Action Retrieval

Rewild: South America

Rewild: South America is a unique, medium-weight, card-driven, engine-building board game for nature enthusiasts with a heart for wildlife that can be enjoyed in 45-60 minutes.

The thematic focus of Rewild is on the fauna and flora of the South American ecoregions Caatinga, Gran Chaco, Cerrado, Pantanal, Amazon rainforest and Atlantic rainforest. These 6 ecoregions and all their inhabitants exhibit diverse interrelationships and dependencies. One of the core concerns of game author Bruno Liguori Sia, who lives in Brazil himself, was to depict and convey this complex network in a game.

In terms of game mechanics, Rewild has a straightforward foundation. On their turn, each player plays a card and chooses one of two depicted actions. After carrying out this action, the player can attract animals and plants on display to their ecosystem. As soon as a player has 8 (or 9) face-up animal cards in front of them, the end of the game is triggered.

However, you shouldn't be fooled by this essentially simple basis, as every game of Rewild features countless decisions and plays differently every time due to the enormous variety of cards. Questions that players are faced with include:
How do I generate enough resources (water, minerals, seeds) to expand my ecosystem? Where do I place which biomes so that their effects optimally promote the expansion of my ecosystem? Do I focus on one biome or several? Would it make sense to upgrade my existing biomes?
When do I get all my action cards back into my hand to have more options and resources available again? Do I do this once, twice or even three times and what are my opponents planning? Will I still have enough time to play all my cards in time for them to count towards the effects of my animal cards?
Which animal and plant cards do I bring into my ecosystem to create an optimally linked ecosystem that generates as many victory points as possible? Are there any cards with immediate effects that would be interesting for a retrigger? Do I keep an animal species until the end, or do I immediately generate points by making it the target of a predator?
The player who best answers and masters all these questions in a game of Rewild receives the most victory points and wins the game.

La Patisserie Rococo

Welcome back to the Rococo era! Louis XV reigns in France and is hosting a grand festival in the gardens of Versailles. Everyone is clamoring for you to provide tantalizing and delicious pastries for the event. This isn't just about your pâtisserie – it's about creating a presence at the most prestigious festival of the era that provides the chance to gain everlasting fame, prestige, and opportunities to gain favor with important nobles.

In La Pâtisserie Rococo, players represent the pastry shops (les pâtisseries) and pastry chefs (les pâtissiers) that are preparing pastries for sale and for show at the Versailles Garden Festival. Using the unique deck-building mechanism from Rococo, players hire staff to create recipes, acquire quality ingredients, and bake delicious desserts. Then comes the challenging decision of whether to sell these delectable creations for profit or present them for possible awards. The player who creates the most acclaimed desserts will gain fame and the respect of the king and his nobles.

Mission: Red Planet (Second/Third Edition)

With technology rapidly developing and the human population growing, Victorian-era Earth is in dire need of fuel, land, and other natural resources. Fortunately, automated probes sent to Mars have discovered celerium, an ore that can be combusted to produce ten thousand times more power than a steam engine, and sylvanite, the densest substance ever found. More incredibly, the probes found ice that could be used in terraforming the planet, bringing the idea of colonizing Mars even closer to becoming a reality.

As the head of a mining corporation, these minerals and ice found on Mars could make you unfathomably wealthy – if you can reach them before your competitors. You have ten rounds to send your astronauts into space, occupy the planet's most resource-rich zones, and harvest as much celerium, sylvanite, and ice as possible. At your command is a team of nine professionals. Each has a unique skill set, from helping your astronauts traverse the Red Planet to blowing up spaceships before they launch.

In each round in Mission: Red Planet, players start by secretly deploying one of their character cards, with this card determining both when they place astronauts on the spaceships awaiting launch to Mars and which special action they take during the round. Each spaceship has a specified destination, and until an astronaut sets foot in a region, no one knows which resource they'll find. Players collect resources (worth points) three times during the game, and they each have a secret mission card that might grant them additional points at game's end. During the game, players might acquire an additional mission or a research card that changes the value of what awaits on Mars.

The 2015 edition of Mission: Red Planet features the same gameplay as the original 2005 edition, but it includes:

Components for up to six players instead of five
Special two-player variant rules
New action cards and revised mission and discovery cards
Mars' moon Phobos as a new zone that astronauts can explore before possibly returning to the planet itself

Undergrove

For over 300 million years, trees have traded nutrients with fungi in a vast underground network. Scientists continue to make new discoveries about this hidden world.

In Undergrove, you are a towering evergreen with an ancient symbiotic connection to the fungi in your forest. As new mushrooms appear, your options expand for converting nutrients and helping your seedlings. Using cube conversion, tile placement, area control, and a tiny bit of engine building, you’ll need to claim the most advantageous locations and optimize your actions to leave the best legacy in the forest. The player with the greatest number of successful seedlings, wins!

● Build a shared forest containing mushrooms with diverse abilities.
● Trade with the mushrooms to get resources based on the partnerships you’ve made.
● Place your seedings in the most advantageous positions to score the most points.

Inspired by real mycorrhizal trading networks. Shape the destiny of your forest with every decision!

-description from publisher

Scholars of the South Tigris

Scholars of the South Tigris is set during the height of the Abbasid Caliphate, circa 830 AD. The Caliph has called upon the keenest minds to acquire scientific manuscripts from all over the known world. Players will need to increase their influence in the House of Wisdom, and hire skilled linguists to translate the foreign scrolls into Arabic. In this Golden Age of wisdom and knowledge, be mindful not to neglect one in pursuit of the other.

The aim of Scholars of the South Tigris is to be the player with the most victory points (VP) at the game’s end. Points are gained by translating scrolls, increasing knowledge in various areas of science and mathematics, influencing the 3 guilds, and by retiring translators after their years of faithful service. The game end is triggered once all 4 caliph cards have been revealed.

—description from the publisher