Tile Placement

Ink is an unforgiving medium. However, when mastered with care, its spontaneity and brilliance can create visual effects of astonishing richness.

INK invites you to deploy your talent by creating sumptuous paintings worthy of the greatest collections.

Combining tile placement, resource and hand management, and pattern recognition, Ink challenges players to complete high-value contracts by carefully placing ink tiles to form harmonious patterns. The trick lies in balancing spontaneity with planning, every move you make affects not only your current canvas, but the options you'll have in future turns.

Living Forest Duel or how to experience all the thrills of the award-winning Living Forest in a tense and tactical two-player showdown!

SUMMARY:
In Living Forest Duel, two players face off as the spirits of Summer and Winter, each striving to save the sacred forest and be recognized as its ultimate protector. Although their goals are similar, only one season will claim the honors.

Your goal? Be the first to achieve one of the four victory conditions:

Plant a 3×3 rectangle of Guardian Tree cards in your Forest
Have only cards of your season on the recruitment line
Collect 8 Fire tokens
Move the Onibi creature to your opponent's side once the Onibi card is in their possession.

The game is played in alternating turns. On each turn, choose one of the following options:

Draw 1 guardian animal card from the shared draw pile and add it to the shared help line
Use 1 action token on 1 guardian animal card in the shared help line

• Draw a guardian animal card
Draw a card from the shared draw pile and place it face up on one of the three help lines:

the shared help line if it’s a neutral animal
your help line if it’s an animal of your season
your opponent’s help line if it’s an animal of their season

Each animal provides elements that you can use later with one of your two Action tokens.

Be careful: revealing too many solitary animals can be detrimental. After 3 solitary symbols, you lose an Action token, which will significantly reduce your ability to act.

• Use an action token
Place one of your Action tokens on a card to point to the last element corresponding to the action you want to perform. Count all elements of this type visible from the start of the common aid line OR from the last Action token pointing to this element.

Possible Actions:

Recruiting one or more Guardian Animals
Extinguishing the fire by collecting one or more Fire tokens
Planting one or more protective trees
Advancing Onibi toward your opponent

• End of the turn
The turn ends when both Summer and Winter have used up their 2 action tokens.

Add up the value of the fire tokens in the clearing: the value of each fire token is determined by its location. Then, add up your water values. Check to see whether the fire value in the clearing is strictly higher than your water value. If so, add a fire varan card corresponding to your season to the shared discard pile for each fire token present in the clearing.

Next, place a fire token on each of the cards on either side of the Onibi standee.

Retrieve your 2 action tokens back in front of you, and place all of the cards in the help line, as well as the cards in the players' personal lines on the shared discard pile.

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No prior knowledge of Living Forest is required to enjoy Living Forest Duel.

—description from the publisher

Flower Fields is a competitive tile-placement game, where your goal is to create an attractive flower garden.

The game is played over 3 Seasons, each composed of a variable number of rounds. On your turn, you must perform 1 action, either taking Flower tiles from the Field and placing them in your garden, taking Bees from the Field, or placing Bees in your Garden.

When taking Flower tiles, you should pick the next tile after the Sun marker in the circle around the Field, but you can spend Bees from your reserve and place it on that tile to "skip" it. Manage your Bees wisely and pick the best Flower tiles.

Flower tiles must connect to at least another tile in your garden. Create large flowerbeds of the same color and use your Bees to pollinate them and increase their value. Collect Hives and get rid of Spider Webs to gather more Bees at the end of the Season.

A Season ends when the last Flower tile has been taken from the circle around the Field. At the end of the third Season, the game ends.

You score your most valuable area of each color: Red/Yellow/Blue areas are worth points equal to the number of spaces times the number of Bees in that area; white areas are worth 1 point for each space in that area. You also get 5 points for each full row and/or column in your Garden board.

—description from the publisher

In Shallow Sea, a multi-layered puzzle board game inspired by the breathtaking beauty of the Great Barrier Reef, players create their own vivid ocean landscapes by strategically arranging an array of marine life, colorful fish, and corals. Unlike typical puzzle games in which pieces merely stack up, the elements in Shallow Sea can activate, deactivate, and even move, creating exciting combos and thought-provoking dilemmas that keep you on your toes.

On your turn, choose tiles showing fish, coral, or sea life, and place them on an empty space on your board. When fish surround a coral of the same color, you flip over the completed coral, which becomes a home for fish. Choose which fish will inhabit the coral, keeping the puzzle and ecosystem cards in mind. Use seashells to lure fish and move them, ideally completing multiple coral at once if you build them strategically.

Invite other creatures to enrich your ocean, trying to match the distinct scoring requirements of the ecosystem cards in order to score the most points.

The generations before you have relied on harvesting the oceans. But as the 19th century ends, change and opportunity reach your fishing village in northern Norway. In Saltfjord, you must decide if you will expand your settlement with new buildings, send your boat to collect fish, engage in trade, or pioneer new technologies to make everyday life easier. How will you shape the destiny of your village?

Saltfjord is set in a Norwegian fishing village, and is loosely based on the dice drafting mechanisms from "Santa Maria", but the game has otherwise been completely redesigned and expanded with new elements.

Over three rounds, players draft dice to activate buildings in their settlement. This provides resources as well as activating actions such as sending out your fishing boat, advancing along the various technology tracks, completing trade orders, or erecting new buildings. Each player's player board shows a grid. When you draft a die, you activate all buildings in the row or column corresponding to that die. By erecting buildings in your settlement, each die can activate more buildings.

The technology tracks unlock special abilities, such as upgrading your fishing boat. And fishing is an important part of daily life in Saltfjord.

To add to the replayability, the game has lots of variable elements in the set-up, such as what special abilities and end scoring tiles are available.

—description from the publisher