Open Drafting

Winter Queen

In one faraway land, there is always winter. Once a year Winter Queen announces a special competition for her court sorcerers. Using enchanted crystals they create magical ornaments and the Queen pays for them with golden coins. The one to collect the most coins till the end of the competition is to become the next Queen’s advisor.

In the abstract family game Winter Queen, you take on the roles of Winter Queen's sorcerers, creating magical ornaments out of enchanted crystals. Each turn, you either place a new crystal onto the board or use already placed crystals to score victory points depending on the spell books you and your opponents have.

Books of Time

The history of humankind has been written down for thousands of years. Our technological achievements, geographical discoveries, and the will to prosper are woven into intricate threads spread throughout books that tell the story of our time on Earth. Now you have the chance to shape this story.

Books of Time puts a unique and exciting twist on tableau building, allowing you to construct three great books, each with their own sets of special abilities that you can write, thereby creating incredible combinations. The story of a civilization is now truly at your fingertips.

Three types of pages go into player books: trade, science, and industry. During the game, you add pages to these books to create powerful combinations of actions that you can activate. You need to efficiently manage your resources to create the books that will meet your personal objectives and score you the most points.

Tokaido Duo

After Journeying the Tokaido road, it is now time to discover the island of Shikoku in Tokaido Duo!

In Tokaido Duo, two players pace the smallest isle of the Japanese archipelago. You will discover its many sceneries through the eyes of three different characters, and will thus experience a threefold spiritual journey.

As the Pilgrim, you will visit temples, forests, seashores and hot springs.
As the merchant, you will craft and sell handmade wares.
As the artist, you will paint a variety of beautiful sceneries, and gift them to passers-by.

You will earn points through all three characters' adventures as you slowly become one with their endeavours.

Isle of Trains: All Aboard

Welcome to the Isle of Trains, where you are the conductor, and constructor of one of the island’s locomotives. You’ll build trains and load a range of goods to complete contracts across the island, and also deliver passengers to their destinations.

Isle of Trains: All Aboard is a card-based engine building game where cards have multiple uses: You can use cards as locomotives, freight cars, passenger cars, or buildings to improve the effectiveness and abilities of your train. Cards can also be spent to pay for the construction of your new train cars and buildings, or you can use your cards as cargo and load them onto available freight cars.

You will also have a range of passengers who want to be taken to different destinations. You will draw these passengers at random from a bag when you build passenger cars and certain locomotives. You can then load passengers into any available passenger car. When passengers are delivered to their destinations, they will give you an instant powerful bonus!

Loading cargo and passengers into opponents’ trains is important on the Isle of Trains as it’ll also gain you extra bonuses that turn! But this will help the other train conductors get a little closer to completing their goals, by giving them the cargo or passengers, which they can then use for deliveries and big end game points!

The game ends when a certain number of contracts have been completed, or a certain number of passengers are delivered. You win by scoring the most points, which you earn by building up your train, completing contracts, and delivering passengers.

Isle of Trains: All Aboard is all about balancing the need to upgrade your train, with loading cargo or passengers onto opponent’s train for big bonuses, and delivering cargo and passengers to their destinations before anyone else. Build your engine effectively enough to be remembered as the greatest train conductor on the Isle of Trains!

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