better a Monster is built, the more dice they can roll in the fight, or play Actions to mess up their rivals and steal their points such as Traps, Sabotage and Grave Robbing cards, while trying to avoid Monster Hunters that appear randomly in the deck trying to destroy their Lab.
It plays like a mix of Munchkin, Exploding Kittens and Epic Spell Wars, whilst creating a mechanic and play style all its own.
Tides of Madness is a sequel to Tides of Time and features gameplay similar to that design. Tides of Time is a drafting game for two players. Each game consists of three rounds in which players draft cards from their hands to build their kingdom. Each card is one of five suits and also has a scoring objective.
After all cards have been drafted for the round, players total their points based on the suits of cards they collected and the scoring objectives on each card, then they record their score. Each round, the players each select one card to leave in their kingdom as a “relic of the past” to help them in later rounds. After three rounds, the player with the the most prosperous kingdom wins.
Tides of Madness adds a new twist to the above game: madness. Some cards, while powerful, harm your psyche, so you must keep an eye on your madness level or else risk losing the game early as your mind is lost to the power of the ancients. More specifically, eight of the eighteen cards in the game feature a madness icon, and while scoring, you receive a madness token for each such icon in your collection of cards. Whoever has the most madness in a round either scores 4 points or discards 1 madness token — and the latter option is valuable because if you ever have nine or more madness, you lose the game immediately.
