Pick-up and Deliver

Game description from the publisher:

In Empire Express, designed to be an easy-to-play introduction to the Empire Builder series of games, players create competing railroad empires by drawing railroad tracks with crayons upon an erasable board. You win if you utilize your network of rail lines to acquire and deliver goods efficiently to accumulate the largest personal fortune!

The base game provides pre-programmed routes on a board depicting a north-eastern portion of the U.S. with demand cards providing players with an easy way to learn the system through play. Players start with the bare bones of a railroad: an empty train and track connecting some cities. Each turn you and your fellow players take turns building track, operating trains, and delivering loads. The bank will pay you for each delivered load.

With the starting route guided by the board, only two loads per card, and a visual pick-up and delivery guide on every card, the learning curve is greatly shortened.

Hoist your sails and mind those tricky tides! Take command of a merchant ship and manage your hand of navigation cards and the goods in your ship’s cargo hold while charting the best course on the map.

Travel from island to island collecting goods and delivering them to earn the most gold.

Tricky Tides is a pick-up-and-deliver game that uniquely employs trick taking to determine turn order and the direction players can move their ships.

—description from the publisher

Several millennia ago, the tiny planet Solenia lost its day-and-night cycle: Its northern hemisphere is forever plunged into darkness, and its southern hemisphere is eternally bathed in sunlight. Your mission is to carry on your ancestors' honorable task of traveling the world to deliver essential goods to the inhabitants of both hemispheres. While the Day people want you to deliver the rarest gems and stones, the Night people sorely need wood and wheat to survive. Be efficient and outpace your opponents to collect the most gold stars by the end of the game!

A game of Solenia plays out over 16 rounds, and in each round, each player plays one card from their hand onto an empty space of the 5x5 game board. You can play the card on either:

A floating production island, to gain as many resources as the value of the card you played of the type corresponding to this space
A floating city, to fulfill a delivery tile by delivering the resources depicted on it.

You must play your card adjacent to the airship in the center of the playing area or adjacent to another card of yours already played. When someone plays a 0 card, the airship advances one space, then at the end of your turn, you remove the back edge of the board, give players resources based on the cards they have on this strip of the playing area, flip the strip over (turning night to day or dawn to dusk or vice versa), and place it on the other side of the game board.

The game ends when each player has played all 16 of their cards. The player with the most gold stars wins!

—description from designer

At the center is the Ziggurat, where you must bring 4 sacrifice tokens to win. But to deliver them, you must have sufficient Mana reserved by praying in temples, which players build. You bring your sacrifices from 4 huts that you build, and you can breed at an empty hut to increase your people. To build huts, temples, and Mana, you use rocks and timber that you collect from quarries and forests.

Each turn, you can move 5 places, placing new tiles if you go off the map, seeding stones or timber if they are quarries or forests, and carrying resource to empty plains if you want to build. Building a hut or temple, breeding, or drawing an action card ends your turn, and you bank Mana if you have people on temples. So gradually, you build up your clan and have them do different things. Some stand at temples to pray, some explore and carry resource, others help build or breed. And when you deliver a sacrifice, you kill the messenger too, thus needing to breed more.

Expanded By

Mesopotamia: Expansion

In a game of Pioneers, the players attempt to populate the cities shown on the game board with their pioneers, using coaches to transport them around the map. Each pioneer has a specific profession, and can only be settled in a city where their work is needed.

After all the pioneers riding in a coach have been deployed on the game board, the player controlling the coach earns money and victory points. In addition, the players construct roads between the cities, expanding their own network and earning money from other players who use the roads. At the end of the game, each player will be rewarded with additional victory points based on the number of their pioneers in their largest network of connected roads. The player with the most victory points wins!