variable player powers

Emberleaf

Emberleaf is a competitive card-dancing and tile-placement board game.

As a brave Emberling, your mission is to rebuild your home in the heart of an ancient forest. To succeed, you'll explore the wilderness, gather resources, clear dangerous areas, and construct new homes for your kin. Along the way, you'll recruit heroes into your fellowship, each bringing unique skills that will help empower your team. But beware - space in the forest is limited, and other Emberlings have their own plans.

The game features:

Card Dancing: Place hero cards within your moving grid to activate skills and enhance your fellowship. Slide cards to trigger powerful combinations and charge them at the perfect moment for even greater effects.
Tile Placement: Build vibrant villages to address the diverse needs of your villagers.
Engine Building: Recruit heroes to acquire new skills and empower your existing fellowship.
Resource Management: Navigate the forest, clear dangerous areas, and collect essential resources.

Every decision you make shapes the destiny of your people. Can you rise to the challenge, guide your village to prosperity, and win the heart of your fellow Emberlings?

—description from the publisher

Harmonies

In Harmonies, build landscapes by placing colored tokens and create habitats for your animals. To earn the most points and win the game, incorporate the habitats in your landscapes wisely and have as many animals as you can settle there.

Starting with the first player and proceeding clockwise, each player will choose a set of 3 terrain tokens from the central area to place on their personal board. They may optionally choose an Animal card from the 5 displayed and/or place an Animal cube from their Animal card(s) on any completed patterns on their board that match their personal Animal cards. There is a 4-card limit per player. After their turn, refill with a new set of 3 tokens and a new Animal card if needed.

Placement of the terrain tokens will depend on the personal Animal card goals, and scoring rules for the various terrain types (mountain, field, forest, etc). For example, mountain tiles score based on how high they are (1 tile scores 1, while 3 tiles stacked score 7), but the mountain scores zero if it is not adjacent to at least one other mountain. If all the cubes on a given Animal card have been placed, the card is set aside and a new card can be drawn. The cards are scored at game end based on the highest number that isn't covered by a cube.

The games ends when there are no tokens left in the bag to refill the central area, or at least one players has 2 or fewer empty spaces on their player board. Play continues until all players have had an equal turn that round. The player with the highest points is the winner.

Optionally, you can use Nature's Spirit cards for richer gameplay. During setup, each player chooses 1 of 2 spirit cards and places a Spirit cube on the card. They follow the same placement rules as Animal cards, but tend to have an ongoing effect once completed. The spirit card does count towards the 4-card hand limit.

Comet

Comet is characterized by fast gameplay despite high variability and strategic depth. In the prehistoric past, you try to save extinct and endangered species from their final extinction. So you do nothing less than change the course of history! You can cleverly combine card skills to save the animals from the threatening comet.

The basic techniques and rules of the game are quickly learned. However, this does not mean that Comet is quickly mastered! Each game presents a new challenge as you must cleverly adapt to your opponent's actions in order to win.

1. You can make animals hatch to use their card abilities after you have moved them to the safe cavern. Saved animals will score rescue points in different ways at the end of the game. However, you also need other animal cards to move your saviors around the board (and thus move your animals to safety). Be careful how you use your cards!

2. Different types of cards deepen the strategic choices. Skillfully use the ability of your asymmetrical hero cards and optimize the possibilities of the silver and golden animal cards. When the pile of silver cards is used up, the comet phase begins and initiates the end of the game.

3. Even the movements on the game board want to be well planned. Opposing saviors can be jumped over to reach the save cavern faster - this can be good for you or your fellow players.

—description from the publisher

5-Minute Dungeon

5-­Minute Dungeon is a chaotic, co-­operative, real-­time card game in which players have only five minutes to escape the randomized dungeon. Communication and teamwork are critical to survival because there's no time to form a carefully considered plan — and no predicting what dangers lie ahead.

In more detail, players assume the role of one of ten heroes, each with special cards and abilities. Once the five-minute timer starts, the race is on to defeat all the monsters inside the dungeon. In order to defeat a monster, players must match symbols from their hand with ones on the monster's card. At the end of each dungeon is a powerful dungeon boss — and after the first boss is defeated, the campaign continues to the second boss. Each boss, and each randomized dungeon, gets harder until players reach the fifth and final boss.

There is a Standard Edition and a Dungeon Master Edition (Kickstarted Exclusive Cover).

Both Kickstarter editions includes:
- 2 New Bosses
- A Deck with 25 new cars [15 Doors + 10 Challenge Cards]
- A Baby Barbarian Figurine (with blood in the sword)