Hand Management

From the back of the box:

Forever Young brings the excitement of life as a vampire to your gaming table. Each player plays the head of a vampire family struggling to maintain control among his minions and human protectors. Beware, your opponents are aiming to convert your servants and... Well, let’s just say they have something a little more 'unkind' in mind for your humans.

Forever Young is a light strategy game that involves secretly placing your vampires and humans, hiding weapons and items and trying to discover where your opponents have hidden theirs. Each beautifully produced and illustrated game has everything needed to play for 2 to 6 players.

Designed by Reiner Knizia and illustrated by the incredibly talented Ursula Vernon, In BlackSheep, players try to corral the best combination of cows, horses, chickens and more while avoiding the mischievous black sheep. BlackSheep is perfect for two to four players ages eight and up. -From the FFG website.

There's a lot of randomness here, but also room for elementary strategy. Players make poker hands from two shared cards (figurines of ranked animals) and three of their own (these are actual cards). There are three such hands playing simultaneously, with players adding one or two cards at a time to any hand on their turn. When all players have played three cards onto a hand, a winner is chosen, based on the poker ranks. The winner takes the two shared cards (animal figurines), and new shared cards are added. At the end of the game, scores are calculated by summing numbers printed on the bottoms of the figurines they captured and some bonuses. The black sheep figurines are worth negative points.

As the first winner of the Spiel des Jahres award in 1979, Hare and Tortoise or the German Hase und Igel (for Hare and Hedgehog) will always be regarded as a classic game. It is a cunningly designed race to the finish in which your fuel (carrots) must practically run out (all but 10 carrots or fewer) at the moment you hit the finish line. You also have three lettuce cards you must spend during the course of the race. The farther you move, the more carrots you spend, and there are a variety of ways to gain or lose carrots as you go around the track. It's a very clever exercise in arithmetic which David Parlett has fashioned into an entertaining and unique perennial favorite.

There have several variations between the multiple prints of Hare & Tortoise by different publishers. Most variations come from methods of adding randomness that favor lagging player via cards, dice, or dice charts when landing on a Hare square.

Parlett Strategic Variant--The designer's preferred way of playing the Hare square is that "... you can land on them [Hare square], but must miss a turn. This would be the equivalent of the hare taking a nap, as in Aesop's fable. This is the rule I most favour and would prefer it to simply not landing on them at all..."

After 500 years, two factions emerge from their underground cities into a new world, an Earth reborn from nuclear disaster.

12 highly detailed miniatures represent the two factions which are:

NORAD: military in thinking and origins. Scientists, engineers, add to their strength.

SALEMITES: occultists working with cadavers, bringing the dead to life.

Soon after emerging, these two factions meet - and it is determined that they cannot live together in peace.

Earth Reborn offers nine scenarios that take you through missions of rescue, retrieval, and escort through areas of labs, mansions, towns, and more. Each scenario builds upon the rules of a new chapter: the game system is built like a tutorial. There are core rules to start the game, and each chapter offers 1-3 new rules along with a scenario that uses these new rules.

The game also contains the innovative S.A.G.S. (Scenario Auto Generating System), where 2-4 players can make their own maps and mission objectives for near infinite replayability!

Other features include:

A Tetris-like board construction using polyomino floor tiles.
An order tiles system to give commands to your miniatures.
Interrupt Duels with Bluff, betting command points to interrupt an enemy character and act during another player's turn.
The I.P.S. (Iconographic Phrasing System) that allows almost any effect to occur with icons, totally language independent.
Colored base arcs on miniatures to simplify Line of Sight, shooting, and close combat. It also multiplies characters’ variations and possibilities.
The Search rule, giving a visceral feeling to searching in rooms to find equipment.
A Mission Points track that also serves as a Morale Points track.
Radio Scrambling to mess with your opponents' orders.

Each player will lead a group of thieves and try to gain the best booty for them. But the treasure is hidden in the palaces of Baghdad and is well guarded. Therefore, the leaders slip their men into the guards corps and try to bribe the rest of the guards. The player who plays his cards the best and reacts the most cleverly to the different situations will be successful in getting his thieves and guards well distributed in Baghdad, and therefore be the first to get four pieces of treasure.

Description from http://www.spieltest.at