City Building

Early Italy, 600 BCE – Five city states are vying each other for superiority in the region: Roma with their Roman inhabitants, Velletri with the Volscian inhabitants, Reate with their Sabin inhabitants, Veii with their Etruscian inhabitants, and Alba Longa with their Latin inhabitans. Each player controls a city state and tries to be the first to have 16+ population and 10 monuments. This city state is destined to be a glorious power of the Ancient World!

A game of Alba Longa offers a fine combination of dice selection, city management, and worker assignment (inside your own city), and is spiced up with the ingredient of city combat (soldiers and heroes)! Inside the box are three big variants – Assisi, A Job Well Done, and Spoils of War – which can be added and combined at your will and which add even more longevity to this game!

In prototype form, under the name The Great Pyramid, this design was one of four winners of the 2009 Concours International de Créateurs de Jeux de Société, a design competition run by Centre National du Jeu in France. Here's what the jury said about the game: The Great Pyramid is rich with an astonishing number of possible strategies but manages to convey the clarity of the whole mechanism. The choices offered to the players are numerous and present a contentious interaction too rare in this kind of game.

Murano the game is set in Murano the place, with Murano being a small group of seven islands near Venice that's well-known by tourists for its glassmaking. As in Venice, the islands of Murano are separated by canals, so gondolas and transportation are at the heart of this game.

The game board depicts the islands of Murano, with the islands being divided up into building sites and walkways. Surrounding the islands is a series of action spaces, with gondolas being present in some number of them at the start of play. On a turn, you move one of the gondolas in the direction of play to an empty space, then take the action shown there. You can't pass another gondola while moving or land in an occupied space, but for a coin you can move a gondola that's in front of the gondola you want to move, and you can pay to move multiple gondolas, if needed.

Some actions place shops on the islands, with shops coming in different types. You mark a shop to show ownership, and when tourists show up later, they will shop at various stores depending on their proximity and the goods they offer. You also need to take actions to move your personal gondolas to islands so that you can take actions there.

Why are you doing all of this activity? To score victory point cards in hand, and actions on the board will let you gain additional VP cards to give you direction to your actions or let you profit from what you've already done.

You can also use some of the buildings to create glassworks, and those glassworks come into play on the VP cards, through tourist sales, and via an action space shown at the bottom of the game board image that lets you sell different types of glass for money.

Welcome to the city of Machi Koro. You've just been elected Mayor. Congrats! Unfortunately the citizens have some pretty big demands: jobs, a theme park, a couple of cheese factories and maybe even a radio tower. A tough proposition since the city currently consists of a wheat field, a bakery and a single die.

Armed only with your trusty die and a dream, you must grow Machi Koro into the largest city in the region. You will need to collect income from developments, build public works, and steal from your neighbors' coffers. Just make sure they aren't doing the same to you!

Machi Koro is a fast-paced game for 2-4 players. Each player wants to develop the city on his own terms in order to complete all of the landmarks under construction faster than his rivals. On his turn, each player rolls one or two dice. If the sum of the dice rolled matches the number of a building that a player owns, he gets the effect of that building; in some cases opponents will also benefit from your die (just as you can benefit from theirs). Then, with money in hand a player can build a landmark or a new building, ideally adding to the wealth of his city on future turns. The first player to construct all of his landmarks first wins!

Cyclades: Titans, the second expansion for Cyclades, includes a new game board with large islands on which ground attacks can be carried out as well as the Titans of Greek legend, who can conduct attacks without the help of Ares.

Madeira is an island officially discovered early in the 15th century by Portuguese seafarers. Madeira, the Portuguese word for wood, refers to the dense forest that covered its wild, fertile landscape. This, and its strategic position far into the Atlantic Ocean made the island one of the most significant Portuguese discoveries. Madeira served as a “laboratory” for what would become the Portuguese Empire.

Wheat plantations were the first means for survival on the island. After that, when D. Henrique decided to increase the economy of the Empire, sugar became the core business of Madeira. Once sugar started coming from other places in the world, such as Africa and Brazil, profits from sugar were no longer enough, and production of the very famous Madeira wine became the most important economic product of the island.

Players try to adapt themselves to these constraints, working to find better fields for farming the right goods and for obtaining precious wood, essential for erecting new structures in the cities and for building ships. In turn, the ships are crucial for trading in foreign markets, as well as for taking part in new expeditions to discover other countries.
Madeira has been established just as it was in the original administrative division of the island under 3 captaincies (Funchal, Machico, and Porto Santo), where the ultimate goal is to develop the Island, gaining the most prestige under and for the Portuguese Crown.

The Crown of Portugal has a series of requests regarding expeditions, urbanization, opening trade routes, increasing wealth, and controlling the guilds on the islands. Three times during the game, the players gain prestige for fulfilling certain requests by the Crown. At two other times, the Crown requests that the islands change the focus of their agriculture due to the changes in the world.

Players must carefully choose the correct timing to show their achievements. Too early and you don’t gain as much prestige, too late and you risk someone else stealing the best opportunities. Will you have what it takes to excel in all of these endeavors?
Beware, wheat may become scarce, money is never enough, the population is hungry, and the shadow of piracy looms large….