Kaleidoscope

Kaleidoscope

Gather 3-5 players, set aside 2 hours, and make up an unwatchable “foreign” film using a pile of index cards and your crazy brains!

Use this step-by-step guide to guffaw your group through non-chronologically remembering a wildly bizarre movie that you apparently just watched together! On each player’s turn they write a part or moment into the movie (oh, I mean remember a part or moment of the movie they saw, pardon me) and insert it anywhere into the timeline you’re collaboratively creating!

Kaleidoscope, a thorough stand-alone hack of Ben Robbin’s celebrated Microscope: a fractal role-playing game of epic histories, has been simmering on my back-burner for a couple of years. I want to share the laughs! Through these years Kaleidoscope has been streamlined and made more silly, seen play in numerous conventions up and down the west coast of North America and many living rooms and several cafes, receiving amused or (on one occasion) unamused looks from folks at neighboring tables, and eliciting many decibels of laughter from its players.

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For the Crown (2nd edition)

For the Crown (2nd edition)

In For the Crown, you must gather key resources, train an army from scratch, and capture the rival King and Heirs to prove your claim to the throne!

In this game that combines the highly popular “deck-building” mechanic with the most engrossing variations of Chess, do you have what it takes to wisely divide your attention between preparations and military maneuvering? To outpace your opponent’s development while eluding capture? Strategize your position and seize glory in For the Crown!

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Elysium

Elysium

Mythic Greece. As an upstart demigod, you want to earn the favor of the Olympians and become a figure of legend yourself. Gather heroes and powerful artifacts, please the gods and bear their power to write your own epic tale.

Let your allies achieve their destiny and enter the Elysium, home of the glorious and the brave. Once the stories are written, only one demigod will be chosen to stand at the side of Zeus. Elysium is a game of set collecting and combinations in which players recruit cards representing heroes, items, powers and gods. These cards have many different powers and you can create powerful combination to earn gold (the help of the gods) and victory points (the favor of the gods). Each card belongs to one of the eight Olympians gods (a family), and shows a level (1 to 3).

During the five turns of the game, players will try to transfer their cards to the Elysium and write their own Legends, which are series of cards from the same family or from different families of the same level. The more epic the Legends, the more favor from the gods they’ll earn. But as they go to Elysium, most cards lose their power and players will therefore have to renounce some of their combinations !

A game of balance and opportunity with simple action, but constant dilemmas and complex strategies.

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Out of Dodge

Out of Dodge

Out of Dodge is a four-person, “American Freeform” live-action game about desperate criminals on a car ride to nowhere. Perfect for your next road trip!

The game requires four players, a small space arranged like a car, and should take around 1-2 hours to play. It can be played by responsible people in an actual moving car. There is no Game Master, but you’ll need one player to prepare the materials.

This game includes mature language in the rules and generally deals with themes of betrayal and extreme violence.

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Black Fleet

Black Fleet

Pirates, merchants, and even the occasional captain of a Navy ship all seek glory and fortune on the Caribbean seas!

In the easy-to-play, tactical card-driven board game Black Fleet, you’re in command of three different types of ships: your merchant ship earns you doubloons by conveying goods from one port to another, your pirate ship by attacking and stealing goods from merchants and burying them on islands, and the Navy ships by sinking your opponents’ pirate ships. With your (not-always-honestly-won) money, you’ll improve your ships by buying advancement cards, giving you powerful additional abilities.

Outwit your opponents with fortune cards and combos, earn money faster than they do, and pay the ransom for the governor’s daughter to win the game!

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Steam Park

Steam Park

In this management game you’ll have to build your own gigantic, coal-powered amusement park and make it the largest and most profitable in the region. By constructing the three-dimensional, beautifully designed rides, you will see your park grow right before your eyes.

But as owners of those fantastic steam park, building attractions won’t be enough: you’ll also need to manage your employees, invest in advertising in order to attract and please the different kinds of guests visiting your park, and, above all, keep the dirt you park produces under strict control!

