Animals

In Great Western Trail: Argentina, you own a vast estancia in Argentina at the end of the 19th century, and you will need to travel the plains of the Pampas with your cattle to deliver them to the main train station in Buenos Aires.

Great Western Trail: Argentina features gameplay elements similar to Great Western Trail such as deck management, the rondel mechanism, and the ability to upgrade your player board, along with twists on these elements and new features.

The player board features a new type of worker — farmers — and different paths await on the game board to confront you with more choices. Will you take the road with buildings or a path past farmers? Maybe you'll have the chance to use your cows — well, the strength on your cow cards — to help farmers, getting them on your side and adding grain, a new type of resource, to your income, with grain being used for boat and city tiles.

Perhaps you can unlock shortcuts that allow you to deliver your herd to Buenos Aires more quickly. Sure, you'll forfeit the use of action buildings, but maybe you can catch others unaware, with the ships leaving before they deliver. The timing of reaching the central train station to deliver your herd has never been so crucial, and valuable bonuses await on the city's port tiles.

Money is easier to get in Great Western Trail: Argentina, but you have more to manage in terms of action options, shortcuts, and cards (including the new exhaustion cards), so the challenges won't let up.

Great Western Trail: Argentina also includes a solitaire challenge in which Pedro is waiting for you to try to beat his score.

The Atiwa Range is a region of southeastern Ghana in Africa consisting of steep-sided hills with rather flat summits. A large portion of the range comprises an evergreen forest reserve, which is home to many endangered species. However, logging and hunting for bushmeat, as well as mining for gold and bauxite, are putting the reserve under a lot of pressure.

Meanwhile, in the nearby town of Kibi, the mayor is causing a stir by giving shelter to a large number of fruit bats in his own garden. This man has recognized the great value the animals have in deforested regions of our planet: Fruit bats sleep during the day and take off at sunset in search of food, looking for suitable fruit trees up to sixty miles away. They excrete the seeds of the consumed fruit, disseminating them across large areas as they fly home. A single colony of 150,000 fruit bats can reforest an area of up to two thousand acres a year.

Just like that mayor, in Atiwa, you know that fruit bats — once scorned and hunted as mere fruit thieves — are in fact incredibly useful animals, spreading seeds over large areas of the country. By doing so, they help to reforest fallow land and, in the medium term, improve harvests. This realization has led to a symbiotic co-operation between fruit bats and fruit farmers. The animals are kept as "pets" to increase the size of fruit farms more quickly. Tall trees are left as roosts, providing shelter for them rather than hunting them for their scant meat. However, if you have a lot of fruit bats, you need a lot of space...

In the game, you will develop a small community near the Atiwa Range, creating housing for new families and sharing your newly gained knowledge on the negative effects of mining and the importance that the fruit bats have for the environment. You must acquire new land, manage your animals and resources, and make your community prosper. The player who best balances the needs of their community and the environment wins.

A deceptively cute, deceivingly challenging abstract strategy game for two players.

Every time you place a kitten on the bed, it goes “boop.” Which is to say that it pushes every other kitten on the board one space away. Line up three kittens in a row to graduate them into cats… and then, get three cats in a row to win.

But that isn’t easy with both you AND your opponent constantly “booping” kittens around. It’s like… herding cats!
Can you “boop” your cats into position to win?
Or will you just get “booped” right off the bed?

Approachable but challenging abstract game and a worthy follow-up to SHOBU. Plays in 20 to 30 minutes.
Features a quilted, fabric board that lays over the back of the box, completing the miniature bed playing surface. 8 wood kittens and cats per player - 32 adorable cat pieces in all!

In Mountain Goats you work to move your goats to the top of 6 different mountains where they can score points as long as they stay there. You can share spaces with other goats on the way up, but there is only room for one goat at the top of each mountain. If someone else's goat moves to the mountain top, they will kick you off and you'll have to start your trek over.

It's a game about timing. You need to not just get to the top of the mountain, but get there when no one else is in position to knock you off.

It's a game about keeping your eye on your opponents. Maximizing your score, but also making sure you don't let anyone else score too much.

There is the fun chance to knock each other off the mountain. But it doesn't feel too mean because you can only knock back goats that are in a scoring position, and it isn't a huge setback. It is just a normal part of the cycle of the game.

—description from the publisher

Break your flock of chickapigs free while dodging opponents, hay bales, and an unruly pooping cow in this strategic board game.

The first player to get their six chickapigs off the board wins. You must coordinate your chickapigs, hay bales, and the cow to help your chickapigs escape through their goal. At the same time, play defense against your opponents with your pieces, or use the cow to drop a poop in their way. Whenever someone goes over a poop, they must take a poop card which are always bad. There are also daisy cards, which are always good.

Chickapig is an abstract game with enough chance to keep everyone competitive.