Tile Placement

Life in Reterra

Not long from now, the world as we know it is an overgrown memory — and though the world has changed, we've changed with it, using anything we can find to build a new way of living.

Life in Reterra is a (re)building game, and it's up to each player to build a community of their own. To set up, choose one of three ready-to-play themed building sets, or put together a set of your own. Each set consists of five building cards, with associated building tiles for each card.

Each player starts with one square land tile in play. Each land tile is divided into a 2x2 grid, with one of five types of terrain in each grid space; a space might also hold a gear icon or one of four types of relics. Players also have three land tiles in hand, and five land tiles are displayed face up.

On a turn, choose a land tile from your hand or the display, then add it to your community, which can be at most four tiles on each side. When the tile has a gear, you can either place an inhabitant from the reserve on this gear or place a building tile in your community...but each part of the building must be supported by a gear and all of these gears must be on the same type of terrain.

After you have a building in play, you gain the power of the building card and can use it once on each of your subsequent turns. Maybe you can place relic tokens for additional points, place additional inhabitants, junk an opponent's relics, or score for building large sections of a terrain or having more of a building than anyone else.

Once everyone has sixteen tiles in their community, players score for what they've built, earning points for blocks of terrain of at least seven spaces, surrounded energy sources (which are a special type of tile), inhabitants, relics, and buildings.

Curious Cargo

I stumbled upon a midnight market. It wasn't selling flowers or farm goods. It was a more curious sort of cargo: energy capacitors, strange crystalline material, and something green and jiggly. Since then, I've been dragged into it, deep into the thick of it.

I paid a stranger more than I should have for manufacturing plans I hardly understood. Worse yet, they sold the same stuff to my best friend. Now, I have to get my supply lines up and running to prepare for shipping my cargo — and if my friend starts shipping some of this curious cargo, I'll have to intercept their trucks and corner the market that way.

By hook or by crook, I'm going to be the king of curious cargo...

Curious Cargo is a two-player game in which you go head-to-head against your opponent by building up the infrastructure of your facility, calling in trucks at the right moment, all while perfectly timing the shipping and receiving of cargo to score the most points. Connect an interweaving web of lines to your shipping and receiving spaces. Play with two-color conveyor tiles, or step it up for an advanced experience and play with all three colors. Ship your custom-shaped cargo tokens to your opponent to interfere with their logistics plans!

The puzzling nature of Ryan Courtney's Pipeline comes alive in Curious Cargo! With six unique player boards for each player and two game modes, a skillful challenge awaits even the sharpest competitor.

Moon River

Moon River uses the Kingdomino game system — but without dominoes.

In the game, you will build a personal landscape of tiles to score points, but instead of tiling dominoes in your landscape, the game uses half-dominoes in which one edge has a jigsaw puzzle-style connection. You combine two of these half puzzle pieces to craft your own dominoes. This mechanism is meant to provide more variability and randomization in each play.

Instead of building your landscape around a central castle, you start from the river and expand away from it. Also, the crowns (i.e., the victory point multiplier) from Kingdomino are replaced by cow meeples, with players being able to use cowboys to move them.

Winter

Every winter, the lake freezes over. It won’t last long, so we have to play as soon as possible, trying to dominate the frozen parts of the lake before everything unfreezes and we lose everything. In order to win, choose key spaces wisely before your rival does, and control them. Show that the cold never bothered you.

In Winter, two players compete to be the player with the most chips of their color on the lake at the end of the game. The game is divided into two phases. In the first, the freezing phase, players will create the frozen lake in a contiguous form using their snowflake cards. They’ll also attempt to secure zones in which they’ve managed to group four snowflakes of their color using chips. In the second phase, the unfreezing, they’ll undo the creation by moving and retrieving their cards and chips of their color. At the end of the game, the player with the most chips on the table is declared the winner.

Winter is an abstract game for 2 players ages 8 and up. Games last 10 minutes in which good decisions are everything. This is a reissue of the 2016 edition with all new mechanics.

Winter was the winner of the 2021 Cardboard Edison Award. It’s the first of a series of the 4 Seasons series that will continue later with Autumn, Summer, and Spring.

AQUA: Biodiversity in the Oceans

In AQUA, your starting point is a hot spot that gradually becomes surrounded by expanding coral formations. These corals serve as habitats for small marine animals. By fostering biodiverse habitats, you can then create ideal conditions for attracting the largest marine animals.

AQUA plays over 17 rounds. On your turn, you must take a new coral tile from the market and add it to your reef, then you may also attract animals to your ecosystem if you create the correct patterns of coral.

At the end of the game, the player who grew the best coral formations and attracted the most large and small sea animals will score the most points and win.

AQUA invites you to dive into the beauty and wonder of the ocean, delivering an incredible variety of gameplay experiences for the whole family.

-description from publisher