Pick-up and Deliver

The Cinque Terre are five coastal villages in the Liguria region of Italy known for their beauty, culture, food, and proximity to one another. Produce carts are commonly found in each village marketplace.

In Cinque Terre, a game of strategy, players compete to sell the most valuable produce in the five villages. Players act as farmers and operate a cart in which they will harvest produce and deliver them to the five villages to sell. Additionally, players will compete for Produce Order cards, which reward Lira points for selling desirable produce in specific villages. Players track sold produce in each village using their Fulfillment Cards. The winner is the player who gains the most Lire by selling valuable produce, gaining popularity in the villages, and fulfilling Produce Orders.

Game Set Up and Play

During setup in Cinque Terre, colored dice are randomly pulled from a cloth bag and rolled to establish the prices each village will pay for select produce. Each player also begins play with a private order only she can fulfill. Five public orders are turned up that all players can work on, though only the first player to fulfill each public order will score points for it. The Most Popular Vendor cards (1 for each village) are placed face up along one side of the board. The first player to fill an entire row with produce cubes for a particular village earns the Most Popular Vendor card for that village, which provides bonus points. Four Produce cards are turned face up and each player receives 4 to begin with along with a Fulfillment board and Produce Truck in their color.

On your turn, you can perform 3 actions in any order or combination you choose:

Take a Produce Card - either a faceup card or one from the deck.
Move your Produce Cart up four spaces clockwise around the board.
Harvest produce from the location your cart is currently at. Each produce cube you wish to harvest requires a matching card. Two identical cards can be used in place of any one other card. Your cart can hold up to 4 produce cubes at a time.
Deliver produce to a village. Unload the produce cubes you wish to deliver and place them in the appropriate spaces for that village on your fulfillment card.

At the end of your turn, if you complete a public order or achieve Most Popular Vendor, take the appropriate card, scoring the points indicated. You can only complete one public order per turn. When you complete a public order, you must draw a new card from the Order Deck. If you would like to keep that card as a private order, add it to your hand and draw another and place it face up to replace the public order just completed. If you do not wish to keep the card you drew as a private order, place it face up instead. Any private orders not fultilled by game end count as negative points against you.

Players take turns taking their 3 actions until one player has completed 5 public orders (Most Popular Vendor Cards also count as public orders for determining game end), then everyone gets one more turn, including the player who caused the game to end.

Alcatraz: The Scapegoat is a game about conflicted loyalties. On one hand, the players work together to bust out of the famous prison; on the other hand they all know that one of them will be left behind as the scapegoat.

Alcatraz is a peculiar game because while it is cooperative in some aspects, with players needing to work together to complete tasks, the game has loads of negative interaction as one player will always be the scapegoat. You don't want to be that guy. You don't "go all in," you don't always keep your promises, and you don't do "what's best for the group." Instead, you do everything you can to become indispensable, and "everything" is literal here – even if it means stealing from, betraying, and blackmailing other players.

In order to escape from Alcatraz, the players need to complete six parts of a plan. Each part is a "pick-up and deliver" task requiring specific items obtained in different parts of the prison. Once each part of the plan is completed, every player but the scapegoat moves a little closer to escaping, with the scapegoat being voted on each round by all the players – most likely the player who contributed the least to completing that particular task, but you never know. Thus, you could say that Alcatraz is a cooperative game – but with a twist.

The map of the prison constituting the play area is generated randomly each game, providing high replayability. Alcatraz is designed for 3-4 players, and due to its theme and complex gameplay is best suited for mature players.

Serenissima is the new Ystari edition of the 1996 game (Méditerranée in France). The rules have been updated and the game is more fluid.

In Serenissima players represent a merchant family during the Renaissance. Players attempt to balance the need of trading and open commerce versus the cut-throat economic piracy of the day. Players create a fleet of ships to purchase and move various commodities around the Mediterranean while also keeping well manned ships to attack and defend against other player's fleets.

