Hand Management

The Hare and the Tortoise, originally published as Royal Turtle, is a card-driven betting game about animal racing loosely based on one of Aesop's Fables.

At the start of a race, each player secretly bets on one of five animals: turtle, rabbit, lamb, wolf and fox. One animal is chosen at random for each player, then after receiving a hand of seven cards, each player places one of his cards face-down (possibly the same animal) as an additional bet. Players then take turns laying down 1-4 cards, with all cards needing to show the same animal, then refilling the hand to five cards. As soon as eight total cards have been played or four cards of any one animal, the animals move (maybe).

Each animal has a distinct characteristic that players can use to their advantage. The turtle always moves one space, but it moves two if four of its cards were played. The rabbit always moves two spaces as long as cards are played. — unless four cards are played and it's at the head of the pack, in which case it sleeps and doesn't move. The fox moves as many spaces as the number of cards played. The lamb moves one more space than the number of cards played — but if it reaches water, it stops moving to take a drink. The wolf moves 1 space if one to two cards are played, and one less space than the number of cards if more are played. The wolf also has 3 cards with a howl, if one of these is played no one but the wolf moves.(The track consists of eleven road cards, two covered with water.)

After the animals move, players start a new round of card-playing. A round ends when three of the four animals reach the goal, after which each player scores points based on the ranking of the animals and how he bet. After three rounds, the player with the most points wins.

The original title of Royal Turtle is a homage to Reiner Knizia's Royal Turf, another betting game about animals racing (albeit horses in that game).

Game description from the publisher

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Android: Netrunner is an asymmetrical Living Card Game for two players. Set in the cyberpunk future of Android and Infiltration, the game pits a megacorporation and its massive resources against the subversive talents of lone runners.

Corporations seek to score agendas by advancing them. Doing so takes time and credits. To buy the time and earn the credits they need, they must secure their servers and data forts with "ice". These security programs come in different varieties, from simple barriers, to code gates and aggressive sentries. They serve as the corporation's virtual eyes, ears, and machine guns on the sprawling information superhighways of the network.

In turn, runners need to spend their time and credits acquiring a sufficient wealth of resources, purchasing the necessary hardware, and developing suitably powerful ice-breaker programs to hack past corporate security measures. Their jobs are always a little desperate, driven by tight timelines, and shrouded in mystery. When a runner jacks-in and starts a run at a corporate server, he risks having his best programs trashed or being caught by a trace program and left vulnerable to corporate countermeasures. It's not uncommon for an unprepared runner to fail to bypass a nasty sentry and suffer massive brain damage as a result. Even if a runner gets through a data fort's defenses, there's no telling what it holds. Sometimes, the runner finds something of value. Sometimes, the best he can do is work to trash whatever the corporation was developing.

The first player to seven points wins the game, but not likely before he suffers some brain damage or bad publicity.

Players take on the role of dwarves. As miners, they are in a mine, hunting for gold. Suddenly, a pick axe swings down and shatters the mine lamp. The saboteur has struck. But which of the players are saboteurs? Will you find the gold, or will the fiendish actions of the saboteurs lead them to it first? After three rounds, the player with the most gold is the winner.

With the help of Dwarf Cards, the players are assigned their role: either miner or saboteur. The roles are kept secret- they are only revealed at the end of the game.

The Start Card and the three Goal Cards are placed onto the table, each seven card widths apart from each other. The Goal Cards are placed face-down. The gold is on one of the Goal Cards, but nobody knows which.

Players have cards in hand. On a player's turn, he must do one of three things: place a Path Card into the mine, play an Action Card in front of a player, or pass.

The Path Cards form paths leading to the Goal Cards. Path Cards must be played next to a already-played Path Card. All paths on the Path Card must match those on the already-played cards, and Path Cards may not be played sideways.

The miners are trying to build an uninterrupted path from the Start Card to a Goal Card, while the saboteurs are trying to prevent this. They shouldn't try and be too obvious about it, however, lest they be immediately discovered.

Action Cards can be placed in front of any player, including oneself. Action Cards let the players help or hinder one another, as well as obtain information about the Goal Cards.

Once a player places a Path Card that reaches the gold, the round is over. The miners have won and receive cards with gold pieces as their reward.

The round is also over if the gold could not be reached. In that case, the saboteurs have won and receive the gold pieces.

Once the Gold Cards have been distributed, the next round begins. The game is over at the end of the third round, with the player with the most gold pieces being the winner.

Game description from the publisher:

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey is an exciting all-new co-operative game of adventure in which you join Bilbo Baggins and his thirteen Dwarven companions on their journey through the Lonelands and Misty Mountains, encountering Goblins, Trolls, and other dangers that seek to put an end to their adventures. Traverse your way through two boards, each more difficult than the last, with the goal of coming out alive and prepared for the dangers that lie ahead. Your accumulated points at the end of the game will be your team's mark for finding out how good of a Company you really are!

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug , although it is also a stand-alone game, can be used as an expansion to this game.

Enter the magical world of adventure of Corto Maltese, the hero from the fertile imagination of Hugo Pratt. Choose your adventures, then live through them as the game unfolds. Aided by Corto and resisting Rasputin's attempts to thwart your plans, recruit your own bands of adventurers and get your hands on gold at the end of the story!

Corto is a card-based adventure game that mixes tactics and luck. To set up the game, choose four of the six quests, then place the appropriate quest boards next to one another on the table; each quest (attack the train of Russian gold, research the four aces of whale bones, meet the leopard-men, etc.) has its own deck of character and object cards that's shuffled and placed on the left side of the board. Reveal the top character from each deck, take turns placing one of your tokens on any character, then draw four cards from any combination of decks for your starting hand.

On a turn, you can either discard any number of cards and fill your hand to four cards or you can play 1-4 cards. If you play a character card, place it on an empty space on the quest board of the same color, making sure that it's adjacent to at least one other character. Place a token on the card, then either add a token to or remove an opponent's token from an adjacent character depending on the character's border color (denoting a friend of Corto or associate of Rasputin). You can also play objects on the character to affect adjacent cards. Some characters and objects have long range effects that hit any character in the same column or row. Hit a character that has no tokens, and you remove it from the board, counting it as 1 gold at the end of the game. If you played cards, end your turn by drawing two cards.

Players can also move Corto and Rasputin directly, using them to block spaces on the quest board, claim gold immediately, or eliminate characters.

In addition to having its own mix of characters, objects and advantages, each quest has a different treasure waiting for players to nab. For "The Wreck of the Fortune Royale", you need to be the first to claim the aces in order to claim all the treasure for yourself; for "Admiral Kolchak's Bullion Train", if you attack the train — which moves across the quest boards as players lay down cards — you claim one of the train car tokens, which might have gold on it; for "On the Track of the Leopard Men", whoever has a majority of tokens on certain characters at the end of the game gains control of markers that might enhance their network of characters.

When two quests are fully occupied or the players run out of cards, the game ends. In addition to scoring for the gold and treasures they've collected during the game, each player scores 2 gold per character in the largest group of characters he controls and 1 gold per character for smaller groups. Whoever ends up with the most gold wins!