Tile Placement

Dungeon Lords: Festival Season is a big expansion that includes lots of Dungeon Lording goodness.

The game is still played over two years, but now each year has five rounds instead of four: winter, spring, summer, autumn and festival season. More time to build your dungeon, but also more time for adventurers to gather a larger party. There are new monsters, rooms, and traps to prepare your dungeon for the battle, but also new nasty spells for the adventurers and sneaky bards who encourage them to perform so-called "heroic" deeds – not to mention two paladins for each year, now ready to punish up to two evil players.

Would you like to push other players toward evil instead of moving yourself toward good when visiting the city? What about making an investment instead of traditional gold digging? Or what about repairing conquered tunnels or rooms instead of digging new ones? Only eight actions are still available to you, but each season one of those actions is replaced by an alternate set of spaces that offer new and intriquing options.

And did we mention that it has recently become fashionable for Dungeon Lords to have their own personal pets?

Dungeon Lords: Festival Season includes the mini expansion Dungeon Lords: The New Paladins.

In Dungeon Lords, you are an evil dungeonlord who is trying to build the best dungeon out there. You hire monsters, build rooms, buy traps and defeat the do-gooders who wish to bring you down.

From the publisher's webpage:

Have you ever ventured with party of heroes to conquer dungeons, gain pride, experiences and of course rich treasure? And has it ever occurred to you how hard it actually is to build and manage such underground complex filled with corridors and creatures? No? Well now you can try. Put yourself in role of the master of underground, summon your servants, dig complex of tunnels and rooms, set traps, hire creatures and try to stop filthy heroes from conquering and plundering your precious creation. We can guarantee you will look on dark corners, lairs and their inhabitant from completely different perspective!

Each turn, players use a hand of cards to choose where to place their worker. Actions vary from mining gold, hiring monsters, buying traps etc. Each action has three spots available - with each spot having different effects (e.g. mining gold lets you mine more gold in each spot).
When using the cards, two cards will become locked and will not be able to be used next turn.

There are 4 turns to place actions for each game "year" and two game years in a whole game.
Each turn is identified as a "season". Each season, players will get to see the heroes and events to come in the following season. Thus allowing them to prepare.

At the end of each season (after the first), heroes will be allocated to each player according to their level of evil. Heroes range from mighty heroes to sneaky thieves. Each hero has their own power for which the player needs to prepare for.
Finally, at the end of each year, the heroes will travel down into the dungeon to fight.

Scoring in the game is based upon what you have built, the monsters you have hired and the heroes you have captured.

Railways of the World (2009) is the new edition of the base game for Eagle Games' popular Railways of the World series, first published as Railroad Tycoon in 2005. It reimplements the original game with several improvements.

Revisit the early days of the Age of Steam as you begin with a locomotive (the venerable John Bull, the first locomotive to run in North America) and a vision (your Tycoon "mission" card). From there, build your budding railroad network into a vast empire. Connect New York to Chicago, earn the most money, develop bigger and faster locomotives and maybe even span North America and build the Transcontinental Railway!

Multiple expansions featuring different maps are available. Railways of the World is the new base game for the system and includes the engine placards, railroad tiles, train tokens, money, bonds, and other items that are needed in almost all the Railways of the World series. A gameboard depicting the eastern half of the United States is included in the base game, as well as a mounted map of Mexico.

This game is preceded by the designer's other Winsome train games: Age of Steam, Australian Railways, Volldampf, New England Railways, Veld Spoorweg, Lancashire Railways, and Ferrocarriles Pampas. Railroad Tycoon was the result of a collaboration with Glenn Drover, in which the mechanics and game-play of Martin Wallace's Age of Steam were simplified and streamlined and attractive over-produced components were added, in order to make Railroad Tycoon more appealing to less hardcore gamers and more accessible to a wider audience.

A revised reprint was published at the end of 2010 which made some component improvements, such as the addition of Railroad Operation cards for the Mexico map.

Complete series overview - The Railways of the World Series: Introducing the family members of the ideal medium-weight train game

Note: The RailRoad Tycoon board itself is gigantic (about 36x45 inches, 91x114 cm) and requires a huge table or playing on the floor.

Similar to:

Steam

P.I. is a pure deduction game, with players competing in three consecutive mini-games in order to see who's got the best chops in terms of solving their cases.

Each mini-game plays out the same way. To start, you receive in secret one suspect card (out of 12), one crime card (out of 10), and one location card (out of 14); this set of information represents the case that the player to your left must solve. The game board shows fourteen locations arranged so that each location touches a few others; each location has space for a suspect and crime tile. Shuffle the suspect tiles (12, plus two "no suspect") and the crime tiles (10, plus four "no crime"), then place one face up in each location. Each suspect, crime and location is included in a deck of evidence cards, and nine evidence cards are revealed.

On a turn, a player either places an investigator, chooses an evidence card, or attempts to solve her case. When you place an investigator in a location, the player to your right looks at his case cards, then places a disc on this space for each case card he holds that matches the suspect, crime or location in this space. Additionally, he places a cube on this space for each suspect, crime or location that's adjacent to this space.

When you choose an evidence card, the player to your right places a disc on the matching tile if the card matches one of the case cards he holds, places a cube on the matching tile if this tile is adjacent to a tile matching one of the case cards he holds, or places nothing if you've made a wild-eyed guess and the tile isn't adjacent to anything.

To attempt to solve the case, you place a black token on your guesses. If wrong, you're penalized two points and continue play next turn. If right, you receive 7, 5, 3 or 1 points depending on how many others have solved their cases in earlier rounds.

The mini-game ends once everyone has solved their case or only one case remains unsolved. All used investigators are removed from play, then the board and cards are reset for the next mini-case. Each player has only five investigators total, so use them wisely!

Whoever has the most points after three mini-cases wins.

Coal Baron – or Glück Auf in German, after a greeting German miners use when wishing one another luck – has players sending meeple miners underground to dig tunnels and acquire coal, which comes in four levels of quality and which is used to fulfill contracts.

The game lasts three rounds, and in each round players take turns placing their workers on action spaces; you can go on a space occupied by another player, but you need to place additional workers in order to do so. Each player has an individual elevator shaft, and he'll need to use workers to extract coal and bring it to the surface, while also competing for contracts and scrounging for cash in order to do everything else that needs to be done!