variable player powers

Who are you in Mascarade? Whoever you want to be...at least until someone else calls you out on it!

Each character receives a face-down role card at the start of the game, and in a game with 4-5 players some role cards are placed in the center of the table. On a turn, you take one of three actions:

1) Announce your character: Claim the power of a certain character and take the associated action. You don't have to have that character card in front of you to take this action, but if someone else says that they're that character and reveals the card to prove it, that player takes the action instead while you lose one coin to the tribunal.

2) Swap cards or not: Take another player's character card along with yours, place them under the table, shuffle them around a bit, then give one card back to the other player while keeping one for yourself. You (presumably) know whether you changed characters and can have some idea of who you are now, but that other player might be in the dark.

3) Secretly look at your character: Look at your character card to make sure of who you are.

Play continues until one player obtains 13 coins and wins — or until a player has lost all of their coins, in which case the player with the most coins wins.

Mascarade includes more character cards than the number of players, so not all characters will be used in each game. The rules suggest that you use certain characters in your first games, but once you know the game, you can try many other distributions.

Note that this second edition of Mascarade includes 17 role cards, with these cards being a mix of roles from the original base game and the 2014 expansion.

Mighty heroes don’t just appear out of thin air -- you must create them! Race, class, alignment, skills, traits, and equipment are all elements of the perfect hero, who is ready to take on all opposition in the quest for glory and riches.

In Roll Player, you will compete to create the greatest fantasy adventurer who has ever lived, preparing your character to embark on an epic quest. Roll and draft dice to build up your character’s attributes. Purchase weapons and armor to outfit your hero. Train to gain skills and discover your hero’s traits to prepare them for their journey. Earn Reputation Stars by constructing the perfect character. The player with the greatest Reputation wins the game and will surely triumph over whatever nefarious plot lies ahead!

The year is 1913. The steamship SS Atlantica is two days out from port on its voyage across the Atlantic Ocean. Its unsuspecting passengers fully anticipated a calm journey to Boston, Massachusetts, with nothing out of the ordinary to look forward to. However, strange nightmares plague the minds of the people aboard the ship every night; rumors circulate of dark shapes following closely behind the ship just beneath the waves; and tensions rise when a body is discovered in the ship's chapel, signs of a strange ritual littered around the corpse.

Lurking within the depths of the Atlantic Ocean are a swarm of vicious, unspeakable horrors: the Deep Ones, led by Mother Hydra and Father Dagon. For reasons unknown, they have set their sights on the Atlantica, and their minions, taking the form of human-Deep One hybrids, have infiltrated the steamship to help sink it from within. Each game of Unfathomable has one or more players assuming the role of one of these hybrids, and how well they can secretly sabotage the efforts of the other players might mean the difference between a successful voyage and a sunken ship.

If you're a human, you need to fend off Deep Ones, prevent the Atlantica from taking too much damage, and carefully manage the ship's four crucial resources if you want any hope of making it to Boston, all while trying to figure out which of your fellow players are friends and which are foes. Everyone shares the same resource pool, but humans will try to preserve them while traitors will strive to subtly deplete them. Being able to tell when someone is purposefully draining the group's resources is harder than you think, especially when you take crises into account!

At the end of each player's turn, that player must draw a mythos card. Each of these cards represents a crisis that the whole group must try to resolve together. Some of these crises, such as "Food Rationing", call for a choice that could potentially put the ship's passengers or resources at risk, while others, such as "Hull Leak", call for a skill test in which failure could have disastrous consequences.

During a skill test, each player contributes skill cards from their hand to a face-down pile shared by the group. Once everyone has contributed (or chosen not to), the cards are shuffled, then revealed. If enough of the correct skills were contributed, then the group passes the test! But if the wrong skills were contributed, they can actually hinder the results, leading to failure. Thus, skill tests are dangerous opportunities for traitors to sabotage the humans' efforts, so you have to stay on your toes at all times.

—description from the publisher

In World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King, players journey to the frozen continent of Northrend to face the armies of the Lich King. This "Pandemic System" game showcases familiar mechanisms and gameplay, now tweaked to embrace the setting of the Wrath of the Lich King. Forts, temples, battlegrounds, and more populate the game board as you and your fellow heroes journey across the cold landscape. Along the way, you'll set up strongholds, complete quests, and do battle with legions of undead.

In more detail, players team up as legendary heroes from across Azeroth, each with their own unique abilities to help in and out of combat. Heroes such as Thrall, Warchief of the Horde; Varian Wrynn, King of Stormwind; Sylvanas Windrunner, Banshee Queen of the Forsaken; and many more are at your fingertips. As the Scourge grows, more undead will populate the board. Throw dice as you enter into battle against the hordes of ghouls and ferocious abominations, using hero cards to add power to your attacks, block incoming assaults, heal wounds, take mounts to far off spaces, and so much more.

As you fight your way to the Lich King, all manner of dark magic and terrible creatures under his control need to be neutralized. This comes in the form of quests, a brand-new mechanism that can be completed as a team through a combination of dice rolls and the hero cards at your disposal. However, each quest comes with its own dangers and hindrances. Complete these quests to move closer to the final assault on Icecrown Citadel, where the Lich King himself resides.

—description from the publisher

Fangs is a re-implementation of the social deduction game Shadow Hunters. Players are secretly dealt characters that belong to one of three teams: vampires, werewolves, or humans. The vampires and werewolves win by destroying the other team, while the humans are generally trying to simply stay alive (though some characters may end up aligning with one of the other two teams).

Since everybody starts knowing only who they are, they must start working on deducing who the other players are and whether they are friend or foe. Acting quickly may help you gain an advantage by weakening the opposing team before they realize which of the players fighting is their ally, but moving hastily with limited information may see you accidentally eliminate a teammate and set your side back in the conflict.

On each turn, players either try to gather information, find new equipment, or try to harm (or aid) another player. Different areas of the map influence what you may discover and who you may interact with while certain cards and abilities mean you can never be certain that things will go according to plan.