Choose your strategy well! Build Stands to attract more Visitors, or Toilets to keep the Dirt under control. Whatever decision you take, take it quickly: the less time you spend planning, the more ??time you’ll have to maintain you Park. Thanks to a clever, original action-choosing mechanic, winning a game of Steam Park is as much a matter of being the best… as of being the fastest!

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Five Tribes

Five Tribes

Crossing into the Land of 1001 Nights, your caravan arrives at the fabled Sultanate of Naqala.

The old sultan just died and control of Naqala is up for grabs!

The oracles foretold of strangers who would maneuver the Five Tribes to gain influence over the legendary city-state.

Will you fulfill the prophecy? Invoke the old Djinns, move the Tribes into position at the right time and the Sultanate may become yours!

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Lifeboat

Lifeboat

Adrift in uncharted waters, six people share a tiny lifeboat. As the supplies run low, they discover that some barrels are filled with jewels and art treasures instead of water or hardtack. Greed mixes with love and hatred as the passengers take sides…

Lifeboat is a fast-paced card game of intrigue and survival. Players vie for the highest score when the boat reaches land – a seemingly simple matter of surviving with the most treasure. But each player has a secret love and a secret enemy among the passengers, and no one knows when landfall will occur.

Will you help row, and thus have a hand in guiding the boat’s course? Try to shove your way into the quartermaster’s seat? Start a fight to grab some loot? Or just bide your time until you can nudge your enemy overboard into shark-infested waters?

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Lords of Vegas

Lords of Vegas

You and your opponents represent powerful developers in a burgeoning Nevada city. You will earn money and prestige by building the biggest and most profitable casinos on “The Strip,” the town’s backbone of dust and sin. You start with nothing but parking lots and dreams, but from there you build, sprawl, reorganize and gamble your way to victory. Score the most points investing in the most profitable development companies and putting the best bosses in control of the richest casinos. Put your dollars on the line . . . it’s time to roll!

The game board is broken into 8 different areas, each consisting of a number of empty ‘lots’. Players build lots by paying money and placing a die of the value matching the one shown on the lot’s space onto the lot, along with a casino tile of one of 7 colors. Adjoining lots of the same color are considered a single casino. The casino’s boss is the player whose die value is higher than any other in the casino. On each players turn, players turn over a new card representing a new lot they get. The card also is one of the casino colors. Any built casinos of the matching color will score both money and VP. Money is earned for each lot in the casino, where each lot may be owned by a different player. VP goes only to the casino’s owner. Players can expand their casinos; try to take over casinos owned by other players; make deals to trade lots, casinos and money; or gamble in opponents’ casinos to make more money. Ultimately, though, only victory points matter, and that means making yourself boss of the biggest casinos.

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Infamy

Infamy

In the Martian mining colony of ARES-6, crime pays. Three factions vie for control of this corrupt new world and everything within it. You are a mercenary known as a “freelancer”, here to profit off the conflict, to make a name for yourself – but ambition alone isn’t enough. A network of seedy contacts will assist you in undertaking the dangerous missions necessary to bolster your rep. Whether it’s hiring henchmen to carry out your dirty work or plotting with secret schemes, you’ll let nothing stand between you and your squalid goals.

In Infamy, players find that nearly anything can be bought for the right price. Players attempt to win the game by being the first to reach 15 Infamy points or by reaching the highest reputation level in any one of three factions: the Harada Cartel, the Trust Megacorp, or the PKD Militia. The core of this auction and influence game is the “Pay to Play” mechanism in which players must sacrifice bidding power in order to place any bids at all. Spend too much time bidding against an opponent, and your currency will dwindle – but if you refuse to bid, you’ll be forced to watch your opponent acquire all those things that only the criminal underworld can deliver.

Here at the end of the world, where everyone and everything has its price, there is but a single ambition that endures: Infamy.

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