Hand Management

Picknick Panik

Its time for a picnic. With the food, the players also bring an assortment of fly swatters and bug spray to defend against the hordes of bugs sure to come.

The starting player pulls a bug card from his hand, and passes it to the next player; who can either play another bug -- passing the larger horde on to his neighbor -- or defend his food with one of the aforementioned weapons. If he fails to do this, he loses food.

The game comes in two editions -- the standard which is comprised of 114 cards and 24 food tiles; and the deluxe, which features 138 wooden tiles.

Savannah Tails

Welcome to Savannah Tails (Fragor's Essen 2009 release) the game of fast and furious ostrich racing. Play as either Albrecht, Alexandra, Enzo, Nnelg or Mathilda as you race for glory through the African savannah. However, winning the race is the least of your worries. Cheetahs will try to eat you. Crocodiles will try to eat you. Warthogs will probably try to ignore you. Elephants are just in the way. The less said about porcupines the better.

The game will include 25 track sections allowing players to once again design their own races. Some of these feature “unhelpful” animals. Special tracks involving a rope bridge, quicksand and a sand dune are also included.

A limited edition of 1,000 games will be produced for Essen 2009. The game is fast paced and easy to learn.

Goa

Goa, a strategy game of auctions and resource management, is set at the start of the 16th century: beautiful beaches, a mild climate, and one of the most important trading centers in the world. Competing companies deal in spices, send ships and colonists into the world, and invest money. Are you on top or at the bottom? It depends on how you invest your profits. Will you make your ships more efficient? Enhance your plantations? Recruit more colonists? Only a steady hand in business will help.

Each turn begins with an auction phase, where each player gets to auction one item (and the starting player two items). The first item being auctioned gives the right to go first the next turn (along with a card that gives an extra action). If you buy your own item, you pay it to the bank. If someone else buys the item you sell, they pay you. Items include plantations complete with crops, income tiles (income in money, ships, plantation refills each turn etc.), ships, settlers, and later on tiles that score points for certain achievements.

After the auction, players get three actions to either improve their technologies or produce things such as spices on plantations, ships, money or build more plantations. Each player has a board showing their advancement for various things: getting ships, planting new spices, getting colonists, etc. The more a player advances along one track, the better one is doing that particular action. The further you get along a certain track, the more points that track is worth at the end, and there are also rewards to the first player who reaches the last two levels along each track. On the other hand, each player normally needs to perform the actions for all the tracks at some point, so it's not necessarily a good idea to concentrate on just a couple of them. Goa is a game that gives plenty of opportunity for tough decisions, since a player always has at least one action too few.

The game mixes an interactive element of the auction, which encourages you to nominate things that other players want so you receive cash with the solitaire management of your plantation, which then interacts later on as players race to be first in the top tech levels.

The 2012 edition of Goa includes four new tiles and a new play variant, as noted on the cover of the Z-Man Games edition.

Legacy: Gears of Time

Legacy: Gears of Time is a strategic card game, mechanically rooted in its time travel theme. Players each play cards from their own hand, draw from a central draw pile, move and play technologies on a single timeline, while placing their influence cubes on existing technologies.

Legacy is played on a timeline that grows at the end of each of 4 rounds. Players take turns during a round consisting of 3 actions each. During each turn, you may travel back in time, play a technology card from your hand, influence an existing technology, or draw two cards (keeping only one).

As you travel back in time, Technologies are played from your hand by paying their discard cost. Any technologies you play generate influence for you automatically.

Having more influence than your opponents is the key to claiming rewards for a technology! At the end of each round, rewards are given for each technology and its dependencies. One Influence cube from each technology will come off at the end of each round, forming your influence pool to be used in future rounds to influence existing technologies. Keep in mind, a technology is only considered successful if all of its dependencies exist previously on the timeline.

Since there are several copies of each technology, you may be able to preempt and eliminate an existing copy by playing yours earlier in the timeline! Be sure there is room for your new technology, though; each time-frame has a capacity equal to it's distance from the present.

There are also a few rare but powerful Fate cards, each allowing you to break the rules in interesting ways. Fate cards have no discard cost and don't require an action to be played.

By strategically influencing existing technologies, adapting to your opponents actions, and carefully choosing when to go further back in time, you will find yourself victorious over your rivals! History remains intact until the Ancient Machine demands you return to the past to rebuild history, and your Legacy, once more.

Summary:

4 Rounds
4 Turns per Round
3 Actions per Turn (any mix of the following):
Travel back in Time
Play a Technology card
Influence an existing Technology
Draw two cards (keep one)

Wooly Bully

The country of La Guerre des Moutons (the war of sheep) is full of fields and forests. There are sheep in the fields and wolves and hunters in the forests. Each player tries to make the largest pens with his own sheep inside by placing his own tiles. You can easily close small pens, or you can be ambitious and try to build large farms... but if you cannot enclose the fields, your sheep are likely to be eaten by the big bad wolves roaming in the nearby forests. Each player's animal is secret at the beginning of the game, but the soonest you reveal it, the more points you get.

Official FAQ (Asmodée)

Online Play

Boîte à jeux (turn-based)

Contents:
1 Large Cloth Bag
1 Small Cloth Bag
77 Double Sided Tiles
1 Rule Book