Medium 8 - Shut Up & Sit Down

EXIT: The Game – The Abandoned Cabin

Everyone meant to use the cabin only as a shelter for the night, but come the morning the door has been secured by a combination lock, with no one knowing the combination of numbers that will let them leave. The windows are barred as well. An enigmatic spinning code dial and a mysterious book is all that you have to go on. Can you escape from this abandoned cottage?

In EXIT: The Game – The Abandoned Cabin, players must use their team spirit, creativity, and powers of deduction to crack codes, solve puzzles, collect objects, and earn their freedom bit by bit.

In Fresco, players are master painters working to restore a fresco in a Renaissance church.

Each round begins with players deciding what time they would like to wake up for the day. The earlier you wake up, the earlier you will be in turn order, and the better options you will be guaranteed to have. Wake up early too often, however, and your apprentices will become unhappy and stop working as efficiently. They would much rather sleep in!

Then, players decide their actions for the turn, deploying their apprentice work force to various tasks. You’ll need to buy paint, mix paint, work on painting the fresco, raise money (which you’ll need to buy the aforementioned paint!) by painting portraits, and perhaps even send your apprentices to the opera in order to increase their happiness. Points are scored mostly by painting the fresco, which requires specific combinations of paints, so you’ll need to buy and mix your paints wisely, in addition to beating other players to the paints and fresco segments you would like to paint.

Fresco includes several expansion modules, so you can play without expansions for a lighter family game or add in expansions to vary play and increase the decision-making and difficulty, resulting in a very flexible game with a high replay value.

Quartermaster General: 1914 is the next title in the critically acclaimed Quartermaster General series by Ian Brody and creates a narrative of the First World War in Europe, reflecting the military, technological, and social changes that occurred over the following four years.

In Quartermaster General: 1914, each card has two different uses: one when played, and another when prepared. On your turn, you have the opportunity to both play and prepare a card. You can also spend cards to draft more troops, or use cards to attrition your opponents. However, your deck represents your overall resources, so moving too quickly through your deck early might result in your unsupported armies being swept away in the final rounds of the game. This is worth it if you can capture Berlin or Paris in 1915, but if your gambit fails, you may have a tough road ahead.

The game ends after 17 rounds of play, or earlier if one side has a commanding lead.

Tyrants of the Underdark pits 2 to 4 players against each other to take over territory in the tumultuous Underdark, mashing up deck-building mechanics with board control.

Designed by Peter Lee, Rodney Thompson, and Andrew Veen, and produced by Gale Force Nine, Tyrants of the Underdark is a competitive board game in which you play as a drow house recruiting monsters, cultists and demons to aid you in controlling locations such as Menzoberranzan and Blingdenstone. Using power and influence as resources, Tyrants of the Underdark features multiple strategies you can use in crafting your deck of minions. Be the spymaster infiltrating your enemy’s strongholds or the deadly war-leader concentrating on assassinating enemy troops. No matter how you decide to play, whoever controls most of the Underdark at the end of the game wins, unless there’s some hidden strategy in play.

In Istanbul, you lead a group of one merchant and four assistants through 16 locations in the bazaar. At each such location, you can carry out a specific action. The challenge, though, is that to take an action, you must move your merchant and an assistant there, then leave the assistant behind (to handle all the details while you focus on larger matters). If you want to use that assistant again later, your merchant must return to that location to pick him up. Thus, you must plan ahead carefully to avoid being left with no assistants and thus unable to do anything…

The world is changing fast. All over the world, railroad tracks bridge countries and continents, and journeys that would take weeks can now be completed in a matter of days. Seas are no longer obstacles: huge steamers carrying hundreds of passengers sail across the oceans. From Los Angeles to Sydney, from Murmansk to Dar Es Salaam, Ticket to Ride: Rails & Sails takes you on a railroad adventure across the entire globe. All aboard, and get ready for an unforgettable journey!

Ticket to Ride Rails & Sails is the new installment in this best-selling train adventure series. Players collect cards of various types (trains and ships) that enable them to claim railway and sea routes on a nicely illustrated double-sided board, featuring the world map on one side and the great lakes of North America on the other. Elegantly simple and fast to learn, it takes the Ticket to Ride series to the next level! Veteran railroaders as well as family and friends will be delighted to set sail to the new horizons of Ticket to Ride…

Mexica plots the development of the city of the same name on an island in lake Texcoco. Players attempt to partition it into districts, place buildings, and construct canals.

