Dice Rolling

In 1954, with an explosion over a hundred thousand times more powerful than even the wildest estimates, the Castle Bravo nuclear test obliterated the Bikini Atoll, and ruptured the Earth down to its mantle.

As water levels rose in the aftermath, the remnants of humanity fled their homes and took to the sea. World leadership came together to build a massive Flotilla, mankind’s last bastion of civilization.

Now, ten years after the disaster, the Flotilla is home to the very last of us.

Flotilla features two distinct and interwoven modes of gameplay, as you try to outpace your opponents in bringing prosperity to humanity’s new home. You begin the game as a “Sinkside” Fleet Commander, commissioned by world leaders to explore the new face of the ocean, scour the depths for resources, and rescue any survivors you come across. At any point in the game, you may choose to turn “Skyside,” by selling your skiffs, and leaving your seafaring life behind to now grow the Flotilla itself.

The choice of if or when to switch from a “Sinkside” explorer to a “Skyside” settler defines the very core experience of Flotilla. They represent two similar but distinct game experiences, utilizing the same game components, seamlessly intertwined among all players. If you switch, you’ll flip over all of your accumulated game components, watching your crew grow into new roles with new art for the same characters, while finding entirely new uses for your ocean tiles and resources, and beginning to trade with the “Sinkside” players as you go after new objectives. As players turn “Skyside,” different niches are filled, forever changing the game’s economy. Mastering this ebb and flow will be critical if you’re to shape the new face of humanity!

As a “Sinksider,” you will explore the ocean with your skiffs, pulling some of the 92 hexagon-shaped ocean tiles out of a bag, and arranging them to help you effectively collect resources, discover valuable artifacts from the sunken civilization, all while trying to avoid toxic radiation left from the disaster. You’ll dive for supplies, rolling a pool of custom dive dice that vary based on the depth level of your skiffs. You’ll also carefully manage your resources, trading them on the open market for the currency you can use to buy more skiffs and outposts, or stockpiling them for when you turn “Skyside.”

As a “Skysider,” you will use your resources to build an expansive network of watercraft and docks, using the “Skyside” of your ocean tiles. Your divers will also have new jobs as researchers, rolling custom, multicolor Research dice, to discover new technologies that allow the Flotilla to manage a growing population. You’ll also build Sonar stations, making life a little easier for the “Sinksiders” still out exploring the unknown, while earning quite a few points for yourself.

On both sides, you’ll also grow your relationships with the four different governing guilds, each giving you unique bonuses and more powerful crew. The players with the strongest relationships will also earn valuable points at the end of the game!

The components in Flotilla are unique, immersive, and interconnected. Your skiffs will be able to actually carry up to four resource barrels, and come in a unique shape for each player color. Artifact tokens slot into matching spaces in a double-layered hub board and art on the ocean tiles lines up to create a unique layout for your growing Flotilla each time you play.

In Flotilla, you’ll find significant strategic depth and variety, while giving players the freedom to tell their own story. Will you build the Flotilla by being the first to go Skyside, or stay Sinkside for the whole game, becoming the most powerful seafarer of them all?

In Tinners' Trail, set in 19th century Cornwall, you represent a mining conglomerate at the height of the tin and copper mining industry. You must buy plots of land across Cornwall in auctions and survey them for tin and copper, always managing your "work points" and money effectively.

Once you have a mine in place, it's time to extract the ore and (ideally) make a profit, but the deeper your mine goes, the more expensive the process gets. To reduce the cost of mining, you can place developments, such as ports, train stations, and adits (drainage tunnels), but there's only so many improvements to go around. Once you have made your money — trying to time the market to sell when prices are high — you can invest it in industries outside of Cornwall, which gains you victory points. The earlier you invest, the better the return. Can you outplay the competition and make the most money, or will you be left without two shillings to rub together?

This edition of Tinners' Trail differs from the original 2008 version in several ways. The player count, for example, is now 1-5 instead of 3-4, and the resources on the board are now set up via tiles instead of die rolls to maintain variability while reducing the randomness. Dual-use cards are now an important part of the game, giving you information before an auction or an extra boost after an auction.

With lead development and expansion designs by David Digby

Things are getting wildly wobbly as the animals create a big stacking tower. Who will climb on whom? The die decides. But whether the animal stack stays standing or not is up to the players. They stack Animal upon Animal in three new games for young stackers. In the third game, they work cooperatively to race against the crab, training their dexterity skills with play. May the best stacker win!

Note: Not the same game as My Very First Games: Animal upon Animal. This game has new rules, new name, new art, new pieces.

Fangs is a re-implementation of the social deduction game Shadow Hunters. Players are secretly dealt characters that belong to one of three teams: vampires, werewolves, or humans. The vampires and werewolves win by destroying the other team, while the humans are generally trying to simply stay alive (though some characters may end up aligning with one of the other two teams).

Since everybody starts knowing only who they are, they must start working on deducing who the other players are and whether they are friend or foe. Acting quickly may help you gain an advantage by weakening the opposing team before they realize which of the players fighting is their ally, but moving hastily with limited information may see you accidentally eliminate a teammate and set your side back in the conflict.

On each turn, players either try to gather information, find new equipment, or try to harm (or aid) another player. Different areas of the map influence what you may discover and who you may interact with while certain cards and abilities mean you can never be certain that things will go according to plan.

Autumn is not the best time to climb up on a scaffold in Moscow, but it is still far better than doing so in the winter. Tsar Ivan wants to see results and our team will prove to him that we are the best builders in the city. We are sure to finish off those decorative arches with the brightest shining stones and ensure our place on the list of the government’s trusted workers.

Sheila Santos and Israel Cendrero make up the game designing duo known as Llama Dice. To date they have put out various titles with different Spanish publishers (1987 Channel Tunnel, Mondrian, Smoothies), and The Red Cathedral is the first game they have published with Devir. Pedro Soto (Holmes, Sherlock & Mycroft, Papua) and Chema Román (El mundo de Águila Roja) took care of the graphic elements of the game with a grand homage to Ivan Bilibin, an iconic Russian artist from the turn of the twentieth century. Despite being from a far later period, his mark is very recognizable in the game.

The Red Cathedral is a strategic, “Euro” board game in which the players take the roles of construction teams. Their job is to work together to put up St. Basil's cathedral in Moscow, as ordered by Ivan the Terrible. However, only one of them will be able to gain the favor of the Tsar.

During the game, the players can carry out one of these three actions: assign a section of the cathedral, send resources to that section to build it, or go to the game board to achieve more resources. Each of these actions has its own mechanism and requires that the players pay close attention to what the other players are doing.

When the sections of the cathedral are assigned the players take possession of the spaces in each of the columns that make up their section. The more sections built and the completion of each with its own tower, the more points the player will be given at the end of the game.

The players can send resources to the cathedral sections that they have claimed. When they complete each of those sections they will obtain rewards in money and prestige points. They will also be able to install decorations on the completed sections to achieve even more recognition from the Tsar. This part of the game also works as a clock, since once any player completes the construction of their sixth section it brings about the end of the game.

The game board shows us the iconic rondel of The Red Cathedral. It is where the players obtain all the resource types needed to complete their work on the cathedral, as well as to get favors from the guilds and professionals to make the most of their trip to the market. In the central rondel the players choose the die they wish to use and move forward as many spaces as is shown on the top side of said die, in order to obtain the resources indicated in the space destined by the die.

The Red Cathedral is a very accessible game with regard to its rules because it is very easy to understand the various levels of the game, but it remains very interesting with regard to strategy. It is sure to please those who are more interested in the challenge offered by trying to strategically optimize their position in each game rather than the complexity of the rules.