Post-Napoleonic

Dearest Player, you have been invited, at the behest of your titled host, to make your debut during the 1851 social season of Victorian London.

Apistocracy is a 2-4 player game featuring worker placement, as well as a trick-taking game based on Whist. Each player has a season host with a unique ability. The hosts provide influence to open the first doors of the season, but players must make connections, thus building influence, to gain invitations to the most coveted events. Over the course of four weeks, players climb to the top of the social beehive to become Queen Victoria's favorite, commission painting sets in the gallery to become the artist's muse, make valuable connections in the ballroom to become the favored guest, learn secrets in the tea room, and curate their hand for the final whist game in the parlor. The player with the most Victoria points at the end of the season is named the "season's favorite" and wins.

The game offers players nuanced action selection, with opportunities for strategic decision making. Do you spend your resources to move up the beehive? Do you dance in the ballroom to gain a valuable card for your player mat? Do you commission your portrait and complete your painting set? Regardless of your choice, the main goal is to have fun! If you happen to create a buzz and become the season's favorite in the process, then bravo! If you do not achieve the coveted title, you need not give up — there's always next season!

The Industrial Age is starting to boom. You are in need of more workers for your factories, and you also need more workers to build railroad tracks to expand your railway network. This, in turn, will enable you to deliver the goods from your factories to cities with high demand — but be sure to earmark goods for fulfilling profitable public contracts because when the connection to Trieste is made, your net worth is all that matters.

Imperial Steam is a highly strategic yet accessible economic and logistics game that sees you making difficult decisions as you manage your business's operations while navigating fierce competition to ensure your victory!

—description from the publisher

Furnace is an engine-building Eurogame in which players take on the roles of 19th-century capitalists building their industrial corporations and aspiring to make as much money as they can by purchasing companies, extracting resources, and processing them in the best combinations possible.

Each player starts the game with a random start-up card, the resources depicted at the top of that card, and four colored discs valued 1-4.

The game is played over four rounds, and each round consists of two phases: Auction and Production. During the auction, 6-8 company cards are laid out with their basic sides face up. Players take turns placing one of their discs on one of these cards, but you cannot place a disc on a card if a disc of the same value or color is already present. Thus, you'll place discs on four cards.

Once all the discs are placed, the cards are resolved from left to right. Whoever placed the highest-valued disc will claim this card, but first anyone with a lower-valued disc on this card will gain compensation, either the resources depicted multiplied by the value of their disc or a processing ability (exchange X for Y) up to as many times as the value of their disc.

Once all the cards have been claimed or discarded, players enter the production phase, using their cards in the order of their choice. Each company card has one action — either production or processing — on its basic side and two actions on its upgraded side. During the production phase, you can use each of your cards once to gain resources, process those resources into other resources or money, and upgrade your cards.

At the end of four rounds, whoever has the most money wins.

Furnace also includes capitalist cards that contain unique effects, and if you want, you can choose to deal one out to each player at the start of the game. For an additional challenge, you can require players to create a "production chain", with each newly acquired company card being placed somewhere in that chain and locked in position for the remainder of the game.

In Pax Pamir, players assume the role of nineteenth century Afghan leaders attempting to forge a new state after the collapse of the Durrani Empire. Western histories often call this period "The Great Game" because of the role played by the Europeans who attempted to use central Asia as a theater for their own rivalries. In this game, those empires are viewed strictly from the perspective of the Afghans who sought to manipulate the interloping ferengi (foreigners) for their own purposes.

In terms of game play, Pax Pamir is a pretty straightforward tableau builder. Players spend most of their turns purchasing cards from a central market, then playing those cards in front of them in a single row called a court. Playing cards adds units to the game's map and grants access to additional actions that can be taken to disrupt other players and influence the course of the game. That last point is worth emphasizing. Though everyone is building their own row of cards, the game offers many ways for players to interfere with each other directly and indirectly.

To survive, players will organize into coalitions. Throughout the game, the dominance of the different coalitions will be evaluated by the players when a special card, called a "Dominance Check", is resolved. If a single coalition has a commanding lead during one of these checks, those players loyal to that coalition will receive victory points based on their influence in their coalition. However, if Afghanistan remains fragmented during one of these checks, players instead will receive victory points based on their personal power base.

After each Dominance Check, victory is checked and the game will be partially reset, offering players a fresh attempt to realize their ambitions. The game ends when a single player is able to achieve a lead of four or more victory points or after the fourth and final Dominance Check is resolved.

A heinous crime has been committed. A team of the Kingdom's finest detectives has been assembled and put on the case. They have a prime suspect, they have a motive, and they know what the opportunity to commit the crime was. Now all they have to do is prove it.

Using powers of deduction and communication, the players work as a team to eliminate dead leads and find clues to prove who, how, and why. All the relevant clues are available to them to do so. They just won't know it. On top of that, Sherlock Holmes himself is already on the case. Can they solve the crime before he does?

At the start of Beyond Baker Street, players select one of the crimes to solve, and a number of suspects, motives, and opportunities will be available for the players to convict of the crime. Each player holds a set of clues, but they won't be able to see their own clues — only those of their counterparts. Each turn, a player must take exactly one of the following actions:

ASSIST another detective
INVESTIGATE crime scene
CONFIRM evidence
ELIMINATE dead leads
PURSUE new leads

Players win together if they can gather enough evidence to make a conviction before Holmes does; otherwise, they crumble under the stress of the case.