Hand Management

Game description of the 2011 revised edition from the publisher:

Welcome to Cadwallon, an infamous city known for the chicanery of its artful guilds! Can your guild sweep through its districts and gain power through recruiting influential citizens and acquiring valuable relics?

The revised edition of Arcana is a card game of recruitment and resource gathering for 2-4 crafty leaders. Command a guild of loyal agents during a series of district encounters against your opponents. Score the most prominent citizens, advantageous locations, and valuable treasures through bribery and power struggles. Collect the highest amount of victory points to become the master guild of Cadwallon!

This vibrant game creates a fantastical atmosphere for players to enjoy while they attempt to best their opponents through strategic card play. Make your guild the most influential by winning Stake cards and strengthening your deck with impressive Personalities, advantageous Locations, or tempting Relics to use in bribery.

The revised edition of Arcana introduces two new guilds to choose from, the Guild of Fortune-tellers and the Guild of Architects, as well a variety of optional rules that players can utilize to enhance their experience. Players can customize their guild, fulfill objectives, recruit Militia, invoke the ability of their Guild Masters, affect game play through random events, or optimize tactical strategy through card discards. Which variant will you use in your game?

Summary of Play

Arcana is played over a series of rounds that are comprised of two phases, the Intrigue phase and the Resolution phase. Send Agents from your unique guild deck to any of Cadwallon’s districts to claim control of Stake cards: Personalities, Locations, and Relics, all of which award victory points.

During these district encounters players gain control of Stake cards by playing their Agent cards. Stake cards are won through meeting or exceeding the card’s main arcanum: either Military, Political, Spiritual, or Financial. Whichever Agent has the highest matching arcanum type wins the current revealed Stake card in that district.

Of course if the Stake card you are after is a Personality card you can choose to bribe them with a Relic Card instead, immediately ending the phase and wresting the victory points from your opponents should you succeed.

Players can increase the mystery of the final outcome through bluffing. Players control two friendly distracts (piles of Stake cards) in which they can place their Agents facedown. Will your opponent chance opposing you when he is uncertain of your arcanum value?

A description of the game from Ravensburger:

In this paradise of a card game, two players take part in a very special competition: who will pick the nicest fruits from the forbidden Tree of Knowledge? It sounds easier than it is, since your opponent decides what happens to your cards.

Belongs to the Ravensburger Fun For 2 Series.

Newest game from the pair that made 1960: The Making of the President. The goal here is to be the founding father with the most renown at the end of the game, which consists of the making of the US constitution.

Each round, an article of the constitution is put up for consideration, which is either a Federalist, Anti-Federalist, Big State, or Small State issue. Players have a hand of three delegate cards that represent their respective states and also have a special ability. Players may use these cards' special abilities, use the cards to vote for or against the issue under consideration, or to try and claim tokens in each of the four types of issues. When a round ends, the issue either passes, or is flipped to its opposite side (Federalist/Anti or Big/Small).

Players score points for having voted with the majority, and also for having tokens matching the issue types that are voted into the constitution.

This text refers to the Queen 2007 reprint. The older edition had players write down their viking orders and was two rounds longer.

In Eketorp, players build Viking strongholds upon the Swedish island of Öland.

The goal of the game is to collect the most valuable blocks to build your own fortress, either by winning battles on the resource spaces or by stealing blocks from other vikings.

Each turn, new resources appear and the players secretly plan their viking movements. After all the placements are revealed, vikings battle each other for blocks (with the losers sent off to the field hospital to recover). The game ends after a set number of rounds, or when one of the players has succeeded in finishing their fortress.

Game description from the publisher:

For a time, the humans of Sera knew peace...then Emergence Day came. The Locust horde arrived without warning, and countless horrors spilled forth from their underground burrows. The Coalition of Organized Governments (COG) struggled to fend off the subterranean threat, but their defenses were quickly crushed. With billions dead, humans turned their weapons of mass destruction on their own cities to deny the enemy control. Now the long struggle against overwhelming odds approaches one final, desperate stand.

Gears of War: The Board Game, designed by Corey Konieczka, is based on the wildly popular third-person shooter by Epic Games. One to four players take on the roles of COG soldiers cooperating to destroy the Locust horde, and must work together to complete missions against an ingeniously challenging and varied game system. In Gears of War: The Board Game, you’ll relive classic moments from Gears of War and Gears of War 2 – Roadie Run into cover, spray your enemy with blind fire, or rip him in half with your Lancer's chainsaw!

In Gears of War: The Board Game you must fulfill one of seven randomly constructed missions and support your fellow COGs as your team engages an unflinching enemy in furious, white-knuckle firefights! Only through teamwork and communication will you gain a tactical advantage, completing your mission and striking a blow for humanity.

You'll need every soldier you can get if you hope to send the Locust horde back to their holes. Leave no man behind!

ERRATA
- In the Roadblocks mission level 3, use tile 12A instead of 3A.