Area Movement

Castell is the vibrant Catalan tradition of building human towers. Huge teams of people from all over Catalonia gather at festivals to celebrate Catalan culture and compete to build the highest and most difficult human towers.

Castell is a strategy game in which players guide castell teams through a year of festivals. Visit Catalan cities, expand your team of castellers, learn tower-building skills, and show off your tower-building prowess at local performances and festival competitions.

Harness your strength, balance, courage, and common sense to take your team to victory!

"Wendake" is the name that the Wyandot People use for their traditional territory. This population, also known as the Huron Nation, lived in the Great Lakes region together with the Iroquois, Shawnee, Potomac, Seneca, and many others. In this game, you explore the traditions and everyday life of these tribes during the 1756-1763 period when the Seven Years War between the French and the English took place in these territories.

But this white man's war is really only a marginal aspect of the game; the focus is on life in the Native villages, fields, and forests. In this game, you won't find the traditional teepees since those were used by southwestern tribes who moved their camps to follow the herds of buffalo. The Natives of the Great Lakes were sedentary, living in long houses. The women farmed beans, corn, and pumpkins, while men hunted beavers in the forests, mainly to sell their pelts as leather.

In the game Wendake, you are placed in the shoes of a chief of a Native American tribe. You have to manage all of the most important aspects of their lives, earning points on the economic, military, ritual, and mask tracks. The core of the game is the action selection mechanism: You have the opportunity to choose better and better actions over seven game rounds, and the winner will be the player who can find the best combinations of actions and use them to lead their tribe to prosperity. Each player has their own 3x3 action board that is comprised of nine action tiles. The first time you select an action tile each year, you may choose any tile; the second and third times that year, you must choose another action tile in the same column, row, or diagonal as your previously selected tile(s). If the action tile you choose shows more than one action, you can use them only in the order shown, from top to bottom. After the last player has placed (and resolved) their fourth action marker, the restore phase begins.

During the restore phase, all players remove the action markers from their tiles and flip the tiles they used face down so that they show the opposite side. All players then move their action tiles down one row so that the top line of their action grid is empty and the three tiles from their bottom row are now outside of the grid; if any of these three tiles shows the ritual side, they must be flipped back to the action side. The first player may now set aside one of the three tiles below their grid and replace it with one of the six advanced action tiles near the board or with any action tile they already set aside in previous years. This new tile is added to the tiles below the player's grid. Then, whether a new tile was taken or not, they shuffle the three tiles that are below their grid and place them in random order on the top line of their grid, all showing the action side.

During the game, you score points in four tracks, with these tracks being coupled randomly at the beginning of the game. The game ends at the end of the seventh year, and for each pair of tracks, you score only the number of points indicated by the score marker on the lower value. Sum these points from the two pairs of score tracks to see who wins.

Professor Evil owns a time machine, and he's been ripping off all the best historical items from times both past and future. Your team has been charged with confiscating these items and returning them to their proper locations in time, so you now need to infiltrate the mansion and abscond with four items before Prof. Evil can secrete four of them in locations inaccessible to you. Thankfully the old soul is a bit daft and won't evaporate you should he catch you lurking through the mansion, but simply scoot you out the front door where he'll forget about you immediately.

On a turn, you first draw and reveal two cards from your tiny deck, then keep one of the cards based on what you think will help you this turn. You then take three actions, such as open a door in the room you're in, move from a room (or outside) to another room (assuming the door is open), disable a trap, or grab a treasure; using a card isn't an action unless it says otherwise. You can repeat actions as desired or needed, but you can't enter a room with Prof. Evil and you can't exit the house on your own (in order to run across the grounds to another window) once you enter. You're now committed to grabbing those treasures!

After you finish your turn, Prof. Evil now moves, but again he's not all there, so he doesn't necessarily move in a logical manner. To move him, you roll three dice: One die advances the secondary Prof. Evil figure on the clock on the board either five or ten minutes; the other two determine where Prof. Evil moves and how far. What's more, as he walks through rooms, he closes the doors through which he travels and reactivates any inactive traps he encounters. If you roll a blue and a 1, for example, he moves through the blue doorway into the next adjacent room; a red and a 3 will move him through three rooms, walking through the red doorway each time. A color and a particular signal will teleport him immediately to the treasure bearing the same colored marker.

Let's look at these treasures in more detail: Each treasure shows a time value and one or more traps on it. Three treasures are placed on the board, then a blue, red and green token are placed on the treasures, with a matching blue, red and green token placed on the game board clock on the time matching what's on the treasure. The Magna Carta might say 45 minutes, for example, and after placing a blue token on the Magna Carta, you place a blue token on the clock 45 minutes away from where the Prof. Evil figure is located. If Prof. Evil moves onto this token on the clock, then that treasure is lost — and if you lose four treasures, then you've lost the game. Remove it from play and replace it with a new treasure, marking the proper time on the clock.

Note that you can't just grab a treasure, however. Professor Evil can't be in the same room (of course), but you also must ensure that all the traps shown on the treasure are currently deactivated. The game board starts with eight traps on it — half active, half not — and you'll play tug-of-war with Professor Evil over keeping them in this status. Collect a treasure, and a new one will be added to the game board; collect four treasures before Prof. Evil does, and you all win Professor Evil and The Citadel of Time.

In 12 Thieves, first published as The thief of Baghdad, each player leads a group of thieves and tries to gain the best booty for themselves, but the treasure is well-guarded in the palaces of Baghdad, so you must slip your thieves into the guard corps and attempt to bribe those you can't represent with one of your own.

The player who plays their cards best and reacts most cleverly to the different situations will succeed in getting their thieves and guards well distributed in Baghdad, and therefore be the first to collect four pieces of treasure.

In El Dorado, players slip into the roles of expedition leaders who have embarked on a search for the legendary land of gold in the dense jungles of South America. Each player assembles and equips their own team, hiring various helpers from the scout to the scientist to the aborigine. All of them have but one goal in mind: Reaching the golden border first and winning all of the riches for themselves. Whoever chooses the best tactics will be rewarded!