Tile Placement

In the 20th Century, every country strives to develop and improve, each in its own way. Some become financial leaders. Others become centers of learning. Both science and commerce serve to propel nations toward the future – but toward what kind of future? Growth produces waste, and the greatest advances may come with the greatest cost to the environment. How will these countries mitigate the inevitable ecological catastrophes?

Your goal is to build a land free of garbage and pollution – a land where the environment is as healthy as the economy. Only then can you consider your country to be truly developed.
The game consists of six rounds, during which you oversee the urbanization of your country. Some lands produce income. Some produce scientific research. Others improve the quality of life. Your research allows you to discover new technologies that will shape the way your nation develops. Science can even help you avert ecological catastrophes. At the end of each round, your lands provide you the money and research that you will need to deal with the challenges of the next round.

You accumulate points each round, based on your nation’s quality of life. At the end of rounds two and four, you also score bonus points for certain aspects of your country’s development. At the end of round six, you will score bonus points based on your country’s income, research, and environmental quality. The player with the most points wins, having built the country with the highest standard of living.

(from Czech Games Edition website)

A fast-paced word game for two players. The game consists of wooden letter tiles, each with