(block of information submitted by user in comments not included in game entry)
Board
The maritime areas are bigger and there are fewer of them. Starting ports are different too: Alexandria is one of them in the new version.Resources and Trade
One of the resources has changed (marble replaces gems) and the ports produce different resources compared to the 1996 version. In the 1996 version, when buying goods from a port owned by another player, you had to bargain. It could be hard. Now, you just pay them 1 ducat, instead of paying the bank.
Wine is now special: one port with wine in its warehouse is worth more VP at the end of the game.

Game Flow (big point)
In the 1996 version, all the players used to bid for turn order. Then, they all played the phases according to this order: they loaded, built and bought, then they all moved their galleys, they fought and finally they took over free ports and made money.
There's no bidding anymore. Now, the galleys you build are numbered, and when it's the turn of one specific galley, its owner can perform their actions (load, move and fight, or build), before the next galley is the active one. If your galleys have successive numbers, you can play several times.
The little flags that used to be awkwardly fixed on the galleys are now useless, and the men have to be in the player's colour (instead of being a nice bunch of nice Sailor Smurfs).
This is a major difference, the game is radically altered.

Counts and Victory Points
There are several counts in the game, and not only one at the end of the game. What's more: another kind of count can bring players money if they have wine in their warehouse. All of that depends on the drawn cards at the end of a galleys' turn. The pace of the game may be altered by those cards, too.
There is no card in the 1996 version.
In this old version, the only way to have your port well valued at the end of the game was to have its warehouses full. It's now different too: a port with one good is better than one with none, but worse than one with two, etc.

Other Changes
There's a building more: basilic. It brings more VP.
Galleys are easier to build but the price is not the same.
Combat rules are very different, the fort has a different power. Dice are different too.
Port limits to recruit sailors are different.
2 and 3 players rules are different.
...and this list is all but exhaustive.

Keyflower is a game for two to six players played over four rounds. Each round represents a season: spring, summer, autumn, and finally winter. Each player starts the game with a "home" tile and an initial team of eight workers, each of which is colored red, yellow, or blue. Workers of matching colors are used by the players to bid for tiles to add to their villages. Matching workers may alternatively be used to generate resources, skills and additional workers, not only from the player's own tiles, but also from the tiles in the other players' villages and from the new tiles being auctioned.

In spring, summer and autumn, more workers will arrive on board the Keyflower and her sister boats, with some of these workers possessing skills in the working of the key resources of iron, stone and wood. In each of these seasons, village tiles are set out at random for auction. In the winter no new workers arrive and the players select the village tiles for auction from those they received at the beginning of the game. Each winter village tile offers VPs for certain combinations of resources, skills and workers. The player whose village and workers generate the most VPs wins the game.

Keyflower presents players with many different challenges and each game will be different due to the mix of village tiles that appear in that particular game. Throughout the game, players will need to be alert to the opportunities to best utilize their various resources, transport and upgrade capability, skills and workers.

Keyflower, a joint design between Richard Breese and Sebastian Bleasdale, is the seventh game in the "Key" series from R&D Games set in the medieval "Key" land.

Merchant of Venus uses many elements which come together to form a very interesting game. Players take on the roles of space traders who move their ships through interconnected systems discovering new alien worlds to trade with. As players start to make money delivering commodities in a unique supply-and-demand system, their earnings can be used to purchase better ships and equipment (shields, lasers, engines, etc...) and construct their own spaceports (which speed up trading) and factories (which create better commodities). Variations included in the rulebook allow for interplayer combat. The player who first acquires enough total value ($1000, $2000, $3000, $4000) in cash and port/factory deeds takes the day.

For the 2012 edition of Merchant of Venus from Fantasy Flight Games, the company promises that this revision "remains true to its magnificently campy core while updating the map and game components and expanding game play in surprising ways that will cause even the most hardcore fan to celebrate." That said, the player count has been lowered from six (in the Avalon Hill edition) to four, with the four races in the game being Human, Whynom, Qossuth, and Eeepeeep.