Take That

King Nebuchadnezzar II has spoken: "Build me the most wondrous gardens the world has ever seen!" The gardening guilds of Babylon have answered, and it is now up to the players, as leaders of these guilds, to build one of the seven wonders of the ancient world and lead their guild to victory in the cutthroat world of competitive gardening.

Gardens of Babylon is a 1-4 player, competitive euro-style game in which players strive to earn the most points by planting flower seeds on the most valuable tiles. Taking turns, players place tiles to create a maze-like ziggurat of pathways, strategically move their gardeners to gain positional advantage, and plant seeds to claim tiles, earning victory points and triggering cascades down connected waterways to steal those of their opponents in the process!

Featuring simple rules and strategic thinking, Gardens of Babylon offers infinite replayability with 78 distinct ziggurat tiles that form a unique 2.5-dimension modular board. A novel cascade mechanism allows a well-placed seed to change the course of the game in an instant, offering emergent gameplay and keeping players on their toes until the very end.

—description from the publisher

Your village has been overrun by savage werewolves, which are represented by the number on each of the cards that make up your village. To get rid of these fanged fiends faster than the neighboring villages, use your residents' special abilities and your powerful secret weapon: a silver coin.

Call for a vote when you think you have the fewest werewolves, but be careful as everyone else gets one more turn to save their own village first...

Silver Coin is a fast and engaging traditional card game with a werewolf twist! Everyone starts the game with five face-down cards, with each player being able to choose and see two of their cards. Cards are numbered 0-13, with the number showing how many werewolves the character on that card attracts, and each character (number) has a different special power.

On a turn, you draw the top card of the deck or discard pile, then either discard it to use the power of the card (but only if it came from the deck), discard it without using the power (ditto), or replace one or more of your face-down cards with this card; you can replace multiple cards only if they bear the same number, and you must reveal the cards to prove this, being penalized if you're wrong.

Silver Coin can be played as a standalone game or combined with other games in the Silver series by Bézier Games. Each version of the game has different card abilities and a different silver token ability.

—description from the publisher

Along cracks in the ocean floor, plumes of black and white superheated water pump relentlessly into the depths. They provide precious heat to the near freezing abyssal waters of the deep as well as a bounty of minerals. Microscopic archaea and other extremophiles live off the heat and minerals to form the base of a unique food chain that hosts a variety of exotic deep sea creatures.

In Deep Vents, players each control their own hydrothermal ecosystem to which they add new life and geological features each turn, competing to survive in the unforgiving depths by being efficient and preying on nearby systems with a host of strange and deadly predators.

Start each turn by drafting a tile from the five on display — placing one archaeon, the currency of the game — on each tile you skip. Place this tile adjacent to each other tile in your ecosystem, then either grow or trigger each tile in your ecosystem, moving through them from top to bottom, left to right, and growing or triggering them individually as you like. When you grow a tile, you place archaea on it, whether a set amount or a varying number depending on other tiles in your ecosystem; when you trigger a tile, you remove archaea from it to carry out its unique effect: attacking opponents, gaining shells to defend against attacks, moving archaea to your personal supply, and decimating tiles, which leaves them as nothing but a heat source for the remainder of the game.

If you ever need to discard archaea due to an attack and cannot do so, you must take a shortfall token and ten archaea, then discard archaea as needed. On your turn, you can pay ten archaea to remove a shortfall token — which you want to do because as long as you have one, you can draft only the first tile on display. If you end your turn with two shortfall tokens, you're out of the game.

The game ends if only one player remains in play (with that player winning) or after eight rounds, with players scoring points for archaea and shells in reserve and archaea on tiles. In this case, whoever has the highest score wins.

—description from the publisher

Shuffle Grand Prix is a Racing Card Game where fellow drivers battle in a fast-paced, strategic challenge to out-distance the competition.

Just like your favorite racing video games, you select your drivers to take advantage of their unique abilities. Play cards to slow your opponents and protect yourself against sabotage. The person who travels the furthest distance by the time the distance cards run out takes home the checkered flag. It is everyone for themselves out there, so don’t be left behind.

With just the right amount of strategy, intense graphics and action to amuse and engage, Shuffle Grand Prix is a family-friendly game that appeals to the competitive side of us all. It’s also a great gateway into light strategy games!

"You are a monarch, like your parents before you, a ruler of a small pleasant kingdom of rivers and evergreens. Unlike your parents, however, you have hopes and dreams! You want a bigger and more pleasant kingdom, with more rivers and a wider variety of trees. You want a Dominion! In all directions lie fiefs, freeholds, and feodums. All are small bits of land, controlled by petty lords and verging on anarchy. You will bring civilization to these people, uniting them under your banner.

But wait! It must be something in the air; several other monarchs have had the exact same idea. You must race to get as much of the unclaimed land as possible, fending them off along the way. To do this you will hire minions, construct buildings, spruce up your castle, and fill the coffers of your treasury. Your parents wouldn't be proud, but your grandparents, on your mother's side, would be delighted."

—description from the back of the box

In Dominion, each player starts with an identical, very small deck of cards. In the center of the table is a selection of other cards the players can "buy" as they can afford them. Through their selection of cards to buy, and how they play their hands as they draw them, the players construct their deck on the fly, striving for the most efficient path to the precious victory points by game end.

Dominion is not a CCG, but the play of the game is similar to the construction and play of a CCG deck. The game comes with 500 cards. You select 10 of the 25 Kingdom card types to include in any given play—leading to immense variety.

—user summary

Part of the Dominion series.