Territory Building

Reef Encounters of the Second Kind was released at Essen 2006. It is an expansion set for Reef Encounter, introducing new creatures, opportunities, and tactics to the basic game.

The crown of thorns starfish with their voracious appetites have now found the reef and will consume any corals that they can reach. Blue shrimps will assist host shrimps in protecting the larger corals, but these blue shrimps are notoriously unreliable. Meanwhile, the polyp tiles now come in a variety of different forms, and even the rocks are liable to change shape.

A selection of cards provides one-off opportunities to influence the game, to introduce or to move the blue shrimps, or to affect the scoring at the end of the game. An appropriate card is also required before a parrot fish can consume its first coral.

Contents: 4 blue wooden shrimps, 48 special tiles, 56 cards (28 in English and 28 in German), and 2 rules sheets, one in English and one in German.

Expands:

Reef Encounter

Reef Encounters of the Second Kind Microbadge :

Reef Encounter is about life on a coral reef! Using polyp tiles, players grow different types of corals, which they can protect from being attacked by other corals through judicious placing of their four shrimp counters. To be successful players must consume polyps from neighboring corals in order to acquire the 'consumed' polyp tiles that are the key to the game. The consumed polyp tiles have a myriad of uses (and have a similar effect to the action points in games like Tikal and Java). Most importantly they can be used to flip over or lock the coral tiles, which determine the respective values of the different types of coral at the end of the game.

Description from the designer, Richard Breese.

Expanded by:

Reef Encounter of the Second Kind

"This world's not big enough for all of us, so it's time you step aside to make room for me."

That's the spirit of Philippe Keyaerts' award-winning Small World, and the 2011 release Small World Underground is a standalone game that keeps that spirit intact, while putting a new spin on the game play.

Small World Underground includes 15 fantasy-themed races of creatures along with 21 special powers. Each player will control several creature/power combinations over the course of the game – spending points to draft these combinations – and will use those creatures to claim control of various subterranean locations. Some locations hold relics or are designated as "places of power", and monsters must first be conquered before a player can claim these special benefits. At the end of each turn, a player scores points for the regions he holds, and the player with the most points at game end wins.

Small World Underground is playable on its own, but can be combined with other Small World releases. The publisher recommends that players be familiar with Small World before playing Small World Underground.

In Small World, players vie for conquest and control of a world that is simply too small to accommodate them all.

Designed by Philippe Keyaerts as a fantasy follow-up to his award-winning Vinci, Small World is inhabited by a zany cast of characters such as dwarves, wizards, amazons, giants, orcs, and even humans, who use their troops to occupy territory and conquer adjacent lands in order to push the other races off the face of the earth.

Picking the right combination from the 14 different fantasy races and 20 unique special powers, players rush to expand their empires - often at the expense of weaker neighbors. Yet they must also know when to push their own over-extended civilization into decline and ride a new one to victory!

On each turn, you either use the multiple tiles of your chosen race (type of creatures) to occupy adjacent (normally) territories - possibly defeating weaker enemy races along the way, or you give up on your race letting it go "into decline". A race in decline is designated by flipping the tiles over to their black-and-white side.

At the end of your turn, you score one point (coin) for each territory your races occupy. You may have one active race and one race in decline on the board at the same time. Your occupation total can vary depend on the special abilities of your race and the territories they occupy. After the final round, the player with the most coins wins.

Clarifications: available in a pinned forum post.

In Kingdom Builder, the players create their own kingdoms by skillfully building their settlements, aiming to earn the most gold at the end of the game.

Nine different kinds of terrain are on the variable game board, including locations and castles. During his turn, a player plays his terrain card and builds three settlements on three hexes of this kind. If possible, a new settlement must be built next to one of that player’s existing settlements. When building next to a location, the player may seize an extra action tile that he may use from his next turn on. These extra actions allow extraordinary actions such as moving your settlements.

By building next to a castle, the player will earn gold at the end of the game, but the most gold will be earned by meeting the conditions of the three Kingdom Builder cards; these three cards (from a total of ten in the game) specify the conditions that must be met in order to earn the much-desired gold, such as earning gold for your settlements built next to water hexes or having the majority of settlements in a sector of the board.

Each game, players will use a random set of Kingdom Builder cards (3 of 10), special actions (4 of 8), and terrain sectors to build the map (4 of 8), ensuring you won't play the same game twice!