Hand Management

Fantasy Flight Games is pleased to announce Exodus, the latest expansion for Battlestar Galactica: The Board Game! With three new options to add to your game, Exodus is a great way to expand on the accusations and mistrust that runs rampant in Battlestar Galactica.

You can choose to add any combination of the three new options included in Exodus. Crave more white-knuckle space dog-fighting? Incorporate the Cylon Fleet option. The Conflicted Loyalties option introduces new Loyalty Cards that will test even the most trustworthy allegiances. Finally, relive the emotional turmoil of the hit television series with the Ionian Nebula, which pits players against the various conflicting personalities aboard Galactica.

The Cylon Fleet option keeps the pressure intense by introducing the Cylon Fleet game board. This board makes sure that every Crisis Card drawn will result in some sort of enemy ship activity. Once the Cylon Pursuit Track reaches the end, the Cylon ships will transfer over to the main game board, surrounding Galactica. There’s little time for rest between assaults, so get out there and protect those civvies, fighter jockeys!

Alliances are put to the test in the Conflicted Loyalties option, where the new Final Five Loyalty Cards up the stakes and introduce penalties for revealing your fellow humans’ Loyalty Card. In addition, new Personal Goal Loyalty Cards present players with an incriminating task to undertake. If they don’t fulfill their goal, then they will cause Galactica to lose a resource at the end of the game. Will you raise suspicion by completing the damaging task, or will you lay low and hope your failures won’t condemn the rest of your crew?

Finally, with the Ionian Nebula option, familiar faces populate the fleet as allies, and can be encountered by visiting locations on Galactica. But beware! The Cylons can influence these non-player characters, compelling them to produce negative effects when encountered. Manage humanity’s conflicting personalities carefully... or infighting will leave you vulnerable!

Battlestar Galactica: The Board Game is an exciting game of mistrust, intrigue, and the struggle for survival. Based on the epic and widely-acclaimed Sci Fi Channel series, Battlestar Galactica: The Board Game puts players in the role of one of ten of their favorite characters from the show. Each playable character has their own abilities and weaknesses, and must all work together in order for humanity to have any hope of survival. However, one or more players in every game secretly side with the Cylons. Players must attempt to expose the traitor while fuel shortages, food contaminations, and political unrest threatens to tear the fleet apart.

After the Cylon attack on the Colonies, the battered remnants of the human race are on the run, constantly searching for the next signpost on the road to Earth. They face the threat of Cylon attack from without, and treachery and crisis from within. Humanity must work together if they are to have any hope of survival…but how can they, when any of them may, in fact, be a Cylon agent?

Battlestar Galactica: The Board Game is a semi-cooperative game for 3-6 players ages 10 and up that can be played in 2-3 hours. Players choose from pilots, political leaders, military leaders, or engineers to crew Galactica. They are also dealt a loyalty card at the start of the game to determine if they are a human or Cylon along with an assortment of skill cards based on their characters abilities. Players then can move and take actions either on Galactica, on Colonial 1, or in a Viper. They need to collect skill cards, fend off Cylon ships, and keep Galactica and the fleet jumping. Each turn also brings a Crisis Card, various tasks that players must overcome. Players need to play matching skill cards to fend off the problems; skill cards that don't match hinder the players success. Fate could be working against the crew, or there could be a traitorous Cylon! As players get closer and closer towards reaching their Earth, another round of loyalty cards are passed out and more Cylons may turn up. If players can keep their up their food stores, fuel levels, ship morale, and population, and they can keep Galactica in one piece long enough to make it to Earth, the Humans win the game. But if the Cylon players reveal themselves at the right moment and bring down Galactica, the Humans have lost.

Official Site, Rules & FAQ: http://www.fantasyflightgames.com/edge_minisite_sec.asp?eidm=18&esem=4
Unofficial FAQ for really tricky questions: http://boardgamegeek.com/wiki/page/Battlestar_Galactica_FAQ

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.

Things aren't what they once were. Here in paradise, breathtaking views were a dime a dozen and awe-inspiring beauty was a blasé norm. The days of beauty and awe are few and far between now and are to be soaked up as if they could be your last because they just might be. The ground is broken as are the people. Paradise is no more, it is dark, it is cold. Paradise has fallen.

In Paradise Fallen: The Card Game, 2-4 players take on the role of tribes that are attempting to explore and navigate a fallen paradise through hand management to gather valuable powers that will enable them to survive and continue their journey. By drawing cards from the Exploration Deck on their turn, players gather the necessary rations and powers needed to explore. Throughout their journey, tribes will have to navigate islands with obstacles placed in their paths by others. The first tribe to successfully explore a certain number of islands for their powers wins.

Starting from the heart of Africa, players in Origin will determine the course of mankind's expansion on our planet, with the tribes gradually growing more diversified over time while still maintaining links to their ancestors and to all inhabitants of Earth.

The game tokens in Origin come in three colors, three heights, and three thicknesses, and at the start of the game one of the smallest, skinniest pieces is placed in the center of Africa. In addition, you place three technology tiles at random on the tan, orange and violet sections of the tech chart and six random tiles on the brown section; the tech tiles show 1-5 arrows. You also shuffle tan, orange and violet decks of cards and place them in the appropriate places. Tan cards provide an one-shot effect, orange cards give you a permanent power, and violet cards present you with an objective you must meet; if you do so, you can play the objective card on your turn, and immediately draw another. You can play at most one card of each color each turn.

On a turn, a player takes one of three actions:

Place a new piece on a region of the game board, with this piece sharing two of the three characteristics of a piece in a neighboring region; the new piece cannot be shorter than the original piece. Mark this piece with a token of your player color.
Move one of your pieces on the board to an empty region, with short pieces moving only one space, medium height pieces moving up to two spaces, and tall pieces up to three.
Take over a region controlled by an opponent by moving one of your pieces into this region and relocating the opponent's piece to the region your piece left. You can do this only if the attacking piece is thicker than the opponent's piece.

When you place a new piece on the board or move an existing piece, you're rewarded based on the color of the space you occupy. If you place in or move into a tan, orange or violet region, either you take a tile and the top card of this color or you draw three cards of this color and keep one of them. For a brown region, you either draw two tiles from the brown section of the tech board or draw one tile from anywhere. The technology tiles must be acquired from low to high – so you can't acquire a 4 unless you have a 3 – but you can have multiple tech stacks. You must meet a certain technology threshold in order to play the orange cards and acquire their special power.

In addition, you can score points during the game by occupying a grassland on a continent or the two regions on opposite sides of a waterway strait.

Players take turns until either all of the pieces are on the game board or all the tiles have been acquired or all the cards of one color have been drawn. Once this happens, players tally their points for objectives, grasslands, straits, tech tiles, and cards still in hand to see who wins!