Take That

You lead the good life at the top of your tower, contemplating your peaceful kingdom and chatting with your charming neighbors. Life is absolute happiness. Well, it was...

Terrible skeletons have arisen with a creepy clatter from their graves across the realms' ancient cemeteries. Those scouts that return report endless streams of bony hordes marching toward each kingdom, ravaging the lands as they come. Faced with this sudden threat, even your once friendly neighbors seem to have turned against you as they withdraw to their keeps to defend their own frightened kingdoms, focusing on their own villages and tower.

Your kingdom is at siege by the living dead. You raise troops, build walls, lay traps, prepare magical spells and even wake your pet dragon. Hopefully they can be slowed, or if you're devilishly crafty, they can be turned toward those traitorous adjoining kingdoms. In this battle, your best asset is your brave and proud hero, who stands ready to slay those piles of walking bones. Alas, he can't fight everywhere, so if things get truly desperate, you could offer them your treasure to get some relief.

The ivory invaders want somewhere to call their own to live out their death in peace, and they have their eye sockets on you! Will you hold out, or will your home become the retirement village of the damned...?

Bad Bones is a game in which you must survive an invasion of ever more numerous and dangerous skeletons. The invasion cannot be defeated, so you must outlast your opponents to win the day. At your disposal are a range of weapons that defeat, slow, or even deflect the skeletons towards the other players. The game ends when one player's tower or village is wiped out.

A game turn takes place in four phases:

1] Hero Movement and Combat: Move your hero and eliminate the skeletons from the destination square.
2) Trap Placement: Place or remove traps on your personal board.
3) Skeletons Move: Move the skeletons forward, damaging your tower or your village if they move far enough.
4) Skeletons Spawn: Place new skeletons among the streams and on the edges of the player boards.

Each phase happens simultaneously for all players on their own player board, which means a game with up to six players can take only thirty minutes. Multiple copies of the game can be combined to play with as many players as you have space for, and the game can also be played solo. The rules are simple to explain and understand, with several strategic variations for experts.

ICECOOL2 is both a standalone game and an expansion for ICECOOL. If played on its own, ICECOOL2 differs from the original game thanks to:

Tasks on 1-point cards
Fish-moving power on 2-point cards
Optional tournament scoring

If you combine both ICECOOL sets, you get:

Multiple new layouts
New game mode called "The Race"
Games playable for up to eight players
Chance to create your own new layouts

Description from the publisher:

The marvelous magician Moop is mashing up monsters to meet the marauding munchkins. He's created bizarre new animals such as the Owligator and Kangarooster! But the heroes can fight back with their own mixed-up weapons, including Sockodiles and the Beaver Cleaver. This version of Munchkin is the craziest ever...but it's still Munchkin, so the first player to Level 10 wins!

Moop's Monster Mashup is a standalone game, but can also be combined with Munchkin or any of the Munchkin games.

Europa, Jupiter's moon. Deep beneath the crust, the oceans are teeming with alien sea life. Shellfish, plants, corals, arthropods, even strange fish and larger sea creatures populate a wide-ranging interconnected web of hidden seas. Volcanism is rampant, warming the mineral-rich waters and creating excellent conditions for energy-harvesting.

The largest cavern close to the surface is known as The Pocket. This is where the initial teams of Stabilizers built their first outposts, with the intent to establish long-term communities capable of surviving indefinitely. Aqua-farming is well established; food and other sundries are efficiently gathered. The Pocket has many deposits of minerals and crystals that can be mined and processed to create strong and versatile construction materials locally.

Colonists arrive at the Doorstep at regular intervals when the Threshold is opened. The arrivals are of four general types: Pioneers (who are tasked with exploring the changing surface of the moon and the labyrinth of seas beneath), Engineers (who develop and operate the machinery and structures needed to run the colonies), Marines (who defend the colonies from hostile sea life, unwanted intruders, and other colonies), and Stewards (overseers responsible for strategy and negotiation).

Colony development mostly occurs beneath the ice; this is where all of the moon’s resources are concentrated, so this is where the effort is best spent. To keep close to the surface, most colony structures are built clinging onto the underside of the ice crust. Surface structures will be built only once an undersea outpost is well established and beginning to thrive. In addition to construction and resource-gathering, colonies spend a lot of effort on exploring this new environment. The volcanic action and mineral-heavy waters make long-range scanning unreliable, so physical exploration is required to plumb the depths.

As the Pocket is explored and expanded, the established colonies have been making some unusual discoveries beneath the ice. Deep in the trenches, artifacts of non-human origin are starting to be found. The dark seas hide many secrets. Squads of mercenaries occasionally appear on the surface and beneath the sea, penetrating the Threshold somehow to carry out an unknown mission on the moon. These aspects are worrisome but can’t distract the colonies from their main goals.

It is still early in the Artemis project. A foothold on life here has been gained, but it will take tenacious effort from the competing colonies to reach the point where Europa is truly viable as a home.

The Artemis Project is a dice (dis)placement and engine building game that has you fighting the planet as well as the other players. Roll your dice and place them tactically to thwart the other colonists. Harvest energy and minerals. Bid for buildings. Work together to go on Expeditions to earn rewards. Train workers. Will your efforts be enough to survive?

Publisher Blurb:

The Game of Inauspicious Incidents and Grave Consequences! In the Gloom card game, you make your eccentric family of misfits suffer the greatest tragedies possible before helping them pass on to the well-deserved respite of death. Just mix the 55 transparent cards in this set together with your copy of Gloom to add morbid new Modifiers, Events, and Untimely Deaths.

Unquiet Dead also introduces Stories, Undead, and Timing Symbols. The families of Gloom have many skeletons in their closets. In Unquiet Dead, the spooks come out to play. Mad scientists can Reanimate Relatives or Invent Invisibility. Vampires and shape shifters can Terrorize the Townsfolk and Go Mad in the Moonlight. Will you Give Up the Ghost, or will you hold onto it?

STORIES: These cards give your families even more to fight over. Whoever claims a story gains a special benefit ... but how long can you keep it?

UNDEAD: There are seven special Modifiers that allow a Character to become a supernatural creature -- a vampire, mummy, ghost, ghoul, wereduck, invisible person, or haunted portrait. These Undead Characters are both living and dead; you can still play Modifiers and Events on them, but they also count toward your Family Value and toward ending the game.

TIMING SYMBOLS: Card effects in Unquiet Dead have symbols to let you know whether a card has an Instant effect that occurs when the card is played from your hand; an Ongoing effect that lasts until it is covered by another card; or a Persistent effect that can last as long as the Character is still alive ... or Undead.