Districts are formed by completely surrounding areas of the island with water and then placing a District marker. The player who founds a district scores points immediately.

Canals and Lake Texcoco act as a quick method of moving throughout the city. Players erect bridges and move from one bridge to the next, which costs 1 action point regardless of the distance. They must also erect buildings. This costs action points, the exact number being dependent upon the building’s size.

In the scoring phases of the game, players score points (El Grande style) based upon their dominance in a District. In the 4 player game, players with the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd most buildings score decreasing numbers of points.

Only districts are scored in the first scoring round.

In the second scoring round at the end of the game, all land areas are scored, not just districts.

The player with the most points wins.

Rome, 1253 AUC: This is not the world you know. The Republic and the Empire thrive. Arenas dot the landscape. Warriors from lands both known and unknown perform upon the sands for the chance at freedom, riches, and eternal glory. Many choose this life, some are condemned to it — they will face men, beasts, and creatures of myth, all for the favor of the crowd.

Arena Rex is a game of gladiatorial combat. Battles of 3 to 6 combatants per side are recommended, and take approximately 30 to 40 minutes to play. Simple, intuitive rules offer myriad tactical possibilities. Maneuver and arena terrain play key roles in the game along with a fatigue-based activation system that twists a traditional round structure in new and exciting ways.

Arena Rex is a miniatures line that features high quality 35mm gladiators, and encompasses not just classic styles, but much of the ancient world. Gladiators train together in ludi; the classic styles of Ludus Magnus compete with more exotic fighters from farther afield. Anachronisms are present and intentional — the ability to combine the best aspects of disparate things is just as important as unity of purpose, and this is reflected in Arena Rex not just aesthetically, but mechanically. Players can choose gladiators freely, whether for their look, their playstyle, or because of unique benefits and synergies within a given ludus.

Your last village was ransacked by barbarians. You barely had time to pick up the baby and your favorite fishing pole before they started the burning and pillaging. You wandered over a cruel desert, braved frozen peaks, and even paddled a log across a rough sea, kicking at the sharks whenever they got too close, the baby strapped tightly to your back.

Then you found it! The perfect place to make your new home. But as soon as you had the first hut built, you discovered a vast network of caverns underground, brimming with shiny treasures, rare resources, and untold adventure. How could you limit your new village to the surface? You immediately start organizing expeditions and building houses underground as well as on the surface.

With any luck, you’ll build a village even stronger than your last– strong enough, even, to turn away the barbarians the next time they come knocking.

Above and Below is a mashup of town-building and storytelling where you and up to three friends compete to build the best village above and below ground. In the game, you send your villagers to perform jobs like exploring the cave, harvesting resources, and constructing houses. Each villager has unique skills and abilities, and you must decide how to best use them. You have your own personal village board, and you slide the villagers on this board to various areas to indicate that they’ve been given jobs to do. Will you send Hanna along on the expedition to the cave? Or should she instead spend her time teaching important skills to one of the young villagers?

A great cavern lies below the surface, ready for you to explore– this is where the storytelling comes in. When you send a group of villagers to explore the depths, one of your friends reads what happens to you from a book of paragraphs. You’ll be given a choice of how to react, and a lot will depend on which villagers you brought on the expedition, and who you’re willing to sacrifice to succeed. The book of paragraphs is packed with encounters of amazing adventure, randomly chosen each time you visit the cavern.

At the end of the game, the player with the most well-developed village wins!

Evolution: Flight, an expansion for Evolution, introduces avian species into the ecosystem. Now your species can swoop on unsuspecting prey from above, fly away from predators, or soar to a new location when food is scarce. Will the ability to fly propel you to new heights? Or will it bring your downfall? Explore the expanding Evolution world and find out!

With this expansion, you may now choose between creating a normal species and creating a flying species! The expansion changes tactics and strategy dramatically, but it doesn’t change the base game’s core mechanics, so it’s a snap to learn.

EXIT: The Game – The Abandoned Cabin

Fresco

Quartermaster General: 1914

Tyrants of the Underdark

Istanbul

Ticket to Ride: Rails and Sails

Mexica

Arena Rex

Above and Below

Evolution: Flight

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