Storytelling

Earthborne Rangers

Earthborne Rangers is a customizable, co-operative card game set in the wilderness of the far future. You take on the role of a Ranger, a protector of the mountain valley you call home: a vast wilderness transformed by monumental feats of science and technology devised to save the Earth from destruction long ago. The story of Earthborne Rangers is presented as a branching narrative campaign consisting of a main storyline and a multitude of side stories. In it, you can choose to follow the critical path or to strike off on your own to discover the Valley's many engaging characters, mysterious ruins, and beings both familiar and strange.

You begin by building a deck that reflects your Ranger's interests, personal history, and personality. Then, as you explore the open world and your story takes shape, you augment your deck with improved equipment, refined skills, and the memories of your journey.

Each game session represents one day in the Valley, and you'll pick up in the same location on the map where you rested the night before. Your goal is to either complete one of your available missions or to explore the open world. The session ends when you're either forced to rest (through either fatigue or injury), or you choose to rest for the night.

An individual game session is played in rounds, and those rounds consist of turns. On your turn, you perform one action: either play a card from your hand, or choose an action from a card on the table. Each action allows you to interact thematically and narratively with the world, and each time you take an action, the world comes to life around you. Predators stalk their prey, rain pours from the sky, rocks tumble down the mountain to block your path, and much more.

—description from the publisher

Unlock!: Escape Adventures – The Island of Doctor Goorse

Unlock! is a cooperative card game inspired by escape rooms that uses a simple system which allows you to search scenes, combine objects, and solve riddles. Play Unlock! to embark on great adventures, while seated at a table using only cards and a companion app that can provide clues, check codes, monitor time remaining, etc.

In Unlock! The Island of Doctor Goorse, you and your team have crash-landed on the island of an eccentric antiques collector. Two to six players will be split into teams, separated in the crash, and forced to escape from two separate starting points. The twists and turns of this challenging adventure will test even the most talented escape artists. With your lines of communication cut, can you and your teammates find a way off the island?

An included ten-card tutorial allows you to learn how to play without reading the game rules. Note: Unlock! requires a free application to be downloaded from the App Store or Google Play. Once downloaded, an internet connection is not required during game play.

Unlock!: Mystery Adventures – The Tonipal's Treasure

The Tonipal's Treasure sets you at the start of a hunt for the treasure of Captain Smith, hidden somewhere on Tonipal Island. As your adventure begins, you've been arrested by the Governor and thrown into prison — you'll need to escape quickly, especially since Johnson, a famous treasure hunter, is also on his way to Tonipal in search of the very treasure that you seek.

Unlock! is a series of escape adventures for up to six players. With one hour on the clock, players work through a deck of sixty cards as a team, searching for clues, combining objects, and solving puzzles. The free Unlock! companion app runs the timer while also providing clues, offering hints, and confirming successes. Once the team has reached a solution and entered the correct code into the app, they will escape and win the game!

Sleeping Gods: Primeval Peril

It’s 1929. You are Captain Sofi Odessa and her crew lost at sea in a strange world. Aboard the steamship Manticore, you must work together to survive by exploring mysterious islands, battling creatures, and meeting the world’s inhabitants. Along the way, seek out the totems of the gods. Wake the gods and perhaps you’ll be able to return home.

Sleeping Gods: Primeval Peril is a short standalone campaign for one or two players, but will include a variant for playing with 3-4, set in the world of Sleeping Gods and using the same rules.

Primeval Peril is set on a dangerous river that winds through lush jungle. It includes new characters and stories so that nothing from the Sleeping Gods base game is spoiled.

It was first offered as a free print-and-play to all backers of the Sleeping Gods Kickstarter.

This first retail edition is revised and expanded with new stories and quests, streamlined gameplay, and an atlas with new maps.

The Dark Quarter

Welcome to New Orleans, Louisiana, circa 1980: a vibrant city of music, food, and magic. Neon lights flicker in dirty puddles up and down Bourbon street; the innovations of the modern world clash with ancient and terrible traditions; and murder is never simple. The Beaumont Agency, staffed with a roster of brilliant, colorful, and ultimately flawed private investigators, specializes in solving cases that no one else can crack.

In The Dark Quarter, a co-operative app-driven adventure game set in a dark, fantastical vision of 1980s New Orleans, players each take control of a Beaumont agent and work alongside one another to solve the worst crimes that New Orleans has to offer. It's a world full of magic, where hexing curses are sold on every street, where voodoo priestesses and creatures of the night are lurking around every corner, and where even the most mundane crimes have a tinge of the supernatural to them.

Through multi-scenario campaigns, the game tells a rich, dynamic story and invites players to make critical decisions that will not only affect their characters, but change the direction and course of the story. The characters are not simply avatars, easily replaceable from scenario to scenario; instead, they are woven into the very fabric of the story itself. Their destiny and the destiny of New Orleans are inextricably linked together.

—description from the publisher