Players: Games with Solitaire Rules

In the late 1840s, thousands of pioneers headed out West to seek wealth and opportunity. Many of these brave souls traveled by wagon over the Sierra Nevada mountain range, into what would soon become the Golden State of California. In the game Sierra West, you are an expedition leader who must guide a party of rough-and-ready pioneers—employing a clever mix of strategy and tactics with each step.

Sierra West comes with four sets of special cards and parts, each of which can be combined with the game's basic components to create a unique mode of play. During setup, the players choose a mode, then build a mountain of overlapping cards with the corresponding deck. Each mode adds new thematic content, alternate paths to victory, and interesting twists on the core mechanics.

The four included modules are:

Apple Hill
Gold Rush
Boats & Banjos
Outlaws & Outposts

Overview of Play
At the start of each turn, you will overlap and arrange three cards into your player board—exposing and concealing a selection of the action icons available on them. This will create two unique paths for your pioneers to follow. Next, you will move your pioneers across their paths from left to right, performing a series of small actions. Common actions include: claiming cards from the mountain, building cabins, gaining resources, and advancing your wagon. Additional actions are brought into the game by the chosen mode—such as: harvesting apples, mining for gold, fishing, and fighting outlaws. As your pioneers complete their paths, they will gain access to the action spaces on the upper portions of your cards. On these, you will be able to exchange resources for to advance on the wagon trail and homestead tracks, or activate other special abilities unique to the mode.

As the game continues—and more cards are removed from the mountain—new and exciting things are discovered! Each piece of the mountain is either a card that can be gained to improve your deck, or a special card that is added to a face-up row at the mountain’s base. As this row extends, more of the mode’s opportunities and challenges come into play. For example, in Boats & Banjos mode, the row is a river that offers more fishing and gold panning options as time goes on.

Sierra West can be set up and played in under an hour, often leaving people with the desire to play it again right away—especially to explore the other modes! It is a highly thematic Eurogame that offers a truly novel and satisfying spin on action-programming, worker-placement, and deck-building.

Includes solo mode by Dávid Turczi.

—Description from the publisher

Note: Contained inside the box are 2 promos for other games:
Teotihuacan: City of Gods – Sierra West Promo
Dice Settlers: Sierra West Promo

Aliens have arrived to conquer Earth. Enemy ships fill the skies. Humanity retreats to underground bunkers located below cities across the globe. Stand against the common threat! Fight the invaders city by city. Build a team from around the globe to save your planet and defeat the aliens!

GAMEPLAY

Under Falling Skies is a solo game with a multi-mission campaign. In each mission, you take charge of defending a besieged city.

Your actions are powered by an innovative dice placement mechanic. When you choose an action, you are also choosing which enemy ships will descend. Bigger numbers give better effects, but they also cause ships to descend faster.

Expand your underground base to gain access to more powerful actions, allowing you to shoot down enemy ships or deploy robots to increase your workforce, but don't forget to work on your research and watch your energy supply.

The mothership draws closer every round, ratcheting up the tension.

Can you complete your mission before your base is destroyed?

Official rules: https://czechgames.com/files/rules/under-falling-skies-rules-en.pdf

Under Falling Skies is based on the print & play game that won the 2019 9-card Nanogame P&P Design Contest. Built on the same intriguing mechanics, it now comes with a full-scale campaign providing even more content for hours of intense fun.

The bees have discovered economics. The queens believe that if they sell honey to the bears, badgers, and woodland creatures, they will find peace and prosperity. Spring has arrived and it's time to build the hive, find nectar, make honey, and, for the first time ever, set up shop.

Honey Buzz is a worker bee placement game where players expand a personal beehive by drafting various honeycomb tiles that grant actions that are triggered throughout the game. Each tile represents a different action. Whenever a tile is laid so that it completes a certain pattern, a ring of actions is triggered in whatever order the player chooses. A tile drafted on turn one could be triggered up to three times at any point during the game. It all depends on how the player places their beeples (bee+meeple) and builds their hive. After all, in the honey business, efficiency is queen.

As you continually expand your hive, you'll forage for nectar and pollen, make honey, sell different varieties at the bear market, host honey tastings, and attend to the queen and her court. There's only so much nectar to go around, and finding it won't be easy. Players will have to scout out the nectar field and pay attention to other players searches to try to deduce the location of the nectar they need for themselves.

As a tight-knit team in Menara, players use pillars and wondrously-shaped temple floors to build a spectacularly soaring structure full of nooks and crannies. Cooperation and static skills are in demand since for each mistake in construction, you have to add another floor to the temple.

A steady hand, an alert mind, and mutual assistance can help you successfully complete what seems to top out at dizzy heights...

In Pax Pamir, players assume the role of nineteenth century Afghan leaders attempting to forge a new state after the collapse of the Durrani Empire. Western histories often call this period "The Great Game" because of the role played by the Europeans who attempted to use central Asia as a theater for their own rivalries. In this game, those empires are viewed strictly from the perspective of the Afghans who sought to manipulate the interloping ferengi (foreigners) for their own purposes.

In terms of game play, Pax Pamir is a pretty straightforward tableau builder. Players spend most of their turns purchasing cards from a central market, then playing those cards in front of them in a single row called a court. Playing cards adds units to the game's map and grants access to additional actions that can be taken to disrupt other players and influence the course of the game. That last point is worth emphasizing. Though everyone is building their own row of cards, the game offers many ways for players to interfere with each other directly and indirectly.

To survive, players will organize into coalitions. Throughout the game, the dominance of the different coalitions will be evaluated by the players when a special card, called a "Dominance Check", is resolved. If a single coalition has a commanding lead during one of these checks, those players loyal to that coalition will receive victory points based on their influence in their coalition. However, if Afghanistan remains fragmented during one of these checks, players instead will receive victory points based on their personal power base.

After each Dominance Check, victory is checked and the game will be partially reset, offering players a fresh attempt to realize their ambitions. The game ends when a single player is able to achieve a lead of four or more victory points or after the fourth and final Dominance Check is resolved.