Animals

User summary
ことりファイト! (Birdie Fight) is card game about birds trying to achieve dominance in the forest. Each bird is a different colour in the game.

Players are forest spirits, trying to secretly guide their chosen bird to success. The cards are numbered 1 to 7 in red, blue, green and white. The players lay a card from their hand to a 5x5 grid after nut tokens (points) are laid out for each row and column.

When the grid is full of cards, the rows and columns are checked. The colour with the highest total in a line takes the nut token for that bird. Colours with tied totals are ignored, so a low value card can win the nut token for that bird.

When the nuts are totalled up for the birds, the players reveal their final hand card. That card is the bird they favoured (so more than one player might be helping the same bird), and for each player, the number on the card is added to the nut total to identify who has the dominant bird.

Since the players choose which bird they favour by leaving it as their final hand card, they can delay this choice until they see how the game is panning out.

The game rules come in Japanese and English, the game itself being language free. The game includes rules for 2-4 players or a solitaire/co-op mode for 1-2 players.

What are all those animals scared of? Well, it’s really simple: the mouse is scared of the cat, the cat is scared of the dog, the dog is scared of the elephant. And what is the giant elephant scared of? The tiny mouse, of course!

Scare It! is a simple, fast-playing family game of scaring animals off the table. At the start of the game, you receive two secret objective cards: one with an animal type, and one with a color. On your turn, you choose an animal to be scared off, and an animal to do the scaring. When a number of animals have run away in panic, everyone reveals their secret animal and color cards, then scores points for what's left on the table.

In Mole Rats in Space, you and your teammates are mole rats on a research station that has been invaded by snakes. You need to collect your equipment and escape the station before you're bit or time runs out.

On a turn, you carry out the instructions on the card in front of you, perhaps moving yourself or your teammates, moving one or more snakes, or adding a new snake to the board. Land on the bottom of a ladder, and the character (or snake) advances one level toward the escape pod; land on a chute, and you descend a level — or are shot out into the vast reaches of space where you die slowly of asphyxiation. Make sure that only snakes suffer this fate or you lose the game!

If you land on a snake, you're bit and must return to your starting location; get bit a second time, and you die. Run out of cards, you die. Let a snake board the escape pod, you die. In case that threat of death isn't enough for you, the game includes a pack of cards to add to the deck once you've triumphed a few times so that you can increase the challenge.

Designer: Matt Leacock
Artist: Jim Paillot

Astoria is a land bustling with productivity and growth! New towns, factories, and railroads are springing up across the land. A few savvy business tycoons (you and your opponents) are determined to make your fortunes on the crest of this wave. These tycoons start out as the producers of the key commodities: wheat to feed the growing towns and factories, wood and iron to build them, coal to fuel the trains and factories, and manufactured goods and luxuries to fill the insatiable demand of the animals of Astoria.

Cornering the market for the most valuable commodities can create small fortunes that can be invested in the new businesses, turning them into huge fortunes. The sky is the limit during this Gilded Age!

In Raccoon Tycoon, players try to produce the most valuable commodities in an ever-changing marketplace. They then use those commodities to build towns, or sell them at the best price to secure great profits that can be used to win auctions for the all-important railroads. The profits may also be used to buy powerful buildings that give the players power-ups or bonuses in production. Owning the best towns and railroads determines victory. There can be only one "top dog" in Astoria. Is it you?

You are the mayor of a tiny town in the forest in which the smaller creatures of the woods have created a civilization hidden away from predators. This new land is small and the resources are scarce, so you take what you can get and never say no to building materials. Cleverly plan and construct a thriving town, and don't let it fill up with wasted resources! Whoever builds the most prosperous tiny town wins!

In Tiny Towns, your town is represented by a 4x4 grid on which you will place resource cubes in specific layouts to construct buildings. Each building scores victory points (VPs) in a unique way. When no player can place any more resources or construct any buildings, the game ends, and any squares without a building are worth -1 VP. The player with the most VP wins!

-description from publisher