Dice Rolling

This entry covers the 2002 release of Sid Meier´s Civilization: The Boardgame by Eagle Games. This game is unrelated to the similarly named 2010 FFG game Sid Meier's Civilization: The Board Game.

A boardgame version of the award-winning PC strategy game. Create a civilization to stand the test of time! The game begins in 4000 BC where the players found a pair of villages of a fledgling people.

Each player’s civilization :

Explores the world around them, discovering resources and the native people that defend them.
Expands by sending settlers out to create new cities.
Researches new technologies to gain advantages over the other players.
Builds unique “Wonders of the World”.
Increases the size of their cities (4 sizes from village to metropolis) to increase production.
Builds military units to defend what’s theirs, and to conquer what’s not.

Features:

2 sets of rules (standard, and advanced) allow anyone to play the game.
784 plastic pieces featuring 22 different, professionally sculpted playing pieces that represent cities, settlers, armies, navies, artillery, and air units from 4 different eras.
Over 100 full color Technology and Wonder cards.
A giant 46” x 36” gameboard featuring the artwork of Paul Niemeyer.

This game has been reimplemented in 2007 as Civilization CHR ("open source" project)

Players control one of the great scientists during the 17th century Scientific Revolution in Europe. Use your limited time and energy to make discoveries, test hypotheses, publish papers, correspond with other famous scientists, hire assistants into your laboratory and network with other people who can help your progress. Discoveries follow historical tech trees in the key sciences of the age: Astronomy, Mathematics, Physics, Biology and Chemistry. The scientist who accumulates the most prestige will be appointed the first President of the Royal Society.

Waking up in an empty hospital after weeks in a coma, sheriff's deputy Rick Grimes finds himself utterly alone. The world as he knows it is gone, ravaged by a zombie epidemic.

The Walking Dead Board Game is based on the AMC television series, The Walking Dead. The zombie apocalypse is here and the human race is on its last legs. As a survivor, you need to collect all the food, guns, transportation, and allies you can find - but watch out! If any of your fellow survivors get bitten, they'll turn into walkers... and turn against you.

Players take on the role of Rick, Shane, Andrea or one of the other stalwart remnants of humanity as they struggle to survive while learning to live with one another. Innovative gameplay can lead to unexpected alliances, as "every man for himself" blends with cooperative play and players race to get back to camp alive. Ever-dwindling resources make every decision "life or death" ... and as the supplies run out, the tension ramps up in this post-apocalyptic world.

You can play as Survivors and Walkers! Create unexpected alliances to get back to camp alive, blasting zombies with shotguns or crossbows – or stalk your former friends as a risen corpse.

This easy-to-learn game includes two scenarios: Survival Mode and Team Game.

Space Empires is a game in the finest tradition of 4X space games - eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, and eXterminate. Each player builds up a space empire and uses it to conquer the other players. Exploration on the mounted map is simple for players (and dangerous for their ships), revealing different space terrain that affects movement and combat.
Space Empires was developed to keep a rich theme without overcomplicated rules. The game includes carriers and fighters, mines, cloaking, a very large technology tree, fifteen ship classes, merchant shipping, colonization, mining, terraforming, bases, shipyards, black holes, warp points, and non-player aliens. Yet the rules are short and intuitive: The basic rules are 8 pages long and increase to 11 pages in length when the advanced rules are included.

Star Trek: Catan takes two well-known media properties and merges them into, well, into something that is 95% The Settlers of Catan glossed with Trek tropes and spiced with a Trek-themed version of a mini-expansion previously only available in German.

In Star Trek: Catan, players start the game with two small Outposts at the intersection of three planets, with each planet supplying resources based on the result of a dice roll. Players collect and trade these resources – dilithium, tritanium, food, oxygen and water – in order to build Starships that connect regions in the galaxy, establish more Outposts and Starbases (upgraded Outposts) at new intersection points in order to increase resource acquisition, and acquire Development Cards that provide Victory Points (VPs) or special abilities.

On a dice roll of 7, a Klingon ship swoops in to prevent resource production on one planet while taxing spacegoers who hold too many resources.

Star Trek: Catan differs from the basic Settlers in one aspect: a set of Support Cards formerly available only in German as Catan Scenarios: Helpers of Catan. Each Support Card features a special ability and one of Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Sulu, Scott, Uhura, Chekov, Chapel, Rand, or Sarek. Some special abilities make basic actions better, such as reducing the costs of Starbase upgrades or allowing the player to trade a resource of their choice at 2:1 for a turn, while others break rules, such as protecting the player from discarding on a 7 or producing a resource when the player rolls a number that wouldn't otherwise produce for them. Players get a specific Support Card during setup based on turn order, with later players getting generally more useful abilities to compensate for early player advantage. When a player uses a Support Card ability for the first time, they may trade it in for a Support Card of their choice or keep it for a second use, but they may only trade immediately after use.