City Building

To rebuild the Eternal City, the Roman Emperor summoned the most talented builders of antiquity. Each of them is trying to draft the best city — but talent is not enough. Only those who know how to please the Emperor, cleverly exert their influence, and invest at the right time will succeed in City of Rome.

In more detail, the game lasts fourteen rounds, and in each round, players draft one of the building cards in play and add it to their hand. The drafting order depends on how closely you stand to the emperor. At the start of a round, you reveal a new "action strip" that has three bricks and two cogs in some order, then players take turns placing their figure on one of these five spaces; the closer you are to the emperor, the earlier you draft, but the fewer resources (bricks and cogs) you receive. (With only two players in the game, each player places two figures on the action strip and takes two complete turns each round.)

After drafting, you can take one build action and one produce action. To build, you must pay the cost in bricks — paying two coins for each missing brick — then place the card you're building adjacent to another card of yours already in play. You start with two building cards in play, so you'll have at most sixteen cards at game's end. These cards must fit in a 4x4 square, so plan carefully since you'll want to place some buildings next to other ones to earn the most points and to get the most out of a produce action. Some buildings give you a special action or influence tokens when you build them.

To produce, you must have two cogs — paying one coin for each missing cog — then use the production action of each building in your city once.

Every few rounds, an influence card is revealed, and whoever has the most influence tokens at the end of that round collects the card, then discards their tokens.

At the end of fourteen rounds, players score points for their residential buildings, temples, aqueducts, coins, and influence cards and tokens. whoever has the most points wins!

In Zoned Out, you take on the role of a developer trying to build a thriving metropolis from the ground up. To win, players will need to use the right combination of residential, commercial and industrial development as well as downtown construction to gain the most points.

On their turn, a player selects one of the square city cards from their hand and adds it to the city, overlapping at least one existing square. They must then move their planner to one of the four squares of the new card. If they left the zone they were previously in, they will score points for the size of that zone with additional bonuses for connected parks and mansions and penalties for connected parking lots and abandoned houses. Zoning out also helps build one of the city's four downtown towers, which award points at the end of the game based on who contributed to each of them the most.

Mastering Zoned Out takes good timing and clever card placement. In the game's advanced mode, players will also be competing to earn points from a variety of public and private objectives for the city.

—description from the publisher

Keyper is a game with high player interaction for two to four players played over four rounds. Each round represents a season: spring, summer, autumn, and finally winter.

Each player starts the game with their own village board, a mini keyp board, 12 village tiles, a keyper (waving meeple) in their player color, and a team of eight multi-colored keyples, including two white keyples. Each differently colored keyple is a specialist in one activity: the brown keyper is a woodsman, the black keyple is a miner, the orange keyple a clay worker, etc. The white keyples are generalists who can represent any other color.

Keyper is a worker placement game. (Keyper is the eighth new title in the medieval Key series of games, with Keydom, the second in the series being widely recognized as the first of the worker placement genre of games.) What makes Keyper special is that when one player places a keyple on a country board, another player can join them with a matching colored keyple on the first player's turn to the benefit of both players. In this way, some players are likely to have played all their keyples before others. All keyples have the potential to work twice. If a player has played all of their keyples, but another player still has some, then on their turn, the player with no remaining keyples can lay down one or more keyples on the country board they have claimed or in their village board to secure additional resources or actions. It can therefore be doubly beneficial to co-operate with your fellow players, although Keyper is not a co-operative game in the usual sense of the term.

The country boards are also noteworthy, in that they can be manipulated and folded at the beginning of summer, autumn, and winter to show one of four different permutations of fields for that season. A player will chose the one to suit their strategy, often hoping that another player will complement their choice. Certain fields on the country boards are available only in certain seasons, e.g., raw materials can be upgraded to finished goods only in spring and summer, after which you can only convert using tiles in your own village. Gem mining occurs only in autumn and winter.

A player's strategy is likely to be influenced by which (seeded) spring country tiles they acquire and by the particular colored keyples they have available in the later seasons. Different combinations will encourage a player to develop their farm or village, help with their shipping or mining activities, and prepare for the seasonal fairs. Players constantly need to evaluate whether or not to join other players, when to claim a country board, whether to play on their own or another player's country board, when to use their own village, and whether to create a large or small team of keyples for the following season. The winner is the player to gain the most points, usually through pursuing at least a couple of the different strategies.

In addition to the theme and mechanisms, Keyper has similar traits to the earlier Key games: Game actions are positive and constructive, not destructive; player interaction is through the game mechanisms not direct, and like Keyflower, the previous game in the series, there is a lot of player interaction.

A special English-language Kickstarter edition of Keyper with "character" keyples and keypers will also be released.

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!

A classic game is back! As one of the first worker placement games, Caylus stands among the true board game classics of the 2000s. The original designers' team, together with the Space Cowboys, have now created a revamped version!

The mechanisms of Caylus 1303 have been streamlined and modernized for an intense and shorter game. Don't be fooled, though, as the game has kept both its depth and ease of play while a lot of new features have been added:

Variability of the starting position for a virtual infinity of possibilities. No more pre-set strategies!
Characters with special abilities, with a wavering loyalty, offer their services to the players.
And of course, brand new graphics!

The King calls you again, so it's time to go back to Caylus!

—description from the publisher