Dice Rolling

You've got your horse, your trusty gun and a brand new hat on your head - but above all you've got a pack of letters that need to reach Sacramento before all the other riders in the Pony Express!

Nothing will stop you on your quest for speed and victory, neither the Indians lying in wait, nor the pretty saloon girls who want to charm the gold from your pockets. You're the best, the wildest, the quickest and the luckiest rider in the land... At least you think you are - but all the other riders feel the same, so watch your back and get moving! Be the first to grab gold from the mines, duel opponents in savage gunfights or beat them at the poker table, and use your brains, bluffing skills and equipment to clear the way to Sacramento and deliver your precious letters.
Whether you ride like the wind or eat dust on the trail, this game will be wild!

As explained on B. Faidutti's website:

A racing game with poker dice in which the dice are used both to generate poker hands in order to move forward and in duels, as bullets. The poker hands rolled denote the number of spaces one could move on the track from St. Joseph to Sacramento (with, of course, some opportunities for bluffing). The game is a mix of luck, bluffing, and dexterity.

Strike it rich with this exciting mining-themed board game!

Gold Mine is a unique tile-laying game in which players build a maze of mine tunnels and control miners that traverse the mine collecting gold nuggets. Players race to be the first to collect enough gold to exit the mine and stake a claim. It may sound easy, but the greedy miners have several tricks up their sleeves in order to gain an advantage—including sneaking through secret passages, fighting for gold, and scaring away other miners with bats.

With a different game board every time, a great balance of luck and strategy, and the addition of optional rules, this game is bound to be a family favorite for years to come!

Players are witches trying to make their potion. Each witch is associated to a secret color with match a cauldron. In turn each witch rolls a colored die and must put a face down mushroom in the cauldron indicated by the die using a wooden spoon. Other players try to guess whether she is putting a right color mushroom or a wrong one.
Guessing right stops the witch and reduce the number of available mushrooms of the guesser, accusing a innocent witch increases the available mushrooms of the guesser.
The game ends when a witch is left without mushrooms and she gets one extra point for herself and subtracts one point from a chosen cauldron. For each cauldron a right color mushroom scores one point to the secret owner and a wrong one subtracts one point.

At the end of the 17th century, Macao – the mysterious port city on the southern coast of China – is a Portuguese trading post in the Far East. The players take on the role of energetic and daring adventurers. Many exciting tasks and challenges await the players, whether they are a captain, governor, craftsman, or scholar. Those who chose the wisest course of action and have the best overall strategy will earn the most prestige at the end.

Macao lasts twelve rounds, and in each round players select one new card from a display specific to that round, two of which were revealed at the start of the game and others that were revealed only at the start of the round. The deck of 96 cards includes all sorts of special abilities, with the more powerful actions costing more resources to put into play.

One player rolls six different-colored dice, then each player selects two of those dice (possibly the same ones chosen by opponents), then places cubes equal to the number and color of the two dice on a personalized "ship's wheel." For example, if a player chooses the blue die that shows a 5, he places five blue cubes on the ship's wheel position five spots away from the current round. (A player can never claim more cubes than the number of remaining rounds).

Players rotate their ship's wheels each round, then use the cubes available to them in that round to perform various actions: activating cards selected in that round or earlier rounds, buying city quarters and collecting the goods located there, moving that player's ship around Europe to deliver those goods, acquiring gold coins, taking special actions with card previously activated, and advancing on a turn order track.

Players score points by delivering goods, paying gold coins, using the powers on their cards, and building in Macao. Whoever has the most points at the end of twelve rounds wins.

Macao is number 13 in the alea big box series, with an estimated difficulty on the alea scale of 6/10.

In the near future, nanofacturing techniques will allow incredible new materials to be built atom by atom. But they can only be built in the zero-gravity and high-vacuum conditions in space. Various private and government enterprises race to establish a buckytube mechanosynthesis factory on a suitable carbonaceous asteroid. To do so, they accumulate tanks of water in orbiting fuel depots, to be used as rocket propellant. Also needed are remote-controlled robonauts to do the grunt work.

The key to success is water in LEO (low Earth orbit). At first, water will be expensively upported out of the deep gravity well of Earth. But for a third the fuel and energy, water can be supplied from Luna, the moons of Mars, or other nearby hydrated objects. Extracting resources at the work site is called In-Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU). Whoever develops ISRU technology able to glean water from space rather than Earth will gain the strategic high ground to make money through exoglobalization.

Now in its second edition. The second edition expansion (aka High Frontier Colonization) is now available for preorders with an expected publication in the summer of 2013. (this expansion is compatible with the 1st and 2nd editions).