Science Fiction

Imagine that you're a supercomputer. Now imagine that you're bored. So you dream up a little contest for you and a couple of your supercomputing buddies. Your task is to move one of the stupid little robots out on the factory floor through a series of checkpoints scattered throughout the factory. The wrinkle, however, is that the factory floor is filled with all kinds of inconvenient (if not down-right deadly) obstacles located in various locations: conveyor belts, crushers, flame-throwers, pushers, teleporters, oil slicks, pits, et cetera. But the real fun comes when the robots cross each other's path, and suddenly your perfect route is something less than that...

In RoboRally players each control a different robot in a race through a dangerous factory floor. Several goals will be placed on the board and you must navigate your robot to them in a specific order. The boards can be combined in several different ways to accommodate different player counts and races can be as long or as short as player's desire.

In general, players will first fill all of their robot's "registers" with facedown movement cards. This happens simultaneously and there is a time element involved. If you don't act fast enough you are forced to place cards randomly to fill the rest. Then, starting with the first register, everyone reveals their card. The card with the highest number moves first. After everyone resolves their movement they reveal the next card and so on. Examples of movement cards may be to turn 90 degrees left or right, move forward 2 spaces, or move backward 1 space though there are a bigger variety than that. You can plan a perfect route, but if another robot runs into you it can push you off course. This can be disastrous since you can't reprogram any cards to fix it!

Robots fire lasers and factory elements resolve after each movement and robots may become damaged. If they take enough damage certain movement cards become fixed and can no longer be changed. If they take more they may be destroyed entirely. The first robot to claim all the goals in the correct order wins, though some may award points and play tournament style.

The game was reprinted by Avalon Hill (Hasbro/WotC) in 2005.

The Abyss power is once again vacant, so the time has come to get your hands on the throne and its privileges. Use all of your cunning to win or buy votes in the Council. Recruit the most influential Lords and abuse their powers to take control of the most strategic territories. Finally, impose yourself as the only one able to rule the Abyssal people!

Abyss is a game of development, combination and collection in which players try to take control of strategic locations in an underwater city. To achieve this, players must develop on three levels: first by collecting allies, then using them to recruit Lords of the Abyss, who will then grant access to different parts of the city. Players acquire cards through a draft of sorts, and the Lords of the Abyss acquired on those cards grant special powers to the cardholder — but once you use the cards to acquire a location, that power is shut off, so players need to time their land grabs well in order to put themselves in the best position for when the game ends.

In the card game Race for the Galaxy, players build galactic civilizations by playing game cards in front of them that represent worlds or technical and social developments. Some worlds allow players to produce goods, which can be consumed later to gain either card draws or victory points when the appropriate technologies are available to them. These are mainly provided by the developments and worlds that are not able to produce, but the fancier production worlds also give these bonuses.

At the beginning of each round, players each select, secretly and simultaneously, one of the seven roles which correspond to the phases in which the round progresses. By selecting a role, players activate that phase for this round, giving each player the opportunity to perform that phase's action. For example, if one player chooses the settle role, each player has the opportunity to settle one of the planets from their hand. The player who has chosen the role, however, gets a bonus that applies only to him. But bonuses may also be acquired through developments, so one must be aware when another player also takes advantage of his choice of role.

AD 3017 - In the Ninja Galaxy it has been discovered that the four main star systems are becoming unstable. A destructive virus is spreading. The Ninja Elders have decided that only one star system can be saved. The other ones must be quickly neutralized. Which ones? To decide, the four Ninja Clans will battle each other at the Galaxy Power Rings. The winner's star system will be saved.

Advance RING-LEVELS by going through PORTALS. Sabotage your opponents with PORTAL-BLOCKERS, and VAPORIZE blockers in your way. Battle your opponents up close with LASER SWORDS, or eliminate them with LIGHT STARS. Finally, NEUTRALIZE the other star systems with the very powerful NEGATIVE ENERGY DISCS (NED).

New Advanced Rules: Use your Ninja Master Card to come into the battle when your ninja is facing elimination. In addition, each ninja has a special ability and on the third hit-point is eliminated. This adds much more strategy to the game and plays in about an hour.

Ninja Galaxy is a fun Space-Battle Adventure for the whole family and yet serious enough for the "gamer." A game of strategy, chance and fantastic finishes!

The year is 1888, and Steampunk technology has advanced at a prodigious rate! Probes have been sent to Mars, and soon astronauts will be manning rockets in order to mine the planet for newly discovered resources. The first is a brand new element, Celerium, that could prove to be a combustible energy source the likes man has never seen. The second is Sylvanite, an incredibly dense material unlike anything found on earth. In addition to these resources, glaciers have been discovered on the planet. Whoever controls these icy masses could work to create a livable atmosphere on Mars

In Mission: Red Planet, players work as mining companies compete to send astronauts to Mars in order to colonize and mine for recently discovered materials. Over the course of 10 rounds, players play one of their special agents every round to help fill the rockets heading to Mars with their own astronauts while simultaneously working to prevent their opponents from doing the same. Once landed, these astronauts must gather to control specific regions of the planet, each yielding one of the three resources: Celerium, Sylvanite, or Ice. After rounds 5 and 8, players gain score tokens for every region where they control the majority of the astronauts. At the end of the game, players score one final time, adding any bonuses received from Discovery Cards and Bonus Cards. The player with the most score tokens at the end controls Mars, and all the riches it can bring!

From Bruno Faidutti's website:

This one, designed with Bruno Cathala, started with the theme. We wanted to make a game about colonizing Mars, with shuttles leaving the blue planet towards the red one. The theme is strong, and well caught in the steampunk graphic style decided by Asmodée. In Mission: Red Planet, each player plays a colonial power which sends astronauts, in space shuttles, to occupy the most promising zones on the planet. For scholars, the systems merge a majority game, à la El Grande or San Marco, with a character/action card system, somewhere between Citadels and Hoity Toity/Adel Verpflichtet. Nothing really new here, but there was much work on it and we're really proud of the result.