Transportation

After half a year of daylight, we must now prepare for the dark season. The roads will be treacherous but they will still need to be braved by a select few in order to keep our cities thriving. In Merchants of the Dark Road, you are one of these brave few merchants that travel the dangerous paths between cities. While the job is perilous, fame and fortune await.

Discover the capital city where most of your actions will take place using a rondel action system. Collect and produce items to add to your caravan, or sell these items to local heroes and hire them to travel with you. Manipulate the market price of items, visit the back alley sellers, or delve a nearby dungeon for magical items to gain the potential for even more coin and notoriety.

Gather lanterns to ease your passage along the dark roads as you guide your caravan to distant villages. Deliver goods and heroes to the best destinations and gain fame for your bravery! Balance the money you earn with the height of your fame because your final score after a number of game rounds will reflect the lowest of these two values.

After all, what good is a purse full of the coin if the people don’t sing songs about you, and what good is a song with an empty mug of ale?

—description from the publisher

Caesar’s Empire is a 2-5 player game about building roads for the glory of Rome! Caesar’s Empire is set in the world of the beloved comic series - Asterix. However, instead of playing as one of the indomitable Gauls, this time around, you’ll be siding with the great Julius Caesar! As a member of his entourage, you’ve been tasked with expanding the limits of his empire.

The one who brings the most glory to Rome will be richly rewarded!

In Caesar’s Empire, you will be building Roads to connect Rome to new Cities across the board. Each time you build a Road, you score points. Every new City you reach will provide City and Treasure tokens that will be worth points at the end of the game. The game ends when Rome is connected to every City on the board. After adding the value of City and Treasure tokens to the points scored during the game, the player with the most points wins!

Caesar’s Empire uses a simple network-building mechanic. Each time you build a Road, you must connect Rome to a new City by placing one or more of your Road pieces onto the game board. You may build your Road anywhere you like on the board, as long as you start from either Rome, or a City whose token has already been taken. This means you may be continuing a Road started by another player!

When you reach a City, you get to take its token, which can be worth points at the end of the game. Each City also provides a Treasure token. Treasures you find are added to your player board and will score you points at the end of the game, especially if you manage to make collections!

Once you’ve taken your City token and your Treasure, you score your route back to Rome. Each section of Road included in your route will score 1 point for the player it belongs to. As your route can include sections of Road placed by other players, you can end up giving points to your opponents!

The game continues until all of the Cities on the board have been taken. Once the final City has been taken, players move on to final scoring.

At the end of the game, you’ll score points based on your City tokens. Each City has a value, which is the number on the back. This is the number of points you’ll score for that City. However, if you have more than one City token of the same colour, you will only score points for the one of the highest value. You then score the value of the different collections of Treasure on your player board. Collections can be of the same Treasure or different Treasures, and Gold is scored separately.

The player with the most points returns to Rome to be showered with fortune and glory by Caesar himself!

Barges, freight and profits are what it's all about in Manila, a speculative contest for 3-5 players. Goods shipments, intended for transport along sea routes, are in danger of gathering dust in the warehouses or being lost at sea in a storm. While the players speculate about success and failure, the ultimate fate of the ships will be determined by the dice.

There are four shipments that need to get to Manila - jade, ginseng, silk and nutmeg. A round begins with an initial auction to become harbour master. If you win, you'll be allowed to buy a share of one of the shipments, choose which three shipments you'd like to take down river and how likely they are to make it to their destination in the harbour. If they make it to Manila, their share price will increase. The aim of the game is to bet on the outcome of these shipments, with dice ultimately determining their fate. How many of the three boats will make it and which ones? Would you like to provide insurance against possible failed ships or perhaps you think pirates will snatch a chance to take control? Manila is a fun family game that takes minutes to learn and brings the river boats of the Philippines to life!

Breaking news! A lost world has been discovered, and clues leading to its secret entrance have been disseminated all around the world. Your goal? Find them! Driven only by your courage, you decide to follow in the footsteps of those first explorers and launch a worldwide expedition, but you're not the only one on this quest...

In Lost Explorers, each player starts with five figures on their research team: two leaders to track your discoveries, and three members to gain equipment and go on expeditions. On your turn, you can place members on one or both equipment areas to gain tokens; placing one figure means you retrieve the first token from the pile, two figures the second token, etc. The visible side of a token represents a vehicle — a train (red), a car (yellow), a boat (blue), or an airship (green) — while the hidden side depicts two or three locations on the world map. For each token you take, choose whether to keep the vehicle side face up or flip it over to reveal the mission side of the token. Once you choose, the token is locked, and you place it in front of you with your other vehicle and mission tokens.

Alternatively, instead of collecting equipment you can place members on map locations. Each location shows 2-3 vehicle tiles, and you must have all depicted tiles in front of you to place a member on a location. Each time you place a member, choose one of the vehicle tokens used, then place it in the discard pile next to the box. (If you travel to the location of another player's member, you instead give them the discarded token.)

After you either collect vehicle/mission tokens or send members on expeditions, you can complete one or more missions if you have a member on each of the 2-3 locations depicted on that mission. For each mission, remove one of your members just used from the board, then advance the appropriate leader on the discovery track for the color of the mission and the number of members used. (Each game, 2-4 locations are marked as "validated", and a validated location is always completed automatically for missions, but you score no points for it.) If you advanced your leader who was behind on the discovery track, take a vehicle token from the discard pile and add it to your collection.

When one of your leaders reaches a "clue" spot on a discovery track, you collect a clue token. If you collect four clue tokens first, you win! Alternatively, the game ends once all the vehicle tokens have been claimed, at which point the player who has advanced the farthest on the discovery track with their slower leader wins.

You are sloths — cuddly, lazy, and, oh well, slothful.

All animals (including humans) like to take vacations, so everyone is together at a country resort. We sloths are sitting around, of course, while all the other animals are running throughout the resort. We want to look around, too, and traveling around the resort to pick up tasty leaves would be great — but running around ourselves is just too tedious. All the other animals are having fun, and we want that, too, but...we are so slothful.

And then we have an idea: We'll let ourselves be carried around by the other animals, thus getting around nicely. The other animals have so much energy that they'll even gladly carry us. They aren't slothful! Which of us sloths will be the first to get through the entire country and be victorious? We are ambitious, but so lazy!

Fast Sloths (a.k.a. "Faultier" in German) is a race game that at its core is a classic pick-up-and-deliver game — except that we ourselves are the cargo being delivered. We are being carried along the whole way and never take a single step on our own!

You always play with six out of twelve different animal species, and you can place the giant game board in four different combinations. On a turn, you draft 2-3 cards of different animal types from the top of their face-up decks, then you play as many animal cards as you like of a single type. Each animal provides a different type of movement or interaction with you, with ants carrying you along in a chain and the elephant throwing you with its trunk.

Fast Sloths is a game free from randomness that evolves only through the interaction between the players, doing so without any "take that" mechanisms — except for you snatching an animal from under the other players' noses because you need to use it yourself.

Each race offers new challenges for you to get to the different trees faster than the other sloths. Enjoy all 256 different combinations, each with countless starting positions of the animals on the game board...and we are already working on new game boards and more animals for even more fun combinations!