Tile Placement

Before winter makes its appearance, a particularly warm fall bathes the forest in a golden shimmer. During the Indian Summer, New England blossoms one last time. Treetops are ablaze with countless colors — a living rainbow, from green to orange to red. Slowly the first leaves are starting to fall. Meanwhile, our steps and the diligent squirrels rustle the colorful foliage.

On our walks through the woods, we discover all kinds of little treasures; we collect berries, nuts, mushrooms and feathers. We pause for a moment to watch the shy inhabitants of the forest before we set off towards home once again. There, a good book and a hot tea are already awaiting.

Indian Summer is the second part of Uwe Rosenberg's puzzle trilogy following 2016's Cottage Garden, and this game is firmly geared towards experienced players. At the heart of the game are puzzle tiles with holes that are placed on individual forest boards to cover up treasures. When players get their hands on these, they gain more options and an edge over their opponents. All that counts in the end is to be the first to cover your forest floor completely with leaves.

Description from the publisher:

King Ludwig II of Bavaria has called all great architects to design his greatest achievement: a world-renowned palace. Only the best will do! Gorgeous appointments, white stone, surrounded by water, with swans everywhere. Oh, and the Ludwig touch? All the architects must design the palace together. The designer who shows the strongest influence will receive the order to build it.

In The Palace of Mad King Ludwig, each player builds rooms one at a time in a single gigantic palace. As rooms are completed, a moat slowly forms around the outside. Once the ends of the moat connect, the palace is finished, and the player who has contributed the most to the palace wins!

In more detail, this sequel to Castles of Mad King Ludwig shares a few similarities to its predecessor, such as tile-laying, room rewards, and the magic of watching a unique palace take shape through the course of the game, but the gameplay is entirely different, with no auction, a clever endgame timer that graphically builds pressure for players as the moat slowly closes in around the palace, and a twist on resource management with multi-colored swan tokens being used as currency, points, and the keys to new abilities.

Guide your adventurers skillfully through the jungle!

Each turn in Karuba: Das Kartenspiel, you carefully select two path cards from your hand to try to outwit the other players. Whoever has the lowest sum loses a card, then all players use their cards to create a network of pathways to connect their adventurers with the temples. Who will best guide their adventurers through the jungle? In the end, the player who collects the most points with valuable treasure and temples wins.

In Automania, you run a car factory, trying to produce the most popular cars in the market. To achieve this, you buy tiles to upgrade and customize your factory, and hire specialist employees to help you.

Central to the game are the factory boards: Each player has a factory with three assembly lines, and each assembly line produces one type of car. You can put machine tiles along your assembly lines to change the specifications of your cars. However, your three assembly lines intersect, so each machine tile placed might affect more than one type of car — which means you have to think carefully about where you put those machines.

When a car is produced, it must be sold in one of two markets, and the better the specifications of the car is in line with the demand in the chosen market, the more popular the car will be. The most popular cars reap the highest profits, earning money or prestige — which is what you need to win this game.

Introduced by the Moors, azulejos (originally white and blue ceramic tiles) were fully embraced by the Portuguese when their king Manuel I, on a visit to the Alhambra palace in Southern Spain, was mesmerized by the stunning beauty of the Moorish decorative tiles. The king, awestruck by the interior beauty of the Alhambra, immediately ordered that his own palace in Portugal be decorated with similar wall tiles. As a tile-laying artist, you have been challenged to embellish the walls of the Royal Palace of Evora.

In the game Azul, players take turns drafting colored tiles from suppliers to their player board. Later in the round, players score points based on how they've placed their tiles to decorate the palace. Extra points are scored for specific patterns and completing sets; wasted supplies harm the player's score. The player with the most points at the end of the game wins.