Hand Management

Lander is coming to Kickstarter March 3, 2020 but why wait until then to try it? We've sent demo copies to over 130 cafes and FLGS around the world so you can go into your 'local' shop and #PlayBeforeYouPledge. You can see a list/map of all our PBYP partners here: https://www.landerthegame.com/play-before-you-pledge.

Lander is a 2-4 player, space-themed strategy game that emphasises area control (resource collection), tableau building (crew development) and set collection (missions). You and your friends will assume the roles of corporations, competing to prepare Kaimas-2 (the first planet outside of our solar system capable of supporting human life) for a large-scale colonization effort. The corporation that contributes the most will become the market leader going forward!

The game includes three distinct game styles with the following victory conditions:
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Basic Simulation – the first player to reach 7 Mission Stars wins.
Early Arrival – the last year is triggered when a player reaches 10 Mission Stars. The player with the most stars at the end of that year wins.
Planned Arrival – the player with the most Mission Stars after 5 years wins.

To earn Mission Stars, you must expand your resource base and develop your crew with specific combinations of traits and classes. Unlike many euro style games where players focus on their own playing area and can only affect each other indirectly, Lander enables players to directly impact each other's strategies through various game mechanics, such as take that and variable player powers.

At it's core, Lander is a game of options. On any given turn, you'll have many potential directions to go in, which gives you a lot of flexibility in how you plan your strategy. It also enables you to pivot when something unanticipated happens (e.g. acid rain reduces the colony's food production, a rival corporation relocates one of your structures, the mission you were working towards gets completed just before you can grab it!). This means that no matter how bleak things may seem, there's almost always a way back in!

Unique leadership abilities and action cards can be used to pull back your opponents or further your own interests, while event cards will force you to make difficult choices that can impact yourself or the entire colony. Lander is like life. You will experience highs and lows and be faced with a series of challenges that will force you to solve problems and pivot your strategy. It's not meant to be easy (think Matt Damon in the Martian). You are self-interested corporations, struggling to survive on a foreign planet - don't be surprised if the planetary conditions change or your colleagues put something toxic in your soup.

While some orders in the game are commonly used across game styles and player counts, others are more situational. For example, negotiation provides a novel framework for trading resources and cards between corporations with the use of a timer and collateral. Typically, a 2-player game won't see any negotiation, but it can become very common in a 3 or 4-player game, especially if one player starts to pull away. Observations are often used sparingly in the first couple years, but can become quite strategic in later years, as you study your opponents' actions and try to time your moves just right.

Lander is a game that often requires a few plays for you to really start appreciating its depth. As you get familiar with the mechanics and cards, you'll start to see there is a game within a game, whereby the study of your opponents' actions is crucial for developing your own strategy. Similar to poker, players can study their opponents' hands, crew and orders to predict what they might be trying do. The interplay between reading your opponents, using your observations, bluffing and playing your action cards becomes the game within the game. Knowing how and when to employ these different tactics is of course, up to you to master...

Your story begins here!

—description from the publisher

Ticket to Ride: London features the familiar gameplay from the Ticket to Ride game series — collect cards, claim routes, draw tickets — but on a scaled-down map of 1970s London that allows you to complete a game in no more than 15 minutes.

Each player starts with a supply of 17 double-decker buses, two transportation cards in hand, and one or two destination tickets that show locations in London. On a turn, you either draw two transportation cards from the deck or the display of five face-up cards (or you take one face-up bus, which counts as all six colors in the game); or you claim a route on the board by discarding cards that match the color of the route being claimed (with any set of cards allowing you to claim a gray route); or you draw two destination tickets and keep at least one of them.

Players take turns until someone has no more than two buses in their supply, then each player takes one final turn, including the player who triggered the end of the game. Players then sum their points, scoring points for (1) the routes that they've claimed during the game, (2) the destination tickets that they've completed (by connecting the two locations on a ticket by a continuous line of their buses), and (3) the districts that they've connected. (A district consists of 2-4 locations, and you score 1-5 points for a district if you link all of its locations to one another with your buses.) You lose points for any uncompleted destination tickets, then whoever has the high score wins!

In LLAMA, you want to dump cards from your hand as quickly as you can, but you might not be able to play what you want, so do you quit and freeze your hand or draw and hope to keep playing?

Each player starts a round with six cards in hand; the deck consists of llama cards and cards numbered 1-6, with eight copies of each. On a turn, the active player can play a card, draw a card, or quit. To play a card, you must play the same number as the top card of the discard pile or one number higher. If a 6 is on the discard pile, you can play a 6 or a llama, and if a llama is on top, you can play another llama or a 1. If you quit, you place your remaining cards face down and take no further actions in the round.

The round ends when one player empties their hand or all players have quit. In either case, players collect tokens based on the cards in front of them, whether in hand or on the table. Each different number card in hand gets you white tokens (each worth 1 point) equal to the value of the card while one or more llamas gets you a black token (worth 10 points). If you played all your cards, you can return one token (white or black) that you previously collected to the supply. You then shuffle all the cards and begin a new round.

The game ends the round that at least one player has forty or more total points. Whoever has the fewest points wins!

Die Hard: The Nakatomi Heist Board Game uses one-versus-many, asymmetric gameplay to pit protagonist John McClane against others acting as thieves who are co-operating to foil the hero's plan, which is to save the hostages in the iconic Nakatomi Plaza high-rise. Movie buffs and hobby game enthusiasts will appreciate the game's distinct homage to the 1988 film, which packs rules and gameplay to the air vents with callbacks to Die Hard’s most memorable scenes, characters, and events.

Who do you trust? If you sit on the Iron Throne, the wisest answer is "no one".

Game of Thrones: Oathbreaker is a game of deception and social deduction. One player assumes the role of King (or Queen), while the others represent the great Lords and Ladies of the Houses of Westeros. Some are loyalists who want order in the realm, others are conspirators who seek to undermine the throne, and all of them have a secret agenda of their own. Who is truly loyal, and who is simply hungry for power, honor, and coin? It's up to the King to figure it out before it's too late.

In more detail, the game lasts seven rounds. In each round, players reveal a number of mission cards, each of which has an associated influence type: crowns, ravens, or swords. Each noble plays influence cards face down to one or more missions and places their House Sigil at the mission where they played the most cards. Then each mission is resolved by shuffling the influence cards there and tallying up successes and failures. If a mission succeeds, Order is generated; otherwise Chaos is generated. Nobles earn rewards (coin, honor, power) based on whether the mission with their House Sigil succeeded or failed.

The King can play decree cards during the game to grant favor to nobles who seem loyal, or cast suspicion on suspected conspirators. Decree cards award Order if the King was correct and Chaos if the King was wrong.

At the end of the game, if Order exceeds Chaos, the King wins and any loyalists who achieved their personal ambitions win. If Chaos has the edge, then any conspirators who achieved their personal ambitions win.