Blades in the Dark

The streets of Duskwall are haunted. By vengeful ghosts and cruel demons. By the masked spirit wardens and their lightning-hooks. By sharp-eyed inspectors and their gossiping crows. By the alluring hawkers of vice and pleasure. By thieves and killers and scoundrels like you— the Blades in the Dark.

The noble elite grow ever richer from the profits of their leviathan-hunting fleets and electroplasm refineries. The Bluecoats of the constabulary crack skulls and line their pockets with graft. The powerful crime syndicates leech coin from every business, brothel, drug den, and gambling house. And then there’s your crew of scoundrels: all the way down at the bottom rung. Can you make it to the top? What are you willing to do to get there? There’s only one way to find out…

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Tales from the Loop

The landscape was full of machines and scrap metal connected to the facility in one way or another. Always present on the horizon were the colossal cooling towers, with their green obstruction lights. If you put your ear to the ground, you could hear the heartbeat of the Loop the purring of the Gravitron, the central piece of engineering magic that was the focus of the Loops experiments. The facility was the largest of its kind in the world, and it was said that its forces could bend space-time itself.

Scifi artist Simon Stlenhags paintings of Swedish 1980s suburbia, populated by fantastic machines and strange beasts, have won global acclaim. Now, you can step into the amazing world of the Loop. In this roleplaying game in the vein of E.T. and Stranger Things, you’ll play teenagers solving mysteries connected to the Loop. The game rules are based on Mutant: Year Zero, which was awarded with a Silver ENnie for Best Rules at Gencon 2015.

Made in the UK.

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Lady Blackbird

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http://www.onesevendesign.com/ladyblackbird/ Lady Blackbird is on the run from an arranged marriage to Count Carlowe. She hired a smuggler skyship, The Owl, to take her from her palace on the Imperial world of Ilysium to the far reaches of the Remnants, so she could be with her once secret lover: the pirate king Uriah Flint. HOWEVER, … Read more

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Imperial 2030

Imperial 2030

Imperial 2030 is a game on its own, based on the rules of Imperial. The six powers (USA, Europe, Russia, China, India, and Brazil) develop their industrial basis and build up armies and fleets. They fight over control of neutral land and sea areas in order to become the most powerful nation worldwide.

In this game it is not the players who take turns, but the six powers, one after another. The players are just internationally operating investors who act in the background. By giving money to the six powers, which all have their own treasuries, the players influence the politics. The biggest investor in each nation gains control of that nation’s government and decides what the nation will do. As control of a government can change with each new investment, players may control several governments at the same time. As investors, players should not get too attached to their preferred nation, but rather focus on where their investments have the best rates of return. Essentially the game is about money, and not about military domination!

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Trail of Cthulhu

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Trail of Cthulhu is a new standalone GUMSHOE system roleplaying game under license to Chaosium, set in the 1930s. It supports both Pulp (for Indiana Jones, Robert E. Howard, thrilling locations sorts of games) and Purist styles of play(for intellectual horror and cosmic dread). HP Lovecrafts work combined both, sometimes in the same story. It … Read more

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Ethnos

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In Ethnos, players call upon the support of giants, merfolk, halfings, minotaurs, and other fantasy tribes to help them gain control of the land. After three ages of play, whoever has collected the most glory wins!

In more detail, the land of Ethnos contains twelve tribes of fantasy creatures, and in each game you choose six of them (five in a 2/3-player game), then create a deck with only the creatures in those tribes. The cards come in six colors, which match the six regions of Ethnos. Place three glory tokens in each region, arranging them from low to high.

Each player starts the game with one card in hand, then 4-12 cards are placed face up on the table. On a turn, a player either recruits an ally or plays a band of allies. In the former case, you take a face-up card (without replacing it from the deck) or the top card of the deck and add it to your hand. In the latter case, you choose a set of cards in your hand that match either in tribe or in color, play them in front of you on the table, then discard all other cards in hand. You then place one or more tokens in the region that matches the color of the top card just played, and you use the power of the tribe member on the top card just played.

At the end of the first age, whoever has the most tokens in a region scores the glory shown on the first token. After the second age, the players with the most and secondmost tokens score glory equal to the values shown on the first and second tokens. Players score again after the third age, then whoever has the most glory wins. (Games with two and three players last only two ages.)

