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Coup

You are head of a family in an Italian city-state, a city run by a weak and corrupt court. You need to manipulate, bluff and bribe your way to power. Your object is to destroy the influence of all the other families, forcing them into exile. Only one family will survive…

In Coup, you want to be the last player with influence in the game, with influence being represented by face-down character cards in your playing area. Each player starts the game with two coins and two influence – i.e., two face-down character cards; the fifteen card deck consists of three copies of five different characters, each with a unique set of powers.

When you take one of the character actions – whether actively on your turn, or defensively in response to someone else’s action – that character’s action automatically succeeds unless an opponent challenges you. In this case, if you can’t reveal the appropriate character, you lose an influence, turning one of your characters face-up. Face-up characters cannot be used, and if both of your characters are face-up, you’re out of the game.

If you do have the character in question, you reveal it, the opponent loses an influence, then you shuffle that character into the deck and draw a new one, perhaps getting the same character again and perhaps not. The last player to still have influence – that is, a face-down character – wins the game!

Keyflower is a game for two to six players played over four rounds. Each round represents a season: spring, summer, autumn, and finally winter. Each player starts the game with a “home” tile and an initial team of eight workers, each of which is colored red, yellow, or blue. Workers of matching colors are used by the players to bid for tiles to add to their villages. Matching workers may alternatively be used to generate resources, skills and additional workers, not only from the player’s own tiles, but also from the tiles in the other players’ villages and from the new tiles being auctioned.

In spring, summer, and autumn, more workers will arrive on board the Keyflower and her sister boats, with some of these workers possessing skills in the working of the key resources of iron, stone, and wood. In each of these seasons, village tiles are set out at random for auction. In the winter, no new workers arrive, and the players select the village tiles for auction from those they received at the beginning of the game. Each winter village tile offers VPs for certain combinations of resources, skills, and workers. The player whose village and workers generate the most VPs wins the game.

In Warrior Knights, each player takes on the role of a Baron vying for control of the Kingdom. Each Baron commands four faithful Nobles who lead his armies into battle. Each Baron seeks to capture cities in order to gain Influence (victory points), which is used to measure his claim to the throne. Barons may also seek to gain advantage by increasing their income, gathering Votes to use at the Assembly, or by amassing Faith, which can be used to gain a measure of control over chance events. Only through cunning strategy and careful diplomacy can a Baron hope to attain victory.

Oss is a skill game based on jacks, with players trying to perform certain tricks in between tossing their jack into the air and catching it.

Composure, dexterity, tricks… Several tribes decide to fight to determine who’s the best, their Big Chief!

Get ready to enter the poor and dreary Whitechapel district in London 1888 – the scene of the mysterious Jack the Ripper murders – with its crowded and smelly alleys, hawkers, shouting merchants, dirty children covered in rags who run through the crowd and beg for money, and prostitutes – called “the wretched” – on every street corner.

The board game Letters from Whitechapel, which plays in 90-150 minutes, takes the players right there. One player plays Jack the Ripper, and his goal is to take five victims before being caught. The other players are police detectives who must cooperate to catch Jack the Ripper before the end of the game. The game board represents the Whitechapel area at the time of Jack the Ripper and is marked with 199 numbered circles linked together by dotted lines. During play, Jack the Ripper, the Policemen, and the Wretched are moved along the dotted lines that represent Whitechapel’s streets. Jack the Ripper moves stealthily between numbered circles, while policemen move on their patrols between crossings, and the Wretched wander alone between the numbered circles.

The card game with ever changing rules! It starts out simple, with just the Basic Rule card: draw one card and play one card during each player’s turn. But New Rule cards quickly make things chaotic.

Even the object of the game will often change as you play, as players swap out one Goal card for another. Can you get the Rocket to the Moon before someone changes the goal to Death by Chocolate?

Once Upon a Time is the award-winning storytelling card game that encourages creativity and collaborative play. One player is the Storyteller, and begins telling a story using the fairytale elements on her Story cards, guiding the plot toward her Ending Card. The other players use their own cards to interrupt her and become the new Storyteller. The winner is the first player to use all her Story Cards and play her Ending Card. The object of the game, though, isn’t just to win, but to have fun telling a story together.

Gauntlet of Fools is an adventure game of skill and fortune for 2-6 that plays in under 30 minutes. Choose your hero from hundreds of possible combinations. You’ll make ridiculous boasts to get the best hero – but every boast comes at a cost. How awesome is your knight with a flaming sword after you boast that he’ll fight blindfolded with a hangover?

You’ll find out in the gauntlet: fifty encounters that will kill you. That’s right. You will die, fool! But even a fool wants his gold, and the monsters have it. Roll a handful of dice, slay a monster, get its treasure. Die with the most gold to win the game.

Here I Stand: Wars of the Reformation 1517-1555 is the first game in over 25 years to cover the political and religious conflicts of early 16th Century Europe. Few realize that the greatest feats of Martin Luther, John Calvin, Ignatius Loyola, Henry VIII, Charles V, Francis I, Suleiman the Magnificent, Ferdinand Magellan, Hernando Cortes, and Nicolaus Copernicus all fall within this narrow 40-year period of history. This game covers all the action of the period using a unique card-driven game system that models both the political and religious conflicts of the period on a single point-to-point map.

There are six main powers in the game, each with a unique path to victory :

The Ottomans
The Habsburgs
The English
The Valois Dynasty of France
The Papacy
The Protestants

Here I Stand is the first card-driven game to prominently feature secret deal-making. A true six-sided diplomatic struggle, the game places a heavy emphasis on successful alliance-building through negotiations that occur away from the table during the pre-turn Diplomacy Phase. Set during the period in which Niccolò Machiavelli published his masterpiece “The Prince,” backstabbing is always possible, especially because the card deck is loaded with event and response cards that can be played by any power to disrupt the plans of the powers in the lead.

Here I Stand integrates religion, politics, economics and diplomacy in a card-driven design. Games vary in length from 3-4 hours for a tournament scenario up to full campaign games that run about twice the time. Rules to play games with 3, 4, or 5 players are also included. The 3-player game is just as well balanced as the standard 6-player configuration, taking advantage of the natural alliances of the period.

In Augustus, you will vie with your fellow players to complete “objective” cards for special powers and ultimately for victory points. Each card has 2-6 symbols which you must populate with legionnaire meeples in order to complete the card. These symbols are drawn one at a time from a bag, with all player gaining the benefit equally, but interestingly, there are more of some symbols than others.

So the pivotal skill you’ll deploy is in making your choice of which three objectives you’ll start the game with (you’re dealt six) — balancing potential difficulty of completion against value of the reward — and then which of five available objectives you’ll add to your plate each time you complete one of your three. The game ends when someone completes seven. So there’s real strategy but the game is still ruled by luck of the draw.

Beautifully illustrated, about 30 minutes to play, and already a favorite for many families, Augustus is one of the nominees for the 2013 Spiele des Jahres.

Coup

Keyflower

Warrior Knights

Oss

Letters from Whitechapel

Fluxx

Once Upon a Time

Gauntlet of Fools

Here I Stand

Augustus

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