Dice Rolling

The year is 1926, and it is the height of the Roaring Twenties. Flappers dance till dawn in smoke-filled speakeasies, drinking alcohol supplied by rum runners and the mob. It’s a celebration to end all celebrations in the aftermath of the War to End All Wars.

Yet a dark shadow grows in the city of Arkham. Alien entities known as Ancient Ones lurk in the emptiness beyond space and time, writhing at the thresholds between worlds. Occult rituals must be stopped and alien creatures destroyed before the Ancient Ones make our world their ruined dominion.

Only a handful of investigators stand against the Arkham Horror. Will they prevail?

Arkham Horror (Third Edition) is a cooperative board game for one to six players who take on the roles of investigators trying to rid the world of eldritch beings known as Ancient Ones. Based on the works of H.P. Lovecraft, players will have to gather clues, defeat terrifying monsters, and find tools and allies if they are to stand any chance of defeating the creatures that dwell just beyond the veil of our reality.

The game is split into a series of rounds made up of four phases.

The Action Phase
The Monster Phase
The Encounter Phase
The Mythos Phase

The Action Phase sees your investigators fighting back against the dark power of the mythos. During this phase, each investigator can perform two different actions.

Move – Investigators can move up to two spaces in the city, spending money to hire speedy transport and move additional spaces. The space where you end your turn will determine what encounter card you draw later in the turn.
Gather Resources – Gain one dollar token, which can be used to purchase items and goods as well as increase how far you can move
Focus – Focus one of your skills, increasing its value.
Ward – Attempt to remove doom from your location. Increasing doom means danger for the investigators, and removing doom can delay these apocalyptic heraldings.
Attack – Attack a monster engaged with you.
Evade – Try to escape from a monster engaged with you.
Research – Search for clues at your location.
Trade – Trade money, clues, items, and more with other investigators at your location.

—description from the publisher

City of Gears is a unique steampunk game of exploration, area control, worker placement, and engine building. From your incredible Factory, you must race to claim ownership over the magnificent ruins of an abandoned clockwork metropolis. Each game plays in under an hour, and because only nine of the city tiles (from dozens available) are randomly chosen and placed each game, no two games ever play the same.

Each turn, you roll a number of production dice and activate City Tiles, then you move your automaton workers and perform a variety of actions (such as drawing and placing gears to reactivate areas of the city, sabotaging opponents, and activating unique steam powers) as determined by your resources. Along the way, you will develop your Factory with special powers which set it apart and provide you with powerful bonuses.

As the city is revealed and its abilities are discovered, players must concoct plans to accrue prestige and hinder opponents so that once Opening Day arrives, they will emerge victorious! Do you have what it takes to set the City of Gears in motion?

Description from the publisher:

In the future, robots battle it out to the amusement of humans, and in DiceBot MegaFun players are the robots who must reach into the junkyard to grab dice displaying various parts and place them on their robot sheet. Each player places six parts dice onto their sheet: five in the body area and one in the head.

Then players simultaneously choose weapon cards to play, which require the parts retrieved from the junkyard. Each weapon card has a cost in parts to pay as well as speed, direction of fire and damage, and an occasional special text ability. Some weapon cards include uzis, lasers, rifles, bombs, jammers, viruses, blue shells, shields, etc. Be the first robot to win three combats!

For advanced play, each player is given a special ability activated by kill points, which are acquired by dealing the final blows to robots in combat.

In one day and night, the island of Atlantis has been overwhelmed beneath the sea. The greater city of Atlantis is about to sink. You, as the last Atlanteans, have to save as much wealth as possible before you flee the fury of the elements. The clock in the center of the city shows the remaining time before the end. But because of the cataclysm, the gates between the locations are broken down. They open and close randomly. Collecting goods will not be so easy...

The mechanisms in Atlandice are unique, but simple. On their turn, a player chooses one of the available dice, which is, in fact, a gate. This gate brings the player to a location; in this location are randomly distributed resources and effects. The effects are randomly dispatched with tiles at the beginning of the game, so that each game will be different! Effects can help the player or can interfere with other players' plans. Earn prestige by collecting more resources than your opponents, both at the key moments of the game and at the end...

—description from the publisher

In Dinosaur Island, players will have to collect DNA, research the DNA sequences of extinct dinosaur species, and then combine the ancient DNA in the correct sequence to bring these prehistoric creatures back to life. Dino cooking! All players will compete to build the most thrilling park each season, and then work to attract (and keep alive!) the most visitors each season that the park opens.

Do you go big and create a pack of Velociraptors? They'll definitely excite potential visitors, but you'd better make a large enough enclosure for them. And maybe hire some (read: a lot of) security. Or they WILL break out and start eating your visitors, and we all know how that ends. You could play it safe and grow a bunch of herbivores, but then you aren't going to have the most exciting park in the world (sad face). So maybe buy a roller coaster or two to attract visitors to your park the good old-fashioned way?