Pattern Recognition

Dust in the Wings

After a long hike through the woods, you finally find the perfect place to set up your camera — a lush meadow. A green sea of grass rolls gently in the wind, spotted with flowers opening up to morning dew and gentle sunlight, and flocks of butterflies hovering above in a slow, deliberate dance. Light flickers in the golden dust, as you take the first look through your lens and get ready to capture the most beautiful of sights in your photo!

Dust in the Wings is a family game of perception, planning, and picturing the beauty of nature. Built on the wisdom of Mancala — a beloved game known for thousands of years — Dust in the Wings creates an experience that is light on rules, engaging in its gameplay, and wondrous to the eye!

At the beginning of the game, Butterflies are placed on each flower in the Meadow, a 5×5 grid on the main game board. During each turn, a player attempts to fulfill the requirements of various objectives in order to score victory points.

The board is manipulated Mancala style. The active player will choose a single Meadow space and pick up all Butterflies from that space. One by one, these Butterflies are dispersed. The first Butterfly is placed onto any one Meadow space adjacent to the space which the Butterflies were picked up from. The next Butterfly is placed onto any one Meadow space adjacent to that space, and so on.

The goal is to place the last Butterfly onto a Meadow space so that the space fulfills the requirement of a Gathering objective or Composition objective.

A Gathering objective is fulfilled by gathering a precise number and types of Butterflies onto a single space in the Meadow.

A Composition objective is fulfilled by having a group of spaces that collectively contain a number of Butterflies indicated on the cards. The group of spaces must also match a distinct shape and size depicted on the card.

Even if you managed to fulfill the requirements of multiple cards, only one card may be scored each turn.

At the end of the game, a player's score is calculated. Each Composition card is worth a number of points as indicated on the card. The values of various Scoring markers, which were collected when completing Gathering objectives, are also added to the final tally.

The player with the most points is the winner!

—description from the publisher

Paranormal Detectives

You open your eyes to discover the most horrible truth of a lifetime... It has just come to an end and you are a ghost, floating in the air! Terrified, you look at your own body. A group of strange individuals have gathered around your mortal remains, watching it closely with sparks of fascination in their eyes. They want to communicate with you to discover how your life ended. You need to talk to them and reveal the truth so the culprit can be judged!

Paranormal Detectives is a deduction party game. One player takes the role of a Ghost. All other players work as Paranormal Detectives and need to discover how the victim died. Using paranormal abilities they will communicate with the Ghost, asking open questions about the details of the crime. The Ghost answers in a variety of ghostly ways - by arranging a hangman’s knot, playing chosen tarot cards, creating a word puzzle on a talking board, drawing by holding the hand of a detective and many more!

At the beginning of the game, the Ghost player receives a story card with a full description of the murder. Each card depicts all the details of the case. Each Detective receives asymmetrical, pre-constructed set of interaction cards, player investigation sheet, and a player screen.

On their turn, each Detective asks the Ghost any open question they want and plays a single interaction card. The card implies the way the Ghost may answer the question. There are 9 different interactions total, most of them giving information to all Detectives. Since Detectives may ask any open questions and interaction cards vary, the game allows for lots of creativity for both the Ghost and Paranormal Detectives.

Detectives may try, twice during the game, to guess what has actually happened to the victim stating who was the killer, where did it happen, what was the motive, how was it done and what was the murder weapon. Then the Ghost writes down secretly on this Detective’s investigation sheet how many of their answers are correct.

The game can end in two ways:

If a Detective gives all correct answers. In this case, they win, together with the Ghost player.
If all Detectives run out of interaction cards. In this case, if no one has guessed everything correctly then, whoever guessed correctly the most information is the sole winner of the game!

Tuki

In the Inuit language, "tukilik" is used to define an object that carries a message, and the northern landscapes are densely populated with such objects. The most well known of these are the inukshuk, that is, structures of rough stones traditionally used by Inuit people as a landmark or commemorative sign, with the stones often being stacked in the form of a human figure.

During each turn in Tuki, you attempt to construct an inukshuk based on the die face rolled using your stones and blocks of snow. Players have only a limited number of pieces with which to construct the inukshuk, so you'll need to be creative and use the three-dimensional pieces in multiple ways, such as to counterbalance other pieces or even build on top of existing pieces. A solution always exists — you just need to discover it!

You can choose from two levels of difficulty when playing Tuki to level the playing ground between newcomers and experts. Be swift, yet precise, and transform your stones into messengers of the north...

One Key

The Key is missing, and it is up to the players to find it! The team leader tries to communicate with the other players, proposing clues by indicating their degree of affinity — strong medium/weak — with the object that the team must find. With good team-play, the other players remove the wrong cards, step by step, until the Key is all that remains. Removing the Key results in instant defeat, so be careful!

One Key is a family game for all kinds of players, a light game that offers a co-operative experience based on the association of ideas and deduction. All the objects are like little universes of their own. Find the right one to solve the enigma! One Key is best played with an app with a three-minute timer and background music to add tension to your games.

—description from the publisher

Cobra Paw

In Cobra Paw, players take turns rolling the dice — which feature six unique symbols — then race to grab the tile with the matching pattern before anyone else. Whoever grabs six tiles first wins!