Abstract Strategy

Northwest a 2-to-4-player tableau-building game with unique point salad scoring and shared movement mechanics. It can be taught in 3 minutes or less and has the right balance of luck and strategy to make it accessible to anyone.

Each turn, the player drafts a memento cube from the main exploration board by moving the shared exploration token onto the cube and adding it to their tableau. The previously captured memento cube sets the next player's available move:

Bees/Honey: next player must move in the L-Shape similar to the Knights from the Chess.
Mushrooms: next player must move into a space in any of the 8 surrounding spaces.
Ferns: next player must move into 1 of 4 orthogonal spaces.
Maples: next player must move into 1 of 4 diagonal spaces.
Bigfoot: next player may move into any space in the same column or row.

In Northwest, your journey is represented by a 4x4 tableau in which you will track memento cubes drafted from the exploration board. Each memento cube scores victory points (VPs) in a unique way. The game ends when a player cannot make a legal move in the exploration board or all players have their personal tableau filled. The player with the most VP wins!

Can you spot bees, mushrooms, foliage, or the ever-elusive Bigfoot? Your next adventure in the Northwest awaits.

—description from the designer.

Decorate the magnificent ceilings of the palace. Will the vaults look more beautiful by day or by night? Azul Duel invites you to play with light and pit opposites against each other.

This competitive strategic game for two players retains the purity and elegance of the original Azul while adding an extra tactical dimension in which you determine the pattern in which tiles will be placed, in addition to drafting tiles to complete that pattern.

Illimat has the style and flavor of a classic card game with a dynamic twist. As you play, you combine cards and collect them, trying to gather more than your opponents. But hidden Luminaries and changing seasons can alter your plans. Featuring a cloth board, metal tokens, and illustrations by Carson Ellis.

Illimat supports two to four players and a single round takes approximately fifteen minutes. The cloth board is divided into four fields, and the box the game comes in is also a component of the game: it sits in the center of the board and sets the seasons for each field, which affects the actions that can be performed in each field. Turning the box and changing the seasons is a critical part of the strategy of the game.

Illimat has been playtested with devoted gamers and people who haven't played a game in years. The result is a game that's easy to learn, dynamic, and just a little bit addictive.

—description from the publisher

Yama (å±±) is an abstract strategy game inspired one of the classics - Connect Four.

The goal still the same; make a line of four-in-a-row of your color and win. The twist here is that the rotating board of Yama contains triangular slots that stand the cube up on its corner - revealing three sides, each of which can be seen from a different point of view. And it is in one of these three point-of-views in which you must try to form your line of four-in-a-row.

With Yama we strove to design the components such that they convey the rules. The cubes are painted such that no matter how you orient it one side will show a different color to the other two. The way placing three cubes in a cluster forms a valley for placement of the next level which covers up and block your opponent, or cliches your victory. These all contributes to making Yama one of the easiest and most intuitive game to learn.

However the game itself is treacherously easy to lose yet deeply strategic and tactical when played by two equally skilled players. The three dimension aspect of the victory goal and the three dimensional aspect of the cube placement can be very tricky to wrap your head around - leading to surprising twists and turns that belies it simple rules and components.

Chromino – short for "chromatic domino" – challenges players to empty their hand of chromino tiles first. Each such tile has three colors on it laid out in a 1x3 row. At the start of the game, each player takes a hand of eight chrominoes and a special start tile with a wild center square is placed face-up on the table. Each turn, a player either places a chromino from his hand onto the table – with that chromino tile matching at least two colors on adjacent tiles already on the table – or else he draws a new chromino tile from the stock, playing this tile if possible and keeping it otherwise. The first player to empty his hand wins.

Chromino includes variant expert rules.