Animals

You are one of the two most powerful traders in the city of Jaipur, the capital of Rajasthan, but that's not enough for you because only the merchant with two "seals of excellence" will have the privilege of being invited to the Maharaja's court. You are therefore going to have to do better than your direct competitor by buying, exchanging, and selling at better prices, all while keeping an eye on both your camel herds.

Jaipur is a fast-paced card game, a blend of tactics, risk and luck. On your turn, you can either take or sell cards. If you take cards, you have to choose between taking all the camels, taking one card from the market, or swapping 2-5 cards between the market and your cards.

If you sell cards, you get to sell only one type of good, and you receive as many chips for that good as the number of cards you sold. The chips' values decrease as the game progresses, so you'd better hurry! On the other hand, you receive increasingly high rewards for selling three, four, or five cards of the same good at a time, so you'd better wait!

You can't sell camels, but they're paramount for trading and they're also worth a little something at the end of the round, enough sometimes to secure the win, so you have to use them smartly.

Along cracks in the ocean floor, plumes of black and white superheated water pump relentlessly into the depths. They provide precious heat to the near freezing abyssal waters of the deep as well as a bounty of minerals. Microscopic archaea and other extremophiles live off the heat and minerals to form the base of a unique food chain that hosts a variety of exotic deep sea creatures.

In Deep Vents, players each control their own hydrothermal ecosystem to which they add new life and geological features each turn, competing to survive in the unforgiving depths by being efficient and preying on nearby systems with a host of strange and deadly predators.

Start each turn by drafting a tile from the five on display — placing one archaeon, the currency of the game — on each tile you skip. Place this tile adjacent to each other tile in your ecosystem, then either grow or trigger each tile in your ecosystem, moving through them from top to bottom, left to right, and growing or triggering them individually as you like. When you grow a tile, you place archaea on it, whether a set amount or a varying number depending on other tiles in your ecosystem; when you trigger a tile, you remove archaea from it to carry out its unique effect: attacking opponents, gaining shells to defend against attacks, moving archaea to your personal supply, and decimating tiles, which leaves them as nothing but a heat source for the remainder of the game.

If you ever need to discard archaea due to an attack and cannot do so, you must take a shortfall token and ten archaea, then discard archaea as needed. On your turn, you can pay ten archaea to remove a shortfall token — which you want to do because as long as you have one, you can draft only the first tile on display. If you end your turn with two shortfall tokens, you're out of the game.

The game ends if only one player remains in play (with that player winning) or after eight rounds, with players scoring points for archaea and shells in reserve and archaea on tiles. In this case, whoever has the highest score wins.

—description from the publisher

Every spring, millions of monarch butterflies leave Mexico to spread out across eastern North America. Every fall, millions fly back to Mexico. However, no single butterfly ever makes the round trip.

Mariposas is a game of movement and set collection that lets players be part of this amazing journey.

Mariposas is played in three seasons. In general, your butterflies try to head north in spring, spread out in summer, and return south in fall. The end of each season brings a scoring round, and at the end of fall, the player with the most successful family of butterflies — i.e., the most victory points — wins the game.

—description from the publisher

Once upon a time, three big cats became exhausted fighting to be top cat. They agreed to quit the fight and spice up their nine lives with a hot spice eating contest. Alas, everyone was soon cheating, so the cats invented a very hot, often tearful, bluffing game.

Spicy is a bluffing card game for 2-6 players. The cards are played face down, so you can cheat when you announce your card. That said, this clever card game isn't just about bluffing for you can almost always play a card that is at least half right if you cleverly play your hand. This means tactically deciding which card to use to get through: Do I play a "Pepper 10" or a color wild on a "Wasabi 9" and declare it a "Wasabi 10"? Or do I better pass because surely someone has noticed me thinking for so long now?

Spicy contains six game-variant cards, but even without these a high replayability is guaranteed.

The cards are illustrated with forty separate pieces of art. In addition, not only the game box sparkles in chic metallic gold, but also the card backs are adorned with a gold-colored finish.

Wizard Kittens is a semi-cooperative set collection card game. Players are wizard kittens who have accidentally released a few curses from the library's restricted section. Now they must defeat the curses before they're caught by the librarian, Professor Whispurr.

Each turn plays quickly but offers interesting decisions, most often around which spell to use and how to use it. Spells allow kittens to draw extra cards, sling cards at other players, discard cards out of their own play areas, or trade any two cards in play. No player can use the same spell two turns in a row, either.

The game ends when either the last of the six curses is defeated, or when the Professor Whispurr card is drawn from the ritual component deck. If the kittens defeated the last curse, then they tally up points (including a secret objective Extra Credit card), and the highest score wins. If they are caught by Professor Whispurr, then the Cleanest Paws Clause applies. All kittens with 10 or more points lose, and from those who are left, the kitten with the fewest cards in their play area wins.

-description from designer