SU&SD Recommends 15 - Shut Up & Sit Down

Unlock!

Unlock! is a series of cooperative card-based escape adventures for up to six players. Each Unlock! game consists of sixty cards depicting objects, maps, and puzzles that can be activated, solved, or combined in an effort to access other cards and areas. The free companion app tracks the time allotted to win the game, while also offering hints and unlocking new, and necessary, elements. When the players believe they have figured out the code to escape each adventure, they will input the number into the app and escape the danger, or lose even more time in finding the real sequence.

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.

America in the 19th century: You are a rancher and repeatedly herd your cattle from Texas to Kansas City, where you send them off by train. This earns you money and victory points. Needless to say, each time you arrive in Kansas City, you want to have your most valuable cattle in tow. However, the “Great Western Trail” not only requires that you keep your herd in good shape, but also that you wisely use the various buildings along the trail. Also, it might be a good idea to hire capable staff: cowboys to improve your herd, craftsmen to build your very own buildings, or engineers for the important railroad line.

If you cleverly manage your herd and navigate the opportunities and pitfalls of Great Western Trail, you surely will gain the most victory points and win the game.

Burgle Bros. is a cooperative game for 1-4 players. Players are unique members of a crew trying to pull off a robbery of a highly secure building — without getting caught. The building has three floors (4×4 tiles), each with its own safe to crack. Players start on the first floor and have to escape to their helicopter waiting on the roof.

Players each have three stealth tokens. Whenever they are on the same tile with a guard, they lose one. If any player is caught without a stealth token, the game is over. If players can open all three safes, and escape through the stairs to the roof they win.

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.

The excitement in the air is electric as the leaders round the last corner and head for the finish line. Each team has used cunning and skill to position their sprinter for this moment, but only one has done enough to pull off the win!

Will your team lead from the front and risk exhaustion? Should you play it safe in the middle of the pack? Could you surprise everyone by striking from the back? Can you time your move perfectly?

Anyone can race, few become champions!

Flamme Rouge is a fast-paced, tactical bicycle racing game where each player controls a team of two riders: a Rouleur and a Sprinteur. The players’ goal is to be the first to cross the finish line with one of their riders. Players move their riders forward by drawing and playing cards from that riders specific deck, depleting it as they go. Use slipstreams to avoid exhaustion and position your team for a well timed sprint for the win.

Diamant is a quick, fun game of push-your-luck. Players venture down mine shafts by turning up cards from a deck, sharing the gems they find on the way down. Before the next card is turned up, you have the chance to leave the mine and stash your finds, including any gems you get on the way out. Why would you leave? Because the deck also contains hazards: scorpions, snakes, poison gases, explosions and rockfalls. When a duplicate hazard turns up (such as a second scorpion), anyone left in the shaft has to flee for safety and loses all the gems they got this turn. The trick is, the more players that leave, the bigger your share in the next card will be.

Set in a far, far distant future, the Numenera RPG puts a new spin on traditional fantasy, creating something unique to reinvigorate the imagination of gamers everywhere. Player characters explore a world of mystery and danger to find leftover artifacts of the past: bits of nanotechnology, the datasphere threaded among still-orbiting satellites, bio-engineered creatures, and myriad strange and wondrous devices that defy understanding. Numenera is about discovering the wonders of the worlds that came before, not for their own sake, but as the means to improve the present and build a future.

Each world stretched across vast millennia of time. Each played host to a race whose civilizations rose to supremacy but eventually died or scattered, disappeared or transcended. During the time each world flourished, those that ruled it spoke to the stars, reengineered their physical bodies, and mastered form and essence, all in their own unique ways.

Each left behind remnants.

The people of the new world—the Ninth World—sometimes call these remnants magic, and who are we to say they’re wrong? But most give a unique name to the legacies of the nigh-unimaginable past. They call them…

Sharpen your mind, for the dark mysteries that once stood before the great Sherlock Holmes are now yours to solve!

In Watson & Holmes, two to seven players are presented with one of thirteen cases, each accompanied by a series of questions. Players must travel from location to location in order to obtain clues and information, competing to reach the most coveted destinations first and sabotaging their opponents along the way.

Once a player feels they have successfully uncovered the truth, they may approach Watson and Holmes with their conclusion. If their answers are correct, they win the game, but if they miss the mark, the other investigators must continue the search until the case is solved.

Enter the gaslit world of Sherlock Holmes in Jack the Ripper & West End Adventures! A brand new standalone game (you don’t need another box in order to play this one) in the Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective series of games, Jack the Ripper & West End Adventures will throw ten entirely new cases cases your way. Six of these cases are one-off adventures, while four others form a linked campaign that challenges you to stop the murders of the notorious Jack the Ripper! With a new map of Whitechapel, newspapers hot-off-the-press for every case, and ten unique casebooks, it’s time to put your mind to the test!

Unlock!

EXIT: The Game – The Abandoned Cabin

Great Western Trail

Burgle Bros.

Fresco

Flamme Rouge

Diamant

Numenera

Watson & Holmes

Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective: Jack the Ripper & West End Adventures

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