Fantasy

Several millennia ago, the tiny planet Solenia lost its day-and-night cycle: Its northern hemisphere is forever plunged into darkness, and its southern hemisphere is eternally bathed in sunlight. Your mission is to carry on your ancestors' honorable task of traveling the world to deliver essential goods to the inhabitants of both hemispheres. While the Day people want you to deliver the rarest gems and stones, the Night people sorely need wood and wheat to survive. Be efficient and outpace your opponents to collect the most gold stars by the end of the game!

A game of Solenia plays out over 16 rounds, and in each round, each player plays one card from their hand onto an empty space of the 5x5 game board. You can play the card on either:

A floating production island, to gain as many resources as the value of the card you played of the type corresponding to this space
A floating city, to fulfill a delivery tile by delivering the resources depicted on it.

You must play your card adjacent to the airship in the center of the playing area or adjacent to another card of yours already played. When someone plays a 0 card, the airship advances one space, then at the end of your turn, you remove the back edge of the board, give players resources based on the cards they have on this strip of the playing area, flip the strip over (turning night to day or dawn to dusk or vice versa), and place it on the other side of the game board.

The game ends when each player has played all 16 of their cards. The player with the most gold stars wins!

—description from designer

From the publisher's website:

Once again, our unfortunate friends find themselves foreigners trapped within the frightful Fortress Furor of the fanged Prince Fieso who would, with felicity, see them flounder and faint. These fine fighters could feasibly face their finish in this forbidding fortification, whose fearsome floors even now flow frighteningly from beneath their feet as the famished Furunkulus forages the fringes, fixing to feast on the foreigners’ flesh. Forthwith, must our fighters fashion their flight from this foulest of fates! But what’s this? By the light of their fallow and flickering flares, our friends find the depths fraught with the most furious of fiends and the fiercest of freaks! With fleet feet, the fearless foreigners follow these ferocious fellows through the fortress, with its multifarious footpaths and their frustrating forks, forging fervently forward toward freedom and fame. Our fighters must not falter from whatever feud or fracas would foil their function: to finally furnish the forlorn Faerie Fabula her freedom from feckless Fieso’s fists!

Theme
Formidable Foes is a light-hearted dungeon crawl. The players all take the role of heroes competing with each other to amass the greatest hoard of treasure. They do this by exploring the dungeon and fighting monsters.

Goal
The goal is to collect as much gold as possible. The winner is the richest player.

Gameplay
On each turn, a player either moves twice; moves once and fights a monster; or collects 'power tokens' which allow a player to improve their dice rolls in subsequent turns. In the early part of the game, the monsters are fairly weak and easily defeated. Defeating a monster increases a character's 'wisdom' which allows them to fight and defeat ever-harder monsters. Fighting monsters involves rolling a dice and then adding power tokens to improve the roll if required.

In the Court of King Arthur, you are the Knights that prove their individual valor by performing heroic deeds, setting out on the quest for the Grail, and obtaining the Knightly Virtues. The goal? To be elected First Knight — Lancelot — he who will steal the heart of Queen Guinevere.

In Lancelot, you will travel the lands of ancient Britain, courting ladies and defeating enemy knights to gain Knightly Virtues. You will walk other paths to fulfill quests. You will meet the Lady of the Lake and as reward, she will gift you the legendary sword, Excalibur — and Excalibur will keep you safe for just as Merlin may be your ally, your true enemy will be Morgana!

In Ashes: Rise of the Phoenixborn, a two-player expandable card game, players take on the roles of Phoenixborns, demi-gods and protectors of this world. These characters are the great saviors of their civilizations. Before they came into existence, the humans were plagued by monsters like chimeras that took away their lands and forced them to live in walled-off cities. When the Phoenixborns came, they fought off the chimeras and freed the lands for humans to take over once again.

But the time of peace was short-lived. A prophecy arose that if one Phoenixborn was able to absorb enough Ashes of others, they would ascend into full gods and take mastery over this world. This, as well as humans' greed for land, fueled the War of Ashes. The great cities now fight among each other, each one of them with a Phoenixborn at its helm, and you will decide who will rise and who will fall to ashes.

—description from the publisher

THE GAMEPLAY

Street Masters is a 1-4 player cooperative miniatures board game inspired by classic fighting video games. Featuring over 65 highly detailed miniatures, unique decks for fighters & enemies, custom dice, and lightning-fast gameplay, Street Masters lets players match up powerful fighters against villainous organizations in a wide array of exciting scenarios. Designed by Adam Sadler and Brady Sadler, the game offers modular and elegant gameplay set in a unique and exciting world of brutal combat.

THE STORY

Warriors from around the world, known for their legendary fighting abilities and skills, receive mysterious invitations to participate in a martial arts tournament. During the tournament, the organization surrounding it reveals their true identity — The Kingdom — and their purpose to recruit fighters to join their militia or enslave those against them. While several of these warriors made it out in time, many were never heard from again.

Five years later, a government project called "Street Masters" initiates in order to counter-act the war against The Kingdom, now having divided and seized control over the world by several of its factions. Those who join the Street Masters project must work together to take down each faction, crippling parts of The Kingdom before they're able to launch their end game.