Mechanism: Roll-and-write

Railroad Ink Challenge: Lush Green Edition

Railroad Ink Challenge is a quick-playing roll-and-write game for 1 to 4 players. Grab a board and a dry-erase marker, and get ready to reach networking nirvana! Roll the dice and draw the routes to connect the exits around your board. Expand your network with railways, highways and stations to collect points, but you will be penalized for any open connections, so plan carefully!

Railroad Ink Challenge has everything you love from the original Railroad Ink games and a lot more, with an all-new focus on player interaction thanks to in-game goals! Only those who achieve them first get the reward, so you have to keep an eye on what your opponents are doing and try to complete the goals before they do! A different set of goals is available each time, so no two games will be the same!

But wait, there's more! Draw unprecedented, mind-bending route configurations thanks to the new dice! Connect special structures to your network to trigger new effects: factories allow you to duplicate a die, villages give bonus points if they are close to a station, universities unlock extra special routes — use these effects wisely and you'll score big!

Railroad Ink Challenge comes in two versions, each one including one expansion with an additional dice set that adds new special rules to your games. Create placid forest landscapes and build into a beautiful arboreal paradise with the Lush Green Edition!

—description from publisher

House of Cats

Fill your house with cats, mice and dice!

Form rooms using numbers. Then use the rooms' special abilities to score the most points.

There are 4 unique levels (each with their own rules), and every time you play you use a random set of 4 out of 12 possible abilities. This ensures new challenges every game.

House of Cats is a quick and clever roll-and-write game, and the first collaborative design by veteran designers William Attia and Kristian A Østby.

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HOW TO PLAY:

Each turn, one player rolls the dice and all players use the results to fill in spaces on their individual playing sheet. Keep taking turns until one player has filled every space on their sheet.

Try to group equal numbers together. A room is formed if you make a group with size equal to the number that makes up the group (i.e. groups of two 2's, three 3's, four 4's or five 5's). Each completed room scores points and gives you access to a special ability.

Cats and mice will score depending on the level you are playing.

Marabunta

Each player controls a colony of ants in Marabunta. On a turn, the active player rolls the six dice, then splits them into two groups. The opponent chooses and uses the dice in one of the groups, then the active player uses the remaining dice.

The Gig

In The Gig, players are members of a jazz group improvising their way through a song, vying for the spotlight, and trying to please the audience while working up mind-blowing solos!

The game takes place over six rounds, a.k.a. "songs". Each song, players count down, then roll and place dice in real time to gain symbols and create patterns. When one player has placed all four of their dice, they shout "Take it to the bridge!" and other players must stop re-rolling and place the remainder of their dice. After placing all of their dice, each player can add the shape that their dice formed to their instrument's unique solo board, each of which offers a different challenge and way of scoring. Players can use symbols gained via the song and their solo boards to quickly change their dice, keep them for endgame scoring, or spend them to buy audience cards, each of which represents a newly-gained fan who will give you another way of scoring points at game's end.

After the set list of six songs has been played, the player with the most points gained from their solo, audience cards, harmonies, and symbol sets and majorities wins.

The Gig includes a solo mode by Dávid Turczi.

The Fox Experiment

In 1958, Demitri Belyaev and Lyudmila Trut started an experiment on domestication. From a large group of foxes, they selected the ones that reacted to humans with more curiosity and less aggression. In each generation, they selected only the friendliest pups to become parents — hoping to recreate the process that originally led to domestication thousands of years ago. The experiment made stunning progress. Even though the foxes were chosen only for their friendliness, they soon started to get many of the physical traits that we associate with domesticated animals — like spots, floppy ears, and curly tails. As communication opened up, the foxes made major contributions to our understanding of how these traits are expressed. The experiment continues to this day.

In The Fox Experiment, you’ll breed your own domesticated foxes. In each round you'll select a pair of fox parents who have certain traits. You'll gain those specific trait dice, roll them, then try to move them around to make complete trait symbols which you'll then mark off on your pup card. You'll then gain trait tokens depending on how many traits you marked off which you'll use to upgrade tracks on your personal player board.

At the end of the round, the previous generation of foxes will be cleared and all of the new pups will be moved to the kennel — thus becoming candidates to be chosen as parents in the next round. The game ends after 5 rounds and you'll gain points for pleasing patrons (end of game scoring bonuses), studies completed (personal player objectives), if you ever won the friendliest fox award, upgrades on your personal player board, and extra tokens. The player with the most points wins!

—description from the publisher