Area Majority / Influence

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

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

Publisher's summary

Rumble Nation — first released as 天下鳴動 (Tenka Meidou) — is an area control dice game and the 2018 Tokyo Game Market Awards Grand Prize winner.

You are Warlords during the Sengoku Era, the Civil War. Aim for supremacy in Japan by contending for its 11 Castles.
Three dice determine where the soldiers are deployed. Tactic cards are your trump to control the course of the war. Wisdom and luck are your keys for dominance.
Sparks spray from one battle to another, setting the nation on fire. Keep an eye on the reinforcement chains or use them to your benefit and turn defeat into victory.
- Contend for the 11 Castles in the nation.
- Roll the dice to send out soldiers.
- Aim for continuous victory with the reinforcements.

Caesar and Cleopatra is a card laying game where players assume the roles of these two great leaders. Caesar wants Rome to invade Egypt while Cleopatra wants it to remain independent and both try to influence Roman officials to support their cause.

Players take turns and send their agents, i.e. play numbered cards from 1 to 5 to influence one group of Roman officials, Aedils, Quaestors, Senators, Pretorians and Censors. They can send fewer agents face-down or more agents face-up. Additionally they can play action cards like Assassins that take out opposing agents or scouts that reveal face-down agents. Players can decide if they want to refill their hand from the agent deck or the action card deck but once one of the decks is empty they don't have access to any more of these cards.

After each players turn, a card from the voting stack is revealed and the group of officials that is indicated on the card casts their vote. The player who has the most influence points next to that group wins one official from that group to his cause and then removes his strongest agent from that stack.

The game ends when all the officials have picked a side and the player who has influenced most of them wins the game, with bonus points for the majority in each group and some simple hidden objectives.

In Nestlings, players assume the role of birds competing to gain priority across four biomes: savannah, alpine, freshwater, and desert.

Each round, players roll their biome dice, then place the dice in biomes one at a time, alternating in clockwise order. Once players have placed all their dice or have chosen to pass for the round, each biome is resolved.

The player who first placed dice in a particular biome gains priority and reaps the rewards of doing so: selecting a resource first, and discarding a resource to thwart their opponents' plans. However, if another player places more of their biome dice in that same biome, that player gains priority. Once priority order has been established for the biome, players each claim resources to feed their nestlings and gain the matching segment to add to their resource ring on their player board.

Once all biomes have been resolved – including the wild grasslands biome in the center of the board – players score points based on how many nestlings they fed and how many segments are in their resource ring, regardless of which round they were assigned.

As the game progresses, the tension rises as players must make key decisions along the way, decisions that could secure victory or usher in defeat. Will they feed their nestlings for more immediate points, or take a different resource to complete a section of their resource ring, thus earning a bonus and triggering a powerful chain reaction? Will they use in-game currency to activate another end-of-game nest goal or save it for victory points? Will they place a second die to secure priority or risk it and head to another biome to take other much-needed scraps?

At the conclusion of round four, the game ends and players reveal their endgame nest goals and tally their points.