Economic

Stocks & Bonds will transport you to Wall Street. You shrewdly invest in the game's 10 securities, buying and selling each year (each round) in an attempt to become the wealthiest stockholder in the game. The game has a unique calculator which will tell you if you've had a Happy Monday or a Black Friday.

Stocks & Bonds is for two to eight players, teen through adult. The bookshelf case contains a Stock Board, marker, dice, calculator, record sheets, situation cards, stock certificates and instructions.

Their are several different versions available, though the external boxes look the same.

The original 1964 version in the 3M Bookshelf Series, with the block-style spine, has a single-sided market calculator, and requires that players pay $10 per transaction. In the later version, with the filigree spine, the $10 per transaction is dropped, and the market calculator has a "bear" and a "bull" side. Additionally, the later version has a "margin" variant that allows players to purchase stock on credit, but pay for a percentage of their credit.

reimplemented as Stock Market Guru

In Steam you build railroads and deliver goods along an ever changing network of tracks and stations. You build the tracks, upgrade towns, improve your train, and grab the right goods to make the longest, most profitable deliveries. Score your deliveries and add to your income or victory points, balancing your need to invest against your quest to win the game.

Steam contains a beautiful, double-sided game board. The map on each side depicts terrain, towns, and cities at the start of the railway age. The map of the northeastern USA and neighboring Canada is ideal for 3 or 4 players. Use the map of Europe's lower Rhine and Ruhr region when playing a 4 or 5 player game. You can play Steam on any number of current and future variant and expansion maps, so we include pieces for 6 players.

The game plays very similarly to Age of Steam but with modifications to some of its mechanics and artwork. Tracks for income, train level, etc. are all printed on the board around the map such that alternate maps can be overlaid on the board and the necessary tracks will still be able to be used.

Similar to:

Railways of the World

Vikings is a fast economic game. Despite the nominal "Viking" theme, no actual exploration or pillaging is involved.

The resources in the game consist of coins and several types of ship tiles, island tiles and meeples. In each of 6 rounds, a random set of 12 tiles and 12 meeples becomes available. Players take turns buying and placing pairs of meeples and tiles. There is no direct player interaction, only indirect contention for resources during the buying phase.

The most unusual aspect of the game is the pricing wheel, which pairs meeples with tiles and sets their prices.

Part of the crayon rail games, this game features unique timeline orchestrated by event cards and a distance warp to accommodate the vast distances of the Soviet Union region. The game begins in the post WWII era, with players drawing rail lines and delivering loads wary of the inevitable fall of the Soviet Union. Build an empire from the Black Sea to the Baltic.

Note that the "distance warp" feature was removed during playtesting, and the "inevitable fall" of the Soviet Union is not as inevitable as you would think if that card doesn't get drawn.

In the card game Race for the Galaxy, players build galactic civilizations by playing game cards in front of them that represent worlds or technical and social developments. Some worlds allow players to produce goods, which can be consumed later to gain either card draws or victory points when the appropriate technologies are available to them. These are mainly provided by the developments and worlds that are not able to produce, but the fancier production worlds also give these bonuses.

At the beginning of each round, players each select, secretly and simultaneously, one of the seven roles which correspond to the phases in which the round progresses. By selecting a role, players activate that phase for this round, giving each player the opportunity to perform that phase's action. For example, if one player chooses the settle role, each player has the opportunity to settle one of the planets from their hand. The player who has chosen the role, however, gets a bonus that applies only to him. But bonuses may also be acquired through developments, so one must be aware when another player also takes advantage of his choice of role.