Pattern Recognition

Chop. Drop. Chili!

Chop. Drop. Chili! celebrates how Bush’s Chili Magic chili starters are the fast track to delicious, homemade chili in just three easy steps. Recommended for ages 8+, each player takes turns rolling the dice and racing to spot the ingredients that match the recipe cards. The first to claim five recipe cards wins.

Corps of Discovery: A Game Set in the World of Manifest Destiny

Lewis and Clark are tasked not only with exploring America, but with ridding the land of numerous invasive monsters that have appeared.

Corps of Discovery: A Game Set in the World of Manifest Destiny is a co-operative deduction game in which players each take the role of one of the crew on the expedition and set out to explore the land. The game board allows for different maps to be inserted into it, so you have many adventures ahead of you.

In addition to finding and killing monsters, you must also complete numerous daily challenges that require specific resources that you can find on the board. You have to use logic and deduction to reason out where the resources you need are located. Ally yourselves with Sacajawea and the indigenous people of the area to help you on your quest.

The game comes with two chapters: Fauna and Flora. Each has new mechanisms, a different goal, and new components to give each chapter a different feel.

—description from the publisher

Yamma

Yama (å±±) is an abstract strategy game inspired one of the classics - Connect Four.

The goal still the same; make a line of four-in-a-row of your color and win. The twist here is that the rotating board of Yama contains triangular slots that stand the cube up on its corner - revealing three sides, each of which can be seen from a different point of view. And it is in one of these three point-of-views in which you must try to form your line of four-in-a-row.

With Yama we strove to design the components such that they convey the rules. The cubes are painted such that no matter how you orient it one side will show a different color to the other two. The way placing three cubes in a cluster forms a valley for placement of the next level which covers up and block your opponent, or cliches your victory. These all contributes to making Yama one of the easiest and most intuitive game to learn.

However the game itself is treacherously easy to lose yet deeply strategic and tactical when played by two equally skilled players. The three dimension aspect of the victory goal and the three dimensional aspect of the cube placement can be very tricky to wrap your head around - leading to surprising twists and turns that belies it simple rules and components.

Ghost Blitz The Dice Game

Geistesblitz Würfelblitz is a witty flash of inspiration for dice-loving lightning enthusiasts.
The die is cast. The players can tell in a flash whether there is a figure that is seen particularly frequently - or articularly rarely - on the dice. Following their colour, the fastest observers get to the only die that tells which of the five objects is to be snatched from the centre of the table. If all the dice show different results, Ghost Balduin personally reveals which object is currently being sought.

—description from the publisher

Codenames: The Simpsons

Codenames: The Simpsons combines the hit social word game Codenames, while featuring characters and locations from thirty years of The Simpsons.

In Codenames, two teams — Team Homer and Team Bart — compete to see who can guess all of their "field agents" (identified by either a word or picture) correctly first — but those field agents are hiding in plain sight in a 5x5 grid that includes the agents of the other team, neutral words, and an assassin that will cause you to lose the game immediately if you guess it. One person on each team is a spymaster and only these two know which agents belong to each team. Spymasters take turns giving one-word clues that can help their teammates identify multiple agents on the board. Their teammates try to guess agents of the right color while avoiding those that belong to the opposing team — and everyone wants to avoid the assassin.