Card Game

In Continental Express, players add train cars to their station in the hope of fulfilling objectives and maximizing the value of their secret contract. To start the game, each player chooses one of two contract cards dealt to them; these contracts require players to collect icons of a particular color or groups of like-colored icons or icons and company tokens of differing colors.

Players then take turns drafting cards from three face-up rows; the card on the end of each row costs nothing, the card in the middle costs $1, and the card closest to each of the three decks costs $2. Players start with no money, however, and the only way to get some is to draft it – but naturally that means you'll be forgoing other cards. If a player has train cars matching one of the three face-up objective cards, he can choose to discard those train cars and claim the objective – and since the objectives have the icons that satisfy contracts, you'll probably want to do that.

In addition to train cars and money, players can draft characters, taking the special action of a character when he drafts one. Actions include things like taking a train car of your choice from the card array, stealing all money from one player, and taking a company token of the color of your choice. The card decks also include two events, and those cards flush either the objective cards on display or the smaller cards that players draft.

When a player claims his fourth objective, each other player takes one more turn, then the game ends. Players tally the points scored for their contract (if any), their claimed objective cards, and any money still in hand. Whoever has the highest score wins!

Game description from the publisher:

It is 1926, and the museum's extensive collection of exotic curios and occult artifacts poses a threat to the barriers between our world and the elder evils lurking between dimensions. Gates to the beyond begin to leak open, and terrifying creatures of increasing strength steal through them. Animals, the mad, and those of more susceptible minds are driven to desperation by the supernatural forces the portals unleash. Only a handful of investigators race against time to locate the eldritch symbols necessary to seal the portals forever. Only they can stop the Ancient One beyond from finding its way to Earth and reducing humanity to cinders.

Elder Sign is a fast-paced, cooperative dice game of supernatural intrigue for one to eight players by Richard Launius and Kevin Wilson, the designers of Arkham Horror. Players take the roles of investigators racing against time to stave off the imminent return of the Ancient One. Armed with tools, allies, and occult knowledge, investigators must put their sanity and stamina to the test as they adventure to locate Elder Signs, the eldritch symbols used to seal away the Ancient Ones and win the game.

To locate Elder Signs, investigators must successfully endure Adventures within the museum and its environs. A countdown mechanism makes an Ancient One appear if the investigators are not quick enough. The investigators must then battle the Ancient One. A clever and thematic dice mechanism pits their exploration against monsters and the sheer difficulty of staying sane and healthy, all within the standard game duration of one to two hours.

Enter the magical world of adventure of Corto Maltese, the hero from the fertile imagination of Hugo Pratt. Choose your adventures, then live through them as the game unfolds. Aided by Corto and resisting Rasputin's attempts to thwart your plans, recruit your own bands of adventurers and get your hands on gold at the end of the story!

Corto is a card-based adventure game that mixes tactics and luck. To set up the game, choose four of the six quests, then place the appropriate quest boards next to one another on the table; each quest (attack the train of Russian gold, research the four aces of whale bones, meet the leopard-men, etc.) has its own deck of character and object cards that's shuffled and placed on the left side of the board. Reveal the top character from each deck, take turns placing one of your tokens on any character, then draw four cards from any combination of decks for your starting hand.

On a turn, you can either discard any number of cards and fill your hand to four cards or you can play 1-4 cards. If you play a character card, place it on an empty space on the quest board of the same color, making sure that it's adjacent to at least one other character. Place a token on the card, then either add a token to or remove an opponent's token from an adjacent character depending on the character's border color (denoting a friend of Corto or associate of Rasputin). You can also play objects on the character to affect adjacent cards. Some characters and objects have long range effects that hit any character in the same column or row. Hit a character that has no tokens, and you remove it from the board, counting it as 1 gold at the end of the game. If you played cards, end your turn by drawing two cards.

Players can also move Corto and Rasputin directly, using them to block spaces on the quest board, claim gold immediately, or eliminate characters.

In addition to having its own mix of characters, objects and advantages, each quest has a different treasure waiting for players to nab. For "The Wreck of the Fortune Royale", you need to be the first to claim the aces in order to claim all the treasure for yourself; for "Admiral Kolchak's Bullion Train", if you attack the train — which moves across the quest boards as players lay down cards — you claim one of the train car tokens, which might have gold on it; for "On the Track of the Leopard Men", whoever has a majority of tokens on certain characters at the end of the game gains control of markers that might enhance their network of characters.

When two quests are fully occupied or the players run out of cards, the game ends. In addition to scoring for the gold and treasures they've collected during the game, each player scores 2 gold per character in the largest group of characters he controls and 1 gold per character for smaller groups. Whoever ends up with the most gold wins!

When venturing in Limbo at the edge of the galaxy, scouts found a new form of energy: Titanium. First experiments showed it could push back the frontiers of technology, and even open new horizons for human capabilities. This news was more than enough to stir up the greed of humankind's greatest factions. Each has sent fleets to take over nearby planets where Titanium is abundant – and even seems to be in constant expansion. From that point on, armed conflicts were bound to happen, and this war will be settled only by controlling the Titanium deposits...

As leaders of these great factions in Titanium Wars, players will purchase buildings to master new technologies and increase their earnings, build their own fleet of custom battleships to defeat their opponents, and expand their space empire. They will have to prove bold, insightful and tactful if they want any chance to win this fierce war.

Madame Ching is a hand-management game in which 2-4 players try to put together voyages that take their ships far across the waters, possibly all the way to Hong Kong.

Each player starts the game with four cards in hand, each card having a number from 1 to 50-something; the cards have a colored bar across the top, often with a symbol in them. In the first round, each player lays down a card, drafts one of the available cards, then moves one of her ships to the right on the ocean. Players then repeat this process, possibly starting a new journey — a.k.a., new row of played cards — or adding to the journey already begun by playing a higher-valued card that what was last played. In the latter case, if the color of the card matches the color of the card previously played, the ship moves directly to the right; otherwise the ship moves both down and right.

When a player can't add to a journey any more and must start a new one, she scores that voyage, possibly claiming one of the ship tiles on display based on the length of the voyage. (Each space on the game board's ocean has values on it, and the more times you move both down and right, the higher your score overall — doing this is more difficult than you'd hope for, however, since you must consistently have cards that are both of higher value and different color.) Each ship bears some combination of gems, and those are worth points at the end of the game.

If you have certain symbols on a voyage, you can claim bonus action cards that let you steal gems or cards from opponents, take cards from the discard pile, insert cards in a voyage, and so on. Get the right symbols, and you can claim the Madame Ching vessel, ending the game. Players then tally their points for destinations, gems, and so forth, and whoever has the highest score wins.