Medium-Heavy 3 - Shut Up & Sit Down

Mottainai

“Mottainai” (pronounced mot/tai/nai or like the English words mote-tie-nigh) means “Don’t waste”, or “Every little thing has a soul”. In the game Mottainai, a successor in the Glory to Rome line, you use your cards for many purposes. Each player is an acolyte in a temple who performs tasks, collects materials, and sells or completes works for visitors. Every card can be each of these three things.

You choose tasks to allow you to perform actions, keeping in mind that other players will get to follow up on your task on their next turn. Clever planning and combining of your works’ special abilities is key, as is managing which materials you sell.

Mottainai is a quick, but deep, game experience.

Combat Commander: Europe is a card-driven board game covering tactical infantry combat in the European Theater of World War II. One player takes the role of the Axis (Germany) while another player commands the Allies (America or Russia). These two players will take turns playing one or more “Fate” cards from their hands in order to activate his units on the mapboard for various military functions.

Players attempt to achieve victory by moving their combat units across the game map to attack their opponent’s combat units and occupy as many objectives as possible. The degree to which a player succeeds or fails is measured by a scenario’s specific “Objective” chits, the destruction of enemy units, and the exiting of friendly units off the opponent’s board edge.

A game of Combat Commander is divided into several measures of Game Time. There is no sequence of play to follow, however: each Time segment is divided into a variable number of Player Turns, each of which may consist of one or more Fate Card “Orders” conducted by the active player. Fate Card “Actions” may generally be conducted by either player at any time. “Events” — both good and bad — will occur at random intervals to add a bit of chaos and uncertainty to each player’s perfect plan.

SCALE: Each hex of a Combat Commander map is roughly 100 feet of distance (about 30 meters). Each complete Player Phase abstractly represents several seconds of real time. Each complete measure of Game Time abstractly represents several minutes of real time.

Each unit in the game is approximated as either a single Leader, a 5-man Team, or a 10-man Squad. Radios — and individual weapons larger than a pistol, rifle or BAR — are represented by their own counters.

64 AD: Rome is burnt to cinders, in need of rebuilding. With the city weakened, distant settlements across the empire refuse to pay taxes and need reminding of power of Rome.
Emperor Nero gathers the most influential members of the city with a clear task: rebuild Rome and recapture the settlements. Each player will utilise their asymmetric abilities to do so and earn wealth along the way in this new, interactive, heavy roll and write game.

Players draft from a pool of custom dice to collect resources and special icons that allow them to build buildings – by drawing onto the map of the Seven Hills of Rome, Tetris-style -, collect legionnaires, invade rogue settlements, or build the famous network of Roman Roads to the already pacified ones. Trading resources and other abilities might earn them coins, building Shrines will allow them to utilise the Favours of the Gods, and careful interaction with other players will surely lead one of them to victory!

The period of the Warring States (475-221 BCE) describes a time of endless wars between seven rival states: Qin, Chu, Qi, Yan, Han, Wei, and Zhao. These states were finally unified in 221 BCE under the Qin dynasty to lay the origin of today’s China, with its two main rivers: the Yellow and the Yangtze. Yellow … Read more

Western Empires is a board game for 5 to 9 players and covers the development of ancient civilizations over 8000 years of history. This is not just a regular game. Western Empires can take up to 12 hours to complete. And still yet, it has a simple mechanism and is easy to learn. The players lead … Read more

The Hunted is a tactical level game placing you in command of one of several models of WWII U-boats. Your mission is to destroy as much Allied Shipping and as many Capital ships as possible…..and still come home. Players will find it EXTREMELY challenging to survive an entire tour from 1943 to 1945, at which … Read more

In Glen More II: Chronicles, each player represents the leader of a Scottish clan from the early medieval ages until the 19th century, a leader looking to expand their territory and wealth. The success of your clan depends on your ability to make the right decision at the right time, be it by creating a new … Read more

Impulse is a quick-playing 4X (explore, expand, exploit, and exterminate) game set in space with the game board being composed of cards that have actions on them. Players also have cards in hand, and in addition to featuring one of ten possible actions, these cards have a color (red, yellow, blue or green) and a size (1, 2 or 3, as indicated by the number of icons on the card). Each card also has six edges, and these edges connect adjacent cards in the hex-shaped playing area.

The cards in the playing area start face down, with each player controlling a card(their Home) on a corner of this area. Each player has two transport ships in the center of his Home card and a cruiser on an edge. Cruisers are used to patrol sectors of space and destroy opposing transports, while transports let you activate sectors that you enter.

On a turn, a player adds a card to the Impulse from his hand, then (optionally) performs an action for a tech in his playing area, then (optionally) performs all the actions in the Impulse, then draws two cards and adds them to his hand. The Impulse is a line of cards shared by all players that changes turn by turn as players add cards to it and as cards fall off once it reaches maximum size. Thus, players need to feed the Impulse with actions that benefit them more than opponents, but that’s easier said than done.

When you perform actions – whether from moving transports to them or using the Impulse – you can boost them by having minerals of the same color or lots of transports. Each action has a single numeral on it, e.g., “Command [1] ship for one jump” or “Build [1] cruiser at home”; when you boost an action, you increase that numeral.

Players score points by destroying enemy ships (one point per ship), by controlling edge spaces on the central card (one point per edge), and by taking other actions via cards. The first player to score 20 points wins!

n 64 A.D., a great fire originating from the slums of Rome quickly spreads to destroy much of the city, including the imperial palace. Upon hearing news of the fire, Emperor Nero Caesar races back to Rome from his private estate in Antium and sets up shelters for the displaced population. Reporting directly to Nero, you are responsible for rebuilding the structures lost in the fire and restoring Glory to Rome.

Glory to Rome is a card-based city building and resource management game with a novel mechanism. Each card may act as a building, a client, a raw material, or a valuable resource, frequently forcing players into difficult decisions regarding how each card should be used. In addition, much of the game is played from the discard pool, giving players some control over what cards are accessible to opponents. Actions are triggered by a form of card-driven role selection — the active player leads a role, and other players may follow if they discard a matching card from hand (to the pool). Players who don’t follow may ‘think’ to draw more cards. There are thus strong interactions between the different uses of cards. Scoring is a combination of completing buildings and storing resources, with end-of-game bonuses for storing a diverse assortment. Game length is player-controlled, and is triggered in a few different ways.

The lighthearted artwork of the original editions was replaced by minimalist art in the ‘black box’ edition, and both have been the source of great controversy. Many of the non-English editions use more conventional artwork.

Travel back in time to the greatest city in Mesoamerica. Witness the glory and the twilight of the powerful pre-Columbian civilization. Strategize, accrue wealth, gain the favour of the gods, and become the builder of the magnificent Pyramid of the Sun. In Teotihuacan: City of Gods, each player commands a force of worker dice, which grow … Read more

Mottainai

Combat Commander: Europe

Rome & Roll

Yellow & Yangtze

Western Empires

The Hunted: Twilight of the U-Boats, 1943-45

Glen More II: Chronicles

Impulse

Glory to Rome

Teotihuacan: City of Gods

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