Science Fiction

The fate of creatures touched by the spark of intelligence hangs in the balance. You must recruit strong animal allies to your city and unlock the potential of your citizens if your settlement is to survive the days to come.

Citizens of the Spark is a variable set-up card game in which players take turns attracting citizens, taking actions, and claiming sparks. The more citizen cards a player has of a specific type, the more powerful that citizen's action becomes. The player with the most sparks in their city when the deck runs out wins!

Play with 7-10 animal citizen types per game, chosen from 30 available creatures and combined into one shared deck. Every citizen type has distinct powers, making each game's action combos uniquely variable.

On your turn, recruit multiple citizens by selecting an available group of cards, placing them in your city tableau, and grouping like citizens together to grow their action strength. Next, select one type of citizen in your tableau to activate, taking the effect of the card and discarding it from your city. But keep watch on rival cities, because when you activate a citizen, all players can follow your move and activate a matching citizen of their own!

In the far-off future, the solar system is inhabited by 3 races: Humans, Robots, and Animods.
Civilization runs off of Zenithium, a clean and renewable energy source, but coexistence is a struggle.
Your goal: unite the planets to gain control of the senate!

Players will struggle to gain Influence on the 5 planets: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, and Jupiter. This Influence is represented by discs in different colors.

In Zenith, there are 3 victory conditions:

Absolute victory: Gain 3 Influence discs from the same planet.
Democratic victory: Gain 4 Influence discs from strictly different planets.
Popular victory: Gain 5 Influence discs (from any planets).

The game ends immediately as soon as one player meets 1 of these three conditions.

—description from the publisher

With technology rapidly developing and the human population growing, Victorian-era Earth is in dire need of fuel, land, and other natural resources. Fortunately, automated probes sent to Mars have discovered celerium, an ore that can be combusted to produce ten thousand times more power than a steam engine, and sylvanite, the densest substance ever found. More incredibly, the probes found ice that could be used in terraforming the planet, bringing the idea of colonizing Mars even closer to becoming a reality.

As the head of a mining corporation, these minerals and ice found on Mars could make you unfathomably wealthy – if you can reach them before your competitors. You have ten rounds to send your astronauts into space, occupy the planet's most resource-rich zones, and harvest as much celerium, sylvanite, and ice as possible. At your command is a team of nine professionals. Each has a unique skill set, from helping your astronauts traverse the Red Planet to blowing up spaceships before they launch.

In each round in Mission: Red Planet, players start by secretly deploying one of their character cards, with this card determining both when they place astronauts on the spaceships awaiting launch to Mars and which special action they take during the round. Each spaceship has a specified destination, and until an astronaut sets foot in a region, no one knows which resource they'll find. Players collect resources (worth points) three times during the game, and they each have a secret mission card that might grant them additional points at game's end. During the game, players might acquire an additional mission or a research card that changes the value of what awaits on Mars.

The 2015 edition of Mission: Red Planet features the same gameplay as the original 2005 edition, but it includes:

Components for up to six players instead of five
Special two-player variant rules
New action cards and revised mission and discovery cards
Mars' moon Phobos as a new zone that astronauts can explore before possibly returning to the planet itself

A permanent base is being built in the Shackleton crater at the Moon's South Pole. You're leading one of the space agencies that are working together to expand their presence on the base, while at the same time the three major corporations sponsoring the mission are each pursuing their own agenda. In Shackleton Base: A Journey to the Moon, you will build structures on the base, while also funding projects from the corporations that provide special abilities and scoring opportunities.

At the start of the game, pick three corporations randomly from the seven available. Each corporation introduces new projects, actions, and scoring opportunities, along with their specific mechanisms. The game is played over three rounds, each divided into three phases:

• Shuttle phase: Each player drafts a shuttle tile from an open display to determine which type of astronauts and resources they can use that round, as well as the turn order for the next phase.

• Action phase: Players take turns deploying their astronauts on the moon to collect resources, build structures, or fund projects. Depending on which corporations were selected, different types of resources will be available, resources that can be used in various ways for the projects or to build structures. Each project provides ongoing abilities and scoring opportunities. Each corporation provides different ways to score points, which could be during the action phase, the maintenance phase, or at game's end.

• Maintenance phase: Deployed astronauts are assigned to work on the structures (providing a bonus to the player owning them), then players collect income and pay maintenance costs. If corporations in play have end-round effects, those effects take place.

The end of the game brings a final scoring, then the player with the most points wins.

Vantage is an open-world, co-operative adventure game that features an entire planet to explore, with players communicating while scattered across the world. With nearly eight hundred interconnected locations on four hundred cards and over nine hundred other discoverable cards, the world is your sandbox.

You begin each game of Vantage on an intergalactic vessel heading towards an uncharted planet. After crashing far from your companions, you have complete freedom as to how you explore, discover, and interact with the planet. You view your location from a first-person perspective, and you can communicate with and support other players, but you are separated by vast distances, so only you can see your current location. You have complete freedom in how you explore, discover, and interact with the planet.

In addition to a mission victory, a destiny victory, or an epic victory (completing both the mission and a destiny), you may define success in Vantage through anything you pursue and achieve.

Vantage is not a campaign game. Each game is a standalone experience; you bring to future sessions only what you’ve learned about the world. It is completely self-contained with no expansions — just a few accessories like metal coins.

—description from the publisher