Horizons of Spirit Island features the core mechanisms of Spirit Island, but features a new double-sided game board with a streamlined set-up, punchboard components, and five new Spirits designed to be ideal for those playing a Spirit Island game for the first time. These new Spirits are compatible with all existing Spirit Island components, but to play with expansions like Jagged Earth, you would need a copy of Spirit Island itself.
Terraforming Mars: Ares Expedition is an engine-building game in which players control interplanetary corporations with the goal of making Mars habitable (and profitable). You will do this by investing mega credits (MC) into project cards that will directly or indirectly contribute to the terraforming process. In order to win, you will want to accumulate a high terraform rating (TR) and as many victory points (VP) as you can. Players raise their TR by increasing global parameters: oceans, oxygen, and temperature. TR also determines each corporation's basic income, and, at the end of the game TR counts as VP. Additional VP and production capabilities are awarded for building project cards and other actions taken during the game.
The game is played in rounds, and each round the players will choose one of five phases, which determines which activities will take place during that round. This means every round is different, but can consist of building new project cards, taking general and project-specific actions, producing income and resources (plants and heat), or researching to draw more project cards. Every player will take all the phases selected for the round, and will receive a special bonus during the phase that they selected. To speed up the game, within each phase, players can act simultaneously without waiting for each other!
The game board has tracks for oxygen, temperature, and terraform rating, as well as a place for all of the ocean tiles that will be flipped over the course of the game. The game ends when there is enough oxygen to breath (14%), oceans enough to allow Earth-like weather (9), and the temperature is well above freezing (+8°C). It will then be possible, if not comfortable, to live on the surface of Mars!
The winner is the player with the most VP at the end of the game.
Welcome to Anytown, U.S.A. where people grumble about the quality of their health care but still show up at Healthy Heart Hospital hoping they made a smart decision. Much has been said (and even more has been written) about the previous administration’s haphazard management of Healthy Heart. In an effort to save the Hospital, you and your allies among its leading Physicians have staged a recent “Clinical Coup” and taken over the Hospital to restore its prestige. However, actually managing things from the inside is never as easy as it appears from the outside, and juggling the responsibilities at Healthy Heart Hospital can quickly turn even the noblest healer into a money-grubbing pragmatist cynically looking for a place to hide the victims of your “care.”
Does your team have what it takes to bring Healthy Heart Hospital back to its former glory without becoming Hard Hearted in the process?
Healthy Heart Hospital is a cooperative game for 1 to 5 players, played in rounds, with each player spending actions to treat and (hopefully) cure the various patients that come pouring into the hospital each round. Patients are represented by a number of cubes of various colors. Color represents the type of illness, while the number of cubes represents the severity of the illness.
The king is throwing an unprecedented year-long event to commemorate the 100th year since Everdell's founding. Come one, come all, to the Bellfaire!
Bellfaire is a new expansion for Everdell that offers several different gameplay modules, including:
Components and rules for 5-6 players
Player powers and resource boards
A Bellfaire board with a new Market location
Garland Awards, which are shared endgame goals
New Special Event cards
—description from the publisher
Welcome to the Northern Expanse, a place where nature is still unexplored, mystical and dangerous. When the humans first arrived, they thought they found an unspoiled paradise, filled with bountiful forests, lakes swimming with fish and cold freshwater flowing from the mountains. But as their settlements expanded and the surrounding forests grew thinner, nature itself pushed back. Great creatures known as Beasts emerged, and with their fangs, claws and mystical powers, they proved an incredible threat to the humans. In order to protect the settlements, humans enlisted specialised hunters, tasked with tracking and killing the Beasts before too many of their kin perish.
The Beast uses a deck of direction cards to move over forests, swamps and caverns, using guile and deceit to hide its track from the hunters. However, whenever a hunter moves over a location where the Beast has previously been, a trail appears. Only when a hunter searches a location or the Beast itself attacks an unsuspecting target is the Beast's actual position revealed. More so, each hunter has but one chance of searching each round, making it a tense and difficult decision. Hunters seldom have full information whether the trail they’re pursuing contains the Beast’s actual location, or if the trail has already gone cold.
Each action you perform in this game is done by playing a card from your hand (up to a maximum of two cards per turn). This means that if a player wants to search, attack or move, they need to have a card in their hand that lets them do that. Before each round, both hunters and Beast participate in a draft for the most important cards. All action cards can be used by both Beast and hunters alike.
In order to win this game, you either need to cooperate every step of the way if you play as a hunter, or skillfully outmaneuver your opponents if you play as Beast. On their own, hunters are never stronger than the Beast. Only when hunters communicate, strategize and combine their actions can they bring down the Beast before it’s too late.
—description from the designer