New to Games? 16 - Shut Up & Sit Down

Above and Below

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!

In charge of valuable cargo, you must deliver it from Osaka to Edo. But fierce competition and the Black Tide may sink your hopes for fortune! Set sail for Japan in this exciting game for traders full of opportunities… and opportunists!

A compact game that plays fast with impactful choices every turn.

Buy, take coins, or reserve a card: no matter the choice, it will always affect your opponents’ turns.

Samurai is a much-beloved tile-placement game for two to four players by renowned designer Reiner Knizia. You and your opponents assume the roles of ambitious daimyo, vying for dominance in feudal Japan.

Through the strategic placement of tiles, you establish your sway over lesser lords, the production of rice, and the region’s religious leaders. Sometimes, though, even these won’t be enough to establish your dominance, and to cement your position, you must send in your samurai!

Cacao is a quick game of placing workers in a jungle to harvest cocoa, mine gold and claim temples, all the while outmanoeuvring other players for the limited resources found in this colourful climate.

In Codenames, two teams face a square grid of 25 word cards. Each team has a captain, and both captains can see (via a hidden picture) which cards belong to their team, which cards are neutral, and which single card is the “assassin”.

On a turn, the captain gives their teammates a clue such as “Car 4”. Those teammates then select cards (up to the number given) which they think the captain might have in mind for the clue (perhaps “Wheel”, “Electric”, “Vacation” and “Price”). Choosing a word not belonging to your team ends the turn, and choosing the “assassin” word makes you lose immediately. Assuming neither team falls to the assassin, the winner is the first team to uncover all of their own words.

Catacombs is the award winning fantasy, dexterity board game that was first published in March, 2010. Three expansions were released for the second edition: Catacombs: Cavern of Soloth, Catacombs: Dark Passageways and Catacombs: Horde of Vermin. Note: Sands of Time Games has merged with Elzra. The same creative team is still in place.

A very successful Kickstarter campaign was completed in April 2014. A third edition of Catacombs featuring new content and the artwork of Kwanchai Moriya is now in production and scheduled for release later this year.

As in its parent game Kakerlakenpoker, Kakerlakenpoker Royal has nothing to do with poker – except that the game is all about bluffing, but with cards showing cockroaches, rats and stink bugs instead of queens, 10s and aces. To set up the game, shuffle the deck and deal the cards out to players. On a turn, a player takes one card from his hand, lays it face down on the table, slides it to a player of his choice, and declares a type of critter, e.g., “Stink bug”. The player receiving the card either:

Accepts the card, says either “true” or “false”, then reveals the card. If this player is wrong in her claim, she keeps the card on the table in front of her face up; if she is right, the player who gave her the card places it face up before him.

Or passes the card to another player, peeking at it first, then keeping it face-down and either saying the original type of critter or saying a new type. This new player again has the choice of accepting the card or passing it, unless the card has already been seen by all other players in which case the player must accept it and make a true/false claim.

The game ends when a player has no cards to pass on his turn or when a player has four cards of the same critter on the table in front of him. In either case, this player loses and everyone else wins.

To this, Kakerlakenpoker Royal adds new rules and new nasty “royal” critters to create more options for players during the game.

Star Realms is a spaceship combat deck-building game by Magic Hall of Famers Darwin Kastle (The Battle for Hill 218) and Rob Dougherty (Ascension Co-designer).

Star Realms is a fast paced deck-building card game of outer space combat. It combines the fun of a deck-building game with the interactivity of Trading Card Game style combat. As you play, you make use of Trade to acquire new Ships and Bases from the cards being turned face up in the Trade Row from the Trade Deck. You use the Ships and Bases you acquire to either generate more Trade or to generate Combat to attack your opponent and their bases. When you reduce your opponent’s score (called Authority) to zero, you win!

Multiple decks of Star Realms and/or Star Realms: Colony Wars, one for every two people, allows up to six players to play a variety of scenarios.

Players create their own kingdoms by skillfully building their settlements, aiming to earn the most gold at the end of the game.

Nine different kinds of terrain are on the variable game board, including locations and castles. During their turn, a player plays their terrain card and builds three settlements on three hexes of this kind. If possible, a new settlement must be built next to one of that player’s existing settlements. When building next to a location, the player may seize an extra action tile that they may use from their next turn on. These extra actions allow extraordinary actions such as moving your settlements.

By building next to a castle, the player will earn gold at the end of the game, but the most gold will be earned by meeting the conditions of the three Kingdom Builder cards; these three cards (from a total of ten in the game) specify the conditions that must be met in order to earn the much-desired gold, such as earning gold for your settlements built next to water hexes or having the majority of settlements in a sector of the board.

In Bring Your Own Book, players take turns drawing prompts from the deck, then race to find the best phrase in their own book that satisfies the prompt.

Everyone has a book and sits in a circle. The cards are placed face-down in the middle. The starting player should also have a 1-minute timer. Each player gets four cards (with 5-7 players) or five cards (with 3-4). The starting player takes the top card off the deck, picks a prompt, and reads it aloud. Everyone except the Picker searches their book for text to match the prompt. They’re seeking for sequential text of any length: a single word, half of a sentence, a whole sentence, multiple sentences.

The first Seeker to find matching text announces “I’ve got it” and starts the timer. When the timer runs out (or every Seeker announces “I’ve got it”), each Seeker reads what they’ve found. Seekers who didn’t find text in time open to a random page and read a random sentence from it.

The Picker chooses their favorite submission and awards that Reader the card. After each round, the person to the left of the last Picker starts the next round. Once any player reaches three cards, everyone passes their book to the player on their left. This happens any time a player reaches three cards during the game. As such, it can happen as many times as there are players. It is quite possible for players to pass until they have their original book back.

The game proceeds until one player reaches the set number of cards. With 5-7 players, four cards wins it; with 3-4 players, it’s better to play to five.

Above and Below

Traders of Osaka

Samurai

Cacao

Codenames

Catacombs

Cockroach Poker Royal

Star Realms

Kingdom Builder

Bring Your Own Book

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