Open Drafting

Welcome, devotees! The celestial gaze of the Great Inky One falls upon you; do you have what it takes to be the most dedicated follower?

Cosmoctopus is an engine-building, tentacle-gathering board game for 1 to 4 devotees. Guide Cosmoctopus through the Inky Realm, a flexible configuration of tiles, to gather resources and obtain powerful cards that represent relics, scripture, hallucinations and constellations. Harness the power of these bizarre objects and experiences, craft potent card combinations and be the first to gain 8 tentacles to win!

Your turns are simple; the game’s excitement and depth lie in working out how best to use an ever-powerful hand of cards. Unlike some other engine-builders, you’ll be straight into the fun, upgrading your engine from turn one. With variable setup, easy ways to alter difficulty and optional solo and co-operative modes, Cosmoctopus offers a versatile tabletop experience, whatever your gaming tastes.

—description from the publisher

From the team that brought you the smash hit Point Salad, Point City is a card-drafting, engine-building game with more than 150 unique building cards, giving you the opportunity to create a completely different city each time you play!

The rules are simple: Take two adjacent cards from the dynamic city grid and add them to your expanding city. Use your resource cards and bonuses to construct building cards that require specific combinations. Build special civic structures to multiply your city's points and be the top urban planner!

Point City takes the same simple concept of drafting cards and building the best combinations, then adds new layers of resource management and engine building to the mix — making the game easy to learn, but challenging for everyone!

—description from designer

Welcome aboard and congrats on the promotion! Your "new" starship is ready to embark on its first big voyage. Just scrape off some of the rust, and she'll do fine. And that crew? Might look a little green around the edges, but they're your crew now. Make us proud.

The stars are calling...and adventure awaits!

As newly promoted Starship Captains, players are in command of their first starship and hungry to prove themselves in a galaxy full of space pirates, grumpy old androids, ancient artifacts, and interplanetary adventures.

In this 1-4 player Eurostyle game, which mixes action selection and engine building, you'll manage a diverse crew of cadets, ensigns, androids, and officers — each with different special roles and capabilities. By earning medals, you can promote and train your crew for even greater effectiveness. Similarly, you can upgrade your ship with powerful engine building technology for maximum synergy.

What will you do with this enhanced crew and ship? Explore an ever-shifting galaxy full of dangerous pirates and interplanetary missions in order to boost your reputation with three distinct galactic factions for bountiful rewards.

Do you have what it takes to deftly command your crew and become the best captain in the cosmos? We'll see!

—description from the publisher

We’ve brought dinosaurs back to life, but who will care for these magnificent and dangerous beasts?

You are paleo-veterinarians, competing to save as many dinos as possible from modern illnesses and injuries. Roll dice, upgrade your hospital, and compete with fellow paleo-veterinarians to treat injured and sick dinosaurs. As long as the dinosaurs don’t wake up during treatment, nothing can go wrong…

In Paleovet, players take turns drafting dinosaur cards from a central river, rolling dice, and spending dice icons for various effects, most notably curing sick and injured dinosaurs. Each dinosaur card lists which icons are needed to cure it, and effect, victory points, its genetic order, and diet.
Dinosaur effects can occur when the dinosaur appears in the center of the table when it is added to your hospital, or while it remains in your hospital. These effects can change gameplay in a variety of ways.

On your turn, you’ll follow a series of steps:

1. Remove a sleep token from each dinosaur in your hospital.
2. If you have fewer than four dinosaur cards in your hospital, select a dinosaur card from the five cards showing in the center of the table. Move it into your hospital.
3. Roll your dice. You begin with three basic dice and can purchase specialty dice later. The dice faces show the three treatments needed to cure dinosaurs, a tranquilizer dart, and a wild icon.
4. You may now spend dice and wild tokens to:
a. Cure dinosaurs by matching the treatment icons on the dice to the treatments listed on the dinosaur card. Each dinosaur requires between 1 and 5 treatments to complete
b. Buy additional dice by spending three matching dice icons
c. Buy a one-use wild token by spending two matching dice icons
d. Buy an upgrade card that provides a permanent beneficial effect by spending two matching icons
e. Spend a tranquilizer dart icon to move an additional dinosaur into your hospital (if you have less than 4 in your hospital already)
5. Any dinosaurs that are not cured and have no sleep tokens on them at the end of your turn wake. When this happens, discard the dinosaur card. If it was a carnivore, you must also discard another dinosaur card in your hospital (if you have any).
6. Any dinosaurs that were cured during your turn are moved into a victory pile. You’ve now scored the points listed on that dinosaur card.

Play continues until one of the card piles in the center of the table is empty. The round is completed, then all players total the points on their cured dinosaurs. The player with the highest score wins.

-description from designer

Set in ancient Rome, Trajan is a development game in which players try to increase their influence and power in various areas of Roman life such as political influence, trading, military dominion and other important parts of Roman culture.

The central mechanism of the game uses a system similar to that in Mancala or pit-and-pebbles games. In Trajan, a player has six possible actions: building, trading, taking tiles from the forum, using the military, influencing the Senate, and placing Trajan tiles on his tableau.

At the start of the game, each player has two differently colored pieces in each of the six sections (bowls) of his tableau. On a turn, the player picks up all the pieces in one bowl and distributes them one-by-one in bowls in a clockwise order. Wherever the final piece is placed, the player takes the action associated with that bowl; in addition, if the colored pieces in that bowl match the colors shown on a Trajan tile next to the bowl (with tiles being placed at the start of the game and through later actions), then the player takes the additional action shown on that tile.

What are you trying to do with these actions? Acquire victory points (VPs) in whatever ways are available to you – and since this is a Feld design, you try to avoid being punished, too. At the Forum you try to anticipate the demands of the public so that you can supply them what they want and not suffer a penalty. In the Senate you acquire influence which translates into votes on VP-related laws, ideally snagging a law that fits your long-term plans. With the military, you take control of regions in Europe, earning more points for those regions far from Rome.

All game components are language neutral, and the playing time is 30 minutes per player.