Dice

In one of his sillier games, Karl-Heinz Schmiel casts the players as semi-psychotic cooks attempting to hone their culinary skills. Each player receives a miniature pan and a hotplate. Then each turn you can either attempt to turn up the heat, season your dish, or attempt to steal another cook's recipe in the making. Heating your hotplate is a random affair with a die, and could raise the heat on everyone's plate. Spicing the dish is heart of the game and done by up-ending small bottles filled with little colored wood pellets. When the pellets tumble out of the bottle (sometimes, if they do), the number of pellets can't exceed two, because over-spicing the dish ruins it and you have to throw it in the trash!

The 2009 version includes some changed rules, a new victory condition, additional recipes and some new mechanics in comparison to the 1989 version.

From the publisher's website:

It's rush hour at the Ring-a-Ding Diner and you must hurry to serve a table full of hungry customers! Roll the die to add dishes to your tray. Roll a Free Meal or snag the Special of the Day to help fill your order. And if you roll a bell, it's a mad dash to grab your grub before another player beats you to the lunch! Be the first to complete all your orders and - DING! - you're the winner!

Players place track and cities, create routes, and deliver goods. Bonuses are awarded to players who deliver multiple types of goods. This game requires careful management of steam to move your train as well as hand management to thwart other players as well as enable your own route.

500 copies manufactured for Essen 2008.

Days of Steam is #5 in the Valley Games Modern Line

Gauntlet of Fools is an adventure game of skill and fortune for 2-6 that plays in under 30 minutes. Choose your hero from hundreds of possible combinations. You'll make ridiculous boasts to get the best hero – but every boast comes at a cost. How awesome is your knight with a flaming sword after you boast that he'll fight blindfolded with a hangover?

You'll find out in the gauntlet: fifty encounters that will kill you. That's right. You will die, fool! But even a fool wants his gold, and the monsters have it. Roll a handful of dice, slay a monster, get its treasure. Die with the most gold to win the game.

Big Boggle is a timed word game where players attempt to find as many connected words as possible from the face up letters resting in a 25 cube grid. When the timer runs out, players compare their list or words and remove any shared words. Points are then awarded for remaining words, depending on how many letters are in the word.

Big Boggle is similar to the standard Boggle, but with the following changes:

uses a 5x5 grid of letters instead of 4x4
the minimum word size is changed to 4 letters instead of 3