Polyominoes

Era: Medieval Age

Era: Medieval Age serves as the spiritual successor to Roll Through The Ages. While Roll Through The Ages was a pioneer for roll-and-write-style games, Era is a pioneer for roll-and-build!

In Era, your dice represent different classes of medieval society as players attempt to build the most prosperous city. The "build" comes into play as players actually build their cities on their boards. You will use beautifully modeled three-dimensional components such as walls, keeps, farms, and other structures. By the end of the game, each player will have a unique city of their very own!

Era: Medieval Age is made even more challenging as players interact with each other in ways such as extortion, scorched earth, and, of course, disease! Hey, this is the Medieval Age, right? Speaking of which, Era serves as the first of a new series of standalone roll-and-build games from Matt Leacock and eggertspiele!

Miyabi

Elegant, graceful, and refined – that’s how you should design your Japanese garden! Careful planning and watchful eyes are needed as you tend your garden. Only by skillfully placing stones, bushes, trees, ponds and pagodas on multiple levels can a player become the best garden designer of the season. Think you’ve got it figured out? Try one of the five included expansions!

—description from the publisher

Patchwork Doodle

Patchwork Doodle is a roll-and-write version of Patchwork, with each player having their own 9x9 grid to fill in over the course of the game. Each player sets up by drawing a unique polyomino card from the starting deck, then drawing that on their sheet.

In each round, players lay out a number of polyomino cards in a circle, then place the rabbit between two cards. On a turn, someone rolls the die, moves the rabbit forward, then removes the card indicated by the rabbit. Each player must draw the polyomino indicated on this card in their grid. Once a certain number of cards have been played, the round ends, players score points, then you lay out more cards for the next round.

Each player has four special actions available to them during the game: You can choose to draw the card before or after the chosen card, you can cut a polyomino into two pieces before adding one piece to your grid, you can fill in a 1x1 space in your grid, and you can do one of the above actions a second time. When you take one of these actions, you mark it off as each can be used only once (except for the one you use a second time, if you know what I mean).

You lose a point for each space that you don't cover, so try to pack everything in as tightly as possible!

Spring Meadow

The first delicate flowers herald the end of a harsh winter. The sun shines longer day by day and pushes the snow back. Lush meadows bloom, and curious marmots slowly awaken from hibernation. Finally, spring is coming into the mountains — the perfect time for a hike. Choose your route carefully, watch out for the burrows of the marmots, and pack enough snacks. Your chances to earn an edelweiss hiking pin are rather low if you sit hungry in the snow.

Spring Meadow is the grand finale of Uwe Rosenberg's puzzle trilogy following 2016's Cottage Garden and 2017's Indian Summer. The complexity of this game — the most interactive of the trilogy — is set in between those two games, and fans of the trilogy will find familiar elements combined in an innovative way.

Place your meadow tiles with 0-2 holes skillfully on your mountain board to receive extra tiles when creating or expanding groups of holes. Find your way around the burrows of the marmots because they can restrict you during tile placement. Scoring takes place depending on the players' selection of meadow tiles from a central game board. Whoever has the largest meadow during a scoring receives a hiking pin, and the first player to earn their second hiking pin during scoring wins.

New puzzle challenges are guaranteed with 172 tiles in 49 shapes.

Scarabya

As the head of an international archaeological team, it is your job to establish camps across the four corners of the globe and uncover the long-lost golden scarabs of Scarabya.

Scarabya is a tile-laying puzzle game, in which your goal is to score scarabs by positioning your tiles such that they create enclosed zones of 1 to 4 squares. Each scarab in an enclosed zone is worth a number of points equal to the number of squares in its zone. Players all play the same tiles, in order. Each turn, a new tile is drawn and all players simultaneously place their copy of the tile on their individual boards. The game is over after all 12 tiles have been drawn (and either placed or discarded). The player with the most points wins.