An alien mothership has arrived at an uncharted planet brimming with mystery and discovery. As a member of this extraterrestrial crew, you must deploy precise away teams to gather knowledge, collect vital specimens, and erase all traces of your presence. Every decision shapes your quest for enlightenment, driving you closer to earning a place among the revered Elders. Will you unlock the secrets of this enigmatic planet?
In Crafting the Cosmos, you are interstellar architects, competing to build the galaxy – one star at a time. Manipulate the laws of the universe to your advantage, shifting gravity or the flow of time to activate useful power cards, and even spawn advanced life that can earn you extra victory points at the end of the game. Use your resources wisely as you craft your cosmic creation.
Each round consists of each player taking a turn, which then is followed by shared end phase. A player's turn consists of two phases: energy and craft. Players takes their turns moving energy on the main board and gaining resources. They then spend their resources to craft their galaxy.
During the energy phase, you move energy tokens around the controls on the main board to gain resources for crafting your cosmos. Then during the collect resources phase, you gain the resources from the one active control space with your energy token, then from all four of the passive control spaces.
Once a player has collected all of their resources, they spend them during the craft phase in any order to craft their galaxy. You may take placement actions, scoring actions, energy card actions, and slider actions in any order. You may place the four standard kinds of stars: hydrogen (H), helium (He), carbon (C), and oxygen (O), place proto life, or even nebulae.
Players can spend energy cards to gain power cards to help them craft their cosmos more effectively, and they compete to complete universal goals.
Railroad Tiles, a sequel to the roll-and-write series Railroad Ink, is a quick-playing tile placement game in which you pick tiles and place routes to build an interconnected community.
The game is played over eight rounds. You start each round by drafting your tiles from the sets available in the common pool, then you place your routes in front of you, trying to make as many connections as possible; be careful not to lock yourself in with choices that are too constraining. Each round, you can also place cars, trains, or travelers to populate the tiny little landscape you're creating - as long as you have free space on your tiles. The available actions change from round to round, so you need to prepare in advance!
The more pieces of the same kind each new placement connects to, the more points you earn. You can also score bonus points at game's end for placing tiles in a large rectangle without gaps and for creating sets of three adjacent city tiles.
—description from the publisher
Welcome to New Orleans, Louisiana, circa 1980: a vibrant city of music, food, and magic. Neon lights flicker in dirty puddles up and down Bourbon street; the innovations of the modern world clash with ancient and terrible traditions; and murder is never simple. The Beaumont Agency, staffed with a roster of brilliant, colorful, and ultimately flawed private investigators, specializes in solving cases that no one else can crack.
In The Dark Quarter, a co-operative app-driven adventure game set in a dark, fantastical vision of 1980s New Orleans, players each take control of a Beaumont agent and work alongside one another to solve the worst crimes that New Orleans has to offer. It's a world full of magic, where hexing curses are sold on every street, where voodoo priestesses and creatures of the night are lurking around every corner, and where even the most mundane crimes have a tinge of the supernatural to them.
Through multi-scenario campaigns, the game tells a rich, dynamic story and invites players to make critical decisions that will not only affect their characters, but change the direction and course of the story. The characters are not simply avatars, easily replaceable from scenario to scenario; instead, they are woven into the very fabric of the story itself. Their destiny and the destiny of New Orleans are inextricably linked together.
—description from the publisher
For over 300 million years, trees have traded nutrients with fungi in a vast underground network. Scientists continue to make new discoveries about this hidden world.
In Undergrove, you are a towering evergreen with an ancient symbiotic connection to the fungi in your forest. As new mushrooms appear, your options expand for converting nutrients and helping your seedlings. Using cube conversion, tile placement, area control, and a tiny bit of engine building, you’ll need to claim the most advantageous locations and optimize your actions to leave the best legacy in the forest. The player with the greatest number of successful seedlings, wins!
â— Build a shared forest containing mushrooms with diverse abilities.
â— Trade with the mushrooms to get resources based on the partnerships you’ve made.
â— Place your seedings in the most advantageous positions to score the most points.
Inspired by real mycorrhizal trading networks. Shape the destiny of your forest with every decision!
-description from publisher