City Building

Relive the dawn of modern New York City, the historic years that made it what it is today. Build bigger and higher skyscrapers on some of Lower Manhattan's most iconic streets. Raise one of four legendary skyscrapers — the Park Row, the Singer, the Metropolitan Life, or the majestic Woolworth — and make one of them the crown jewel of your real estate empire!

In New York 1901, the players are building skyscrapers on a map of New York's Financial District. Players take location cards from a cards' display and then use 2-3 of those location cards to place tetris-shaped building tiles on the board. They first build bronze level buildings. Later in the game those buildings can be replaced by silver level and then gold level buildings.

Spyrium is set in an alternate world, an England set in a steampunk-based universe. Players build factories, needing workers to manage the production of a commodity previously unknown to us called "Spyrium". Producing Spyrium in one factory, then processing it in the next results in victory points (VPs) for that particular player. Alternatively, Spyrium can be purchased, but the material is rare and expensive, and players are constantly scraping for money.

Only those who from the beginning of the game manage to increase their regular income or their base of permanently employed workers (who can be used again and again to raise money) will be flexible enough to get their hands on the important end-of-game buildings to generate many VPs.

The circular nature of the game is flexible as each player can decide for himself when to move out of the placement phase and into the activation phase. With the two tracks in the game, those involved with delivery during the worker phase can then be used to raise money, to purchase an adjacent card, or to work on their own in an idle factory. All of these things are important, but in the end only the player who has dealt best with the lack of money, workers and Spyrium will win.

Carcassonne: the Castle takes place in the city of Carcassone itself. The theme is development of the city within the "castle walls", which might be more appropriately called the city walls, but Carcassonne: The City was apparently already in development.

It is not an expansion, but a stand-alone tile-placement game with the Carcassonne mechanics adapted specially for two players. The goal is to lead the race around the castle wall, which is also the scoring track for the game. There are bonus items on the wall for the first player to reach that point.

Play is very similar to Carcassonne but all the tiles must be played within the walls, which often constrains the choices. The followers used for scoring are heralds (on paths), knights (on towers), squires (on houses) and merchants (on courtyards which are more valuable if they have a market). And, the player with the largest "keep" (largest house completed during the game) scores points for the largest contiguous undeveloped area (unplayed tile spaces) at the end of the game. The bonus tiles collected from the walls add twists to the scoring, such as doubling one of a particular scoring structure or scoring one uncompleted structure.

Humanity has been at each other's throats since time immemorial. Now in another galaxy humans wage war amongst themselves again but this time with the aid of alien technology found on other planets. Ascending Empires offers a nice mixture of building exploring and development along with combat via a simple dexterity element. Ascending Empires is sure to sate the desire for a space empire building game that plays simply yet deeply.

The last survivors of the Human race have fled to a new galaxy in fear of annihilation at the hands of an unstoppable enemy. Now, having discovered the ruins of four long dead civilizations spread across the stars, the race to develop technology based on the alien relics has begun. Humans will once again ascend to the stars to claim the galaxy.

Players will colonize new worlds by building colonies, cities, and research facilities. They will develop new Technologies, and build up fleets of Starships. Ascending Empires is a fast paced game that utilizes a dexterity based Starship movement and combat system, and allows for many different strategies to be explored.

In Western Town, each player is a Marshal of an expanding town in the Old West of the U.S. in the early 1860s. Each Marshal wants to develop the most prosperous town, one that President Lincoln himself would be proud to visit.

The three principal criteria that allow you to win the game are population growth, charm/attractiveness, and wealth, as measured by gold. Turns are regulated by the visits of Lincoln, who determines, bit-by-bit, the value of the towns relative to those three criteria. These criteria can and do change every round, and you will need to adapt to these changing criteria to win this game!

Each player has his own board on which he will be building his town. Every building gives him different, and increasing, rights and abilities, and therefore power. The bigger your town gets, the better – but managing too much growth is challenging, so you'll need to make difficult choices at the beginning of each round as to which buildings you'll bring into play.

This "building-adding" mechanism helps players stay in the game and not get lost in the overwhelming number of choices available. Of 22 different buildings, six of them are identified every round as "bonus" buildings, and players are forced to adapt varying strategies and test new combinations of these buildings for their town as the game progresses.

In addition to logic and strategy, Marshals will need to bluff and occasionally resort to questionably bending the law a bit, to succeed in building their Western Town. And as if that weren't enough, there are even occasional Indian attacks to deal with as well!