pattern building

Welcome to Kingdom Rush: Rift in Time, where you and your allies must work together to fend off the furious onslaught of the mysterious Time Mage. Command Heroes and build Towers to defend the realm by placing polyomino pieces to attack your enemies and deploying soldiers to hold back the ever-advancing horde. Be careful, though! The Time Mage’s portals are wreaking havoc, causing all of the Towers to warp in and out of existence! Will you play your Towers to defend the Kingdom, or will you pass them to your compatriots so that the Towers can be upgraded? The decision is yours!

Play through a unique campaign to foil the Time Mage’s plan for total domination of the space-time continuum. Each new scenario in the campaign is more challenging than the one before it, introducing formidable foes, game-changing events, and epic bosses to battle! The only way to stop the Time Mage is to close all of their pesky portals but you’ll have to do so while combating wave after wave of their minions. Fight back with unique Heroes, special abilities, and an awesome arsenal of upgradable Towers. The Time Mage will stop at nothing as they try to take over the Kingdom and neither should you - archers ready!

In Seikatsu, players take turns placing tiles into a shared garden area, with each tile showing a colored flower and colored bird. Players score for groups of birds as they place them, but they score for rows of flowers only at the end of the game and only for the rows of flowers that exist from their perspective, i.e., that are viewable as lines from where they sit at the game board.

Seikatsu: A Pet's Life features the same gameplay as Seikatsu, but with players placing tiles that show pets sitting on pillows instead of birds resting on flowers.

As an architect in Welcome To..., you want to build the best new town in the United States of the 1950s by adding resources to a pool, hiring employees, and more.

Welcome To... plays like a roll-and-write dice game in which you mark results on a score-sheet...but without dice. Instead you flip cards from three piles to make three different action sets with both a house number and a corresponding action from which everyone chooses one. You use the number to fill in a house on your street in numerical order. Then you take the action to increase the point value of estates you build or score points at the end for building parks and pools. Players also have the option of taking actions to alter or duplicate their house numbers. And everyone is racing to be the first to complete public goals. There's lots to do and many paths to becoming the best suburban architect in Welcome To...!

Because of the communal actions, game play is simultaneous and thus supports large groups of players. With many varying strategies and completely randomized action sets, no two games will feel the same!

Gem Rummy is similar to standard Gin Rummy except each card has a background color & gem symbol; Kings have two background colors; (Jokers are included but are not used in hands). Adding colors to each card allows for more interesting combinations (like having all eight gems in hand). Another difference is that (2) 6-sided dice are used at the beginning of each hand to establish the "Knock number", and also the "Diamond number" for a special meld called "Queen's Diamonds".

The object is to get your hand down to a few points of Deadwood by getting Melds.

There are 3 phases to each hand: 1) DEAL & ROLL; 2) CARD PLAY; 3) SHOWDOWN & SCORING.
Cards in Melds and Lay-offs will not score for your opponent, but have no inherent point values themselves. Cards not in Melds or Lay-offs are called Deadwood and might add points to your opponent’s score.

There are 4 different Melds available: Sets, Runs, Stashes, and Queen’s Diamonds (the latter two are new).

SET: At least 3 cards of the same rank (i.e., 5, 5, 5).
RUN: At least 3 consecutive cards in the same suit (i.e., 6, 7, 8, all clubs).
STASH: At least 4 cards of the same gem color (i.e., 4 Emeralds).
QUEEN’S DIAMONDS: Any Queen + one designated Diamond card that is determined by the initial roll number on the dice. Both dice are rolled to find one number (i.e., 3 and 4 = 7, indicating 7 of Diamonds is the card). An “11” or “12” indicates JACK of DIAMONDS.

Also, "Gem Parts" is a bonus players can earn by having all 8 gems at the end of a hand.

A new minimum score rule keeps the game moving along nicely.

—description from the designer

Ankh'or is a quick-playing resource management game in which each player on their turn either collects three types of tokens (with an ankh being a supplemental resource) or buys a tile from a marketplace and adds this tile to their structure, trying to connect tiles of the same color or bearing the same scarab while doing so. By spending an ankh, you can shift tiles in the marketplace and change the cost and type of goods needed to purchase them.

Each player's structure will have at most thirteen tiles, so don't wait too long to start building!