Hand Management

The "shufflebuilding" game Smash Up begins with a simple premise: take the 20-card decks of two factions, shuffle them into a deck of forty cards, then compete to crush more bases than your opponents! Each faction involves a different gaming mechanism, and each combination of factions brings a different gaming experience.

In Smash Up: Marvel, players smash up two groups of Marvel characters, such as the vigilant members of The Ultimates or the criminal masterminds HYDRA, to take over bases and score the most victory points. Mix and match the different decks of heroes and villains to see which combinations can best defeat the others! This game allows for fans to create stories that have never existed in the Marvel universe. What combo will you choose?

Welcome Heroes! Many magnificent contestants have signed up for the tournament but only a handful will be chosen to join the the Tidal Blades, the elite guards of our island realm. To succeed in the Tournament and be chosen as a Tidal Blade, you must compete in Challenges held in the 3 Arenas, rise to the top of the Champion’s Board, and protect the realm from the ever increasing threat of the Monsters from the mysterious Fold.

It has been fifteen years since the Great Battle; 15 years since the Arcanists from the Citadel of Time made their terrible choice and created the Fold; 15 years since the last assemblage of Tidal Blades. The Arcanists folded space and time to stop the onslaught of creatures from the depths, but now new Monsters have appeared, the hard-earned days of peace are coming to a close and the islands need protection. A tournament has been called, the Arenas are ready, the inhabitants of all the islands are gathering, and young heroes from across the realm are showing up to compete to be named a Tidal Blade: Hero of the Reef.

In Tidal Blades: Heroes of the Reef, each player takes the role of a young hero competing to be named a Tidal Blade. The tournament takes place over 5 Days and Nights. By gathering the needed resources, signing up to compete in Challenges and timing your arrival at different islands you can make the most of your Hero’s turns and rise in the ranks of the contestants.

Each day you will send your hero to take actions on the different Locations and to undertake Challenges. Each action will gain you the resource or effect listed on the action space as well as the Location bonus. At the Arenas you may then attempt a Challenge that matches your Location, and at the Fold you may battle a monster. Completing Challenges and fighting monsters will advance your character in the four traits of Focus, Spirit, Resilience and Synergy.

Each Tidal Blade will be judged at the end of the 5 rounds based on the Challenges they have completed, the level of each of their Traits, their standing on the Champions Board, and the monsters they have fought.

The Game: Face to Face features gameplay similar to The Game with players laying down cards from their hand in ascending and descending piles, but now the game is limited to two players who are competing to get rid of their cards first. You want to win on your own, but to advance, you must inevitably help your opponent...

On your turn, you’ll play at least 2 cards from your hand of 6. The twist comes from where you can play them. Of course, your own ascending and descending piles are fair game and follow the normal rules of The Game.
But exactly once per turn, you can play a card on one of your opponent’s piles, breaking all rules. This ultimately helps them out, as it pushes whatever pile you played on away from its upper limit.

Friday, the second game in the Friedemann Friese Series: Freitag-Project (Friedemann Friese), is based on the story of Robinson Crusoe and his loyal partner Friday (Freitag). You play as Friday, and when Robinson Crusoe crashes his ship on your island, your peaceful times are disturbed. You must help Robinson to survive the island and prepare him to defeat the pirates that are coming for the island.

Friday is a solitaire deck-building game in which you optimize your deck of fight cards in order to defeat the hazards of the island. During a turn the player will attempt to defeat hazard cards by playing fight cards from their deck. If defeated, a hazard card will become a fight card and is added to the player's deck. If failed, the player will lose life points but also get the opportunity to remove unwanted cards from their fight deck. In the end, the player will use their optimized fight deck to defeat the two pirate ships coming for the island, allowing Robinson Crusoe to escape the island and allowing you to finally have your peace back!

You are a Dreamwalker, lost in a mysterious labyrinth, and you must discover the oneiric doors before your dreamtime runs out – or you will remain trapped forever!

You may wander through the chambers of dreams, hoping that chance will reveal the doors, or you can linger in each type of room. In both cases, you will have to deal with the slithering Nightmares, which haunt the hallways of the labyrinth.

Onirim is a solo/cooperative card game. You (and a partner, if you wish) must work (together) against the game to gather the eight Door cards before the deck runs out; you can obtain those Door cards either by playing cards of the same color three turns in a row, or by discarding (under specific circumstances) one of your powerful Key cards. In both cases you will have to decide the best use of each card in your hand and carefully play around the Nightmares. Those cards are hidden in the deck and will trigger painful dilemmas when drawn...

Seven mini-expansions, all standalone and compatible with one another, are included with the second edition of Onirim, including these three that were in the first edition of the game:

"The Towers" introduces a new type of card that allows more searching and deck manipulation, while also imposing an additional victory condition.

"Happy Dreams and Dark Premonitions" adds evil time bombs that will impede your progress at predictable moments of your quest as well as helpful but unreliable allies.

In "The Book of Steps Lost and Found", you must find the eight Door cards in a randomly given order and may remove discarded cards from the game to cast powerful spells that will help you complete this difficult task.

In addition to these three variants from the first edition, there are four new modules in the Onirim 2nd edition box. Just like previously, each module consists of something that makes the game easier and something that makes the game harder:

"The Glyphs" introduces a fourth symbol on location cards (apart from Key, Sun and Moon), which makes it easier to compose the row of unrepeated symbols. Player must then find one extra door of each color (so 12 doors in total) to win

"The Dreamcatchers" are four cards that "guard" the Limbo piles. The Limbo pile stays with Dreamcatcher until some effect allows the player to shuffle the pile back to the deck... if all Dreamcatchers are full and new cards should come to Limbo, a Dreamcatcher is discarded and his cards shuffled back. Also, four new "Lost Dreams" cards are supposed to be in Limbo at the end of the game, as an extra winning condition - so discarding all Dreamcatchers means loss.

"The Crossroads and Dead Ends" introduce location cards with a given symbol (3 Sun, 2 Moon, 1 Key), but serving as any color "joker". It also contains 10 "Dead End" cards, that remain in players hand (un-discard-able on its own) and block her 5-cards hand limit... until a player discards the whole hand (=the only way to discard a Dead End).

"The Door To The Oniverse" brings several one-time abilities cards as "inhabitants of the Oniverse"... and one extra colorless door to find.

Apart from all those, there are a few special rules to use the dark meeple in the game (which interferes with Nightmare cards resolving), making the game easier or harder, depending on the chosen variant.