Open Drafting

In Flowers: A Mandala Game, your goal is to collect flower tiles by achieving majorities through clever card play. Skillfully build mandalas to claim the best tiles, combining and multiplying them to create exquisite flowers of your own!

To set up, layout the game cloth showing three large "mandala" flowers. Shuffle the 36 half-flower tiles in separate decks — 18 each of black and white, with the black flowers being gray, purple, and red on the opposite side and the white ones being green, orange, and yellow — then place one black tile and one white tile face up in each flower. Each player starts with a hand of cards, with the cards coming in six colors that match the flower tile colors.

On a turn, a player lays down one or more cards of the same color onto one of the flowers. (Each player keeps their played cards separate, facing toward themselves.) If that color is already present in the mandala, the player then flips the card(s) face down; if not, the player leaves them face up. If the player laid down one card, they draw two cards from the deck; if they played two or more, they don't draw any cards.

After playing, if you have at least one face-up card on a flower and more cards than any other player, take that flower's "claim" token and place it on your cards. Then, if that flower now has all six colors face up around it, destroy the mandala. Whoever has the claim token on their cards places one of the flower tiles from this mandala in front of themselves; if they already have a flower tile of the same color, they flip this "complete" flower face down. Whoever has the secondmost cards on this mandala takes the second flower tile. Anyone who took a flower tile discards all of their played cards on this mandala; everyone else returns their played cards to their hand. Draw a black tile and white tile from the stack to create a new mandala.

Continue play until someone completes their third flower, then everyone scores their points. Each separate flower half is worth as many points as the number of flowers on it. For each complete flower, if one of the tiles is 3x, triple the number of flowers on the other tile; if both tiles have flowers, double the number of flowers on the tile with fewer flowers. Whoever has the most points wins.

Twenty years after his expedition around the world, Charles Darwin is writing On the Origin of Species. He wants to gather new information about animal life, particularly about continents he hardly explored. Who other than young naturalists, eager for discovery, could help the renowned scholar finish writing his most famous work?

In In the Footsteps of Darwin, players are junior naturalists who have just arrived aboard the Beagle to help Charles Darwin finish his book On the Origin of Species. During this journey, you will study animals, carry out cartographic surveys, publish your findings, and develop theories. Starting with the naturalist controlling the Darwin token, naturalists take turns in clockwise order, performing these two steps in order:

Study an animal or take inspiration from a character: Choose one of the three tiles facing the Beagle and place it onto your naturalist's notebook. It may be either an animal to study or a character from the Beagle's previous journey who will inspire you. Gain the bonuses depicted or any additional scoring bonuses triggered by the tile's placement.

Voyage of the Beagle: After placing a tile on your notebook, move the Beagle as many spaces forward as the distance between the Beagle and the tile you just selected (1-3 spaces), then draw a new tile to replace the empty space on the journey board.

Your goal is to score more points than your opponents to determine who contributed the most to On the Origin of Species.

—description from publisher

TRICKTAKERs is a...trick-taking game featuring role selection. After being dealt a hand of cards, the players choose from various characters (such as King or Gambler) that change how they will participate in the game.

The basic game consists of three rounds of trick-taking, and the winner will be the person that wins the most tricks in two of the three rounds. Alternatively, if no one achieves that condition, if a player has taken no tricks in all three rounds, they will be the winner.

Not mentioned above, the game also has a higher priority victory condition and a lower one. Each character in the game grants the player holding it a special "immediate victory" condition that could be achieved. The characters also give the players ways to earn points, and this is the lowest tier of victory determination: who has the most points.

To illustrate some of the character abilities, the Gambler can discard cards from the initial hand to draw replacements, and will bid for how many tricks they take, possibly granting them extra points if successful. The Resistance has the potential to cause a "revolution" which reverses the strength of the ranks, and earns more points if they can win tricks with what would normally be the "high" cards.

Welcome to the city of light! Find yourself transported to the glamorous Paris of the roaring twenties. Jump aboard an open platform bus, cruise down Champs-Elysées Avenue, admire the Eiffel Tower, and conclude your day by enjoying a picturesque sunset from a charming terrace in Montmartre — all without leaving your table.

Ticket To Ride: Paris, part of the "Cities" line of Ticket to Ride games, has gameplay similar to the original game, but with a playing time of only fifteen minutes. On a turn, you either collect transportation cards, spend these cards to claim a route on the game board, or draw tickets that show two locations you need to connect with routes.

In Paris, when you claim a blue, white, or red route, you keep a transportation card of this color in front of you instead of discarding all of the cards. When you collect a card of each color, you've made a French flag, then you discard these cards and score bonus points. Vive la France!

When a player has two or fewer buses left to place on routes, each player takes one final turn, then they score points for the tickets they've completed and lose points for those unfulfilled.

Not long from now, the world as we know it is an overgrown memory — and though the world has changed, we've changed with it, using anything we can find to build a new way of living.

Life in Reterra is a (re)building game, and it's up to each player to build a community of their own. To set up, choose one of three ready-to-play themed building sets, or put together a set of your own. Each set consists of five building cards, with associated building tiles for each card.

Each player starts with one square land tile in play. Each land tile is divided into a 2x2 grid, with one of five types of terrain in each grid space; a space might also hold a gear icon or one of four types of relics. Players also have three land tiles in hand, and five land tiles are displayed face up.

On a turn, choose a land tile from your hand or the display, then add it to your community, which can be at most four tiles on each side. When the tile has a gear, you can either place an inhabitant from the reserve on this gear or place a building tile in your community...but each part of the building must be supported by a gear and all of these gears must be on the same type of terrain.

After you have a building in play, you gain the power of the building card and can use it once on each of your subsequent turns. Maybe you can place relic tokens for additional points, place additional inhabitants, junk an opponent's relics, or score for building large sections of a terrain or having more of a building than anyone else.

Once everyone has sixteen tiles in their community, players score for what they've built, earning points for blocks of terrain of at least seven spaces, surrounded energy sources (which are a special type of tile), inhabitants, relics, and buildings.