family

Candy Land

A child can begin by just recognizing basic colors. Each player advances along the rainbow path through the peppermint stick forest, the gingerbread plum tree and the gumdrop mountain. The players use the plastic gingerbread man as the playing pieces. There are colorful pieces in four colors and cards.

“The Legend of the Lost Candy Castle” is printed inside the box and can be read out loud. The game parts can be stored below it. The game board is colorful and has lots of yummy candy references. You play the game by moving the gingerbread playing pieces on the gameboard spaces that match the colors and pictures of the drawn cards. The object is to be the first player to reach the candy castle. There are specific directions to play. You can play with one color block, two color blocks and picture cards. If you are the first person to reach the last purple space, or move beyond the last purple space, you reach candy castle and have won the game. There are barriers along the way, like the gooey gumdrops, getting lost in the lollipop woods, or stuck in the molasses swamp.

North Wind

In the adventure game North Wind, cities are suffering heavily under constant raids from pirates. As freelance trade captains, the players bring food and other goods to the cities, in addition to fighting the pirates whenever they encounter them. Fighting without cannons leads to poor results, however, and cannons are expensive. With each success, though, a player can better equip his three-dimensional ship and strengthen his crew.

In the end, the player who finds the best mix of trading and fighting will prove to be the victorious captain.

Blueprints

In Blueprints, players are architects who must use different colored dice to build three different structures from blueprints, with the dice providing different advantages to you. In the game, each round progresses like this:

Discover your blueprint.
Each turn, choose a die and place it in your building.
Reveal your building, tally your points, then discover who wins the awards and prizes.

After three rounds, players tally their awards and prizes to see who wins. Who will be the best architect?

1000 Mille Bornes

One Thousand Milestones. On French roads there are small marker stones giving the distance in kilometres to the next town. In this famous old French card game, players compete to drive 1000 km, dealing with hazards along the way. Draw a card to your hand, play or discard. You must lay a green traffic light to start, play cards showing mileage, dump hazards (flat tire, speed limit) on the other players, remedy hazards (spare tire, end of limit) from yourself, play safety cards (puncture proof), and try to be the first to clock up the distance.

Saint Malo

Developer Stefan Brück at alea describes Saint Malo as "a light, dice-rolling strategy game in which the players draw their own city buildings, walls, and people on wipe-off boards".

In more detail, in Saint Malo players roll five dice to gain various resources; combinations of dice create enhancements like characters or buildings, which can provide additional victory points, money, or special actions, such as altering the outcome of a die roll. Players draw symbols for their holdings on erasable boards showing a grids of their cities to create individual towns. Players could build storehouses on particular squares, for example, then place a merchant nearby to gain money each turn. Another important character is the soldier; players must acquire these to defend themselves from pirate attacks that can decimate their towns.

Saint Malo rates a 2 out of 10 on Alea's difficulty scale.