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Aquarium

Aquarium offers high player interaction as the other players can – and will – use their action cards to alter the available fish that you can buy and the price that you have to pay for them.

Each player starts with a set of nine action cards and $15. The deck is shuffled, then set up with three or four “Feeding time!” cards shuffled into the deck at various points. On a turn, a player first turns up a card from the deck if the market is empty (as it is as the start of the game). Then the player looks at the fish and plant cards in the market and decides whether to pass or try to buy them. If he passes, he takes $2 from the bank and adds the top card to the market; if he wants to buy, all other players get to influence what’s on the market and what the cards cost.

First, each other player chooses one of their five action cards for use in phase 1 of a buy. These cards force the active player to add, remove or swap a card from the market or simply allow the card player to make a fish swap of his own! (Players can also pass, with all action cards but the “pass” being set aside.) Second, each other player chooses one of their five action cards for use in phase 2 of a buy. These cards add or subtract 1 from the cost of the market, or double or halve the cost of the market. In the latter case, the player of the card receives money from the active player instead of those coins going to the bank.

Once the goods and the cost are set, the active player chooses to buy all the fish and plants on offer or none of them. The cost is equal to the sum of the card values, plus or minus any modifications, then doubled or halved as appropriate. All purchased cards go into a player’s personal aquarium. If a player has two identical fish, he can move them to a separate breeding tank where they will earn him 1-3 coins each turn.

Each time a “Feeding time!” card is revealed, players reveal one “food cost” card at random, then pay money equal to that cost times the number of stars on fish and plants in their aquariums. Any fish not fed starve and float away to the big toilet bowl in the sky. Each plant in an aquarium reduces the food cost by one.

After the final “Feeding time!”, players count the stars on their non-breeding fish, then receive bonuses for collecting all colored fish of the same size, all three sizes of fish of the same color and different varieties of plants. The player with the most stars wins.

Here, fishy, fishy, fishy…

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Junk Art

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Junk Art challenges players to transform a collection of disparate junk into something meaningful, a construction of size and significance.

Junk Art contains over ten game different ways of playing and more than sixty large, colorful wooden components. It challenges players to create large, stable and cannily-built works of “art” from these pieces, according to the rules of whatever game mode they’re playing. Some are collaborative, some are competitive and some are plain old chaos.

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Go Cuckoo

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On your turn in Zum Kuckuck!, you take one standing stick and put it on the nest. If both ends of the stick have the same color, you may choose to lay an egg on it. Otherwise, you take another stick whose top color is the same as the hiding color of the previous one, up to three sticks. After laying an egg or putting the third stick with different colors, your turn ends. There are penalties for a stick touching the ground or eggs falling from the nest.

The first person to lay all of their eggs can then put the cuckoo on the nest and win the game.

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Celestia

Celestia

You get aboard an aircraft with an adventurers team to perform many trips through the cities of Celestia and recover their wonderful treasures. Your journey will not be safe, but you will attempt to be the most rich adventurer by collecting the most precious treasures!

At the beginning of a journey, all players place their pawns within the aircraft; the players start the game with 6 cards in the hand (or 8 depending on the number of players). At the beginning of each round, one player is chosen to be the captain of the trip and he throws from 2 to 4 dice so as to determine the weather that he should face (fog, lightning bolts, killer birds or pirates). He must then play the appropriate cards to go on the journey and reach the next city (a compass, a lightning arrester, a foghorn or even canons).

Before that the captain plays the appropriate cards, each player has to decide whether or not he will stay within the aircraft:

– to get off is to ensure the victory points by exploring the city;

– to stay is to try a trip upto the next city in order to catch more precious treasures.

But beware: if the captain is unable to discard the appropriate cards, it is the crash down! All remaining passengers get back empty-handed and a whole new journey beginswith all players on board.

During his journeys, each explorer can try to pull out of the game with fabulous objects ( a jetpack, astronomy glasses… ) or by changing the trip ( modifying the travel or abandoning an explorer in the city ).

As soon as a player earns treasures valuable for at least 50 points, the game is over.

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