Theme: Trees and Forests

Summer nights, the woods, and the campfires where it is good to roast marshmallows — it doesn't get better than this!

Well - that is about to change! Suddenly, out of the bushes, hordes of zombie animals are rushing towards you. Do they want to steal your marshmallows? Not at all! It's your brains they want to cube and roast over the campfire. Your goal in Oh My Brain is to rid yourself of these assailants — that is, the cards in your hand — as quickly as possible to avoid gradually losing your mind because losing your brain entirely means being transformed into a zombie...and losing the game!

The card deck consists of cards numbered 0-19, and to start a round of play each player takes three cards from the deck and places one in their "cemetery" (a card holder) and the other two in their hand. They then do this twice more to have a hand of six cards and a cemetery of three cards. Each player starts with a number of brain tokens.

On a turn, you must play to the central pile (campfire), playing a number higher than the current highest number. You can play multiple copies of the same number, and if you do, you place all copies of that number after the first one into the cemetery of one or more opponents. You can always play a 0, which restarts the pile. If you play an 8, the next player must play lower than an 8, then the pile ascends again. If you play an 11, you take another turn. If you play certain high or low cards, you must roll the special die, which may have you play again, steal a brain from another player, swap campfires with an opponent, or take some other action.

If you cannot play, you lose a brain token, clear the pile, draw two cards, place one of those cards in your cemetery, then start the pile again by playing from your hand. If you have fewer than three cards in hand at the end of a turn, refill your hand to three from the cards in your campfire. If you have played all of your cards, success! You have fended off the zombie animals, and all opponents lose a brain token for each card in their hand and cemetery. If any player has no brains remaining, the player with the most brain tokens wins; otherwise, shuffle the cards and play another round, starting with the player who has the fewest brains.

In a post-apocalyptic world, the tribes of the wind are going to rebuild the world on the polluted ruins from the past.

Players will have to plant forests, build new villages and temples, and decontaminate surrounding areas.

They will be able to play cards from their hand. But be careful! The effect or even the possibility of playing the card may vary depending on... the back of your surrounding opponents' cards.

Players may also send their wind riders to explore the area, plant forests, or build villages and temples using all the gathered resources.

As the game progresses, you strive to complete objectives that will allow you to unlock your guide's special abilities, and to improve your tribe's powers.

When someone builds their 5th village, the end of the game is triggered. The player with the most points, depending on pollution, villages, temples, layout of their forests, and other various objectives, wins!

—description from the publisher

Renature is a majority game with dominoes for 2-4 players.

Each player gets a board with large pieces of wood in the form of turf, bushes, pines and oaks. These plants are used for the majorities on the large valley board and are available in a neutral color and in the respective player color. In addition, each player gets a stack of dominoes with two out of ten animal motifs on each of them.

On your turn, place one of the three dominoes in your hand on two brook spaces of the valley board. Of course, the domino must be adjacent to another domino that shows the same animal. If the placed domino borders a free space of a brown area, you can decide whether a tuft of grass or any other of your plants should be placed on that space. Tufts of turf have a value of 1, bushes of 2, pines of 3 and oaks of 4. After placing the plant, you score points for it and every plant piece that is already in this brown area and has the same or a lower value.

Once a brown area is framed with dominoes, the majority is scored and the player with the highest total plant value in the area gets the points that are printed as a large number on that area's flower token. Whoever has the second highest value gets the lower number. Two things make this especially tricky: The neutral pieces count as their own color and not among the majority of the player who has used them. Also, if colors are tied, they a treated as though they are not present at all in the area. After the area has been scored, the player who framed the area receives its flower token, which will give them extra points at game end.

In the course of the game, you may run out of plants, but these can be bought back from the game board with clouds. Clouds can also be used to buy another turn and to appoint a new joker animal. This animal then counts as all animals and makes it easier to put on. At the end of a player's turn, a domino is drawn and it is the next player's turn.

Once all players have run out of dominoes, the game ends with a final scoring.

The Atiwa Range is a region of southeastern Ghana in Africa consisting of steep-sided hills with rather flat summits. A large portion of the range comprises an evergreen forest reserve, which is home to many endangered species. However, logging and hunting for bushmeat, as well as mining for gold and bauxite, are putting the reserve under a lot of pressure.

Meanwhile, in the nearby town of Kibi, the mayor is causing a stir by giving shelter to a large number of fruit bats in his own garden. This man has recognized the great value the animals have in deforested regions of our planet: Fruit bats sleep during the day and take off at sunset in search of food, looking for suitable fruit trees up to sixty miles away. They excrete the seeds of the consumed fruit, disseminating them across large areas as they fly home. A single colony of 150,000 fruit bats can reforest an area of up to two thousand acres a year.

Just like that mayor, in Atiwa, you know that fruit bats — once scorned and hunted as mere fruit thieves — are in fact incredibly useful animals, spreading seeds over large areas of the country. By doing so, they help to reforest fallow land and, in the medium term, improve harvests. This realization has led to a symbiotic co-operation between fruit bats and fruit farmers. The animals are kept as "pets" to increase the size of fruit farms more quickly. Tall trees are left as roosts, providing shelter for them rather than hunting them for their scant meat. However, if you have a lot of fruit bats, you need a lot of space...

In the game, you will develop a small community near the Atiwa Range, creating housing for new families and sharing your newly gained knowledge on the negative effects of mining and the importance that the fruit bats have for the environment. You must acquire new land, manage your animals and resources, and make your community prosper. The player who best balances the needs of their community and the environment wins.

In Woodcraft, you play as forest people running competing workshops in the woods, with you gathering wood and crafting goods for your customers. Along the way, you hire helpers, improve your workshop, and buy different types of wood and other tools to create the best workshop you can.

During the game, players complete their projects with wood (dice) that can be cut down to size, glued back together, and adjusted using dice manipulation to be as efficient as possible with their resources.

Whoever builds the best, most successful workshop wins.

—description from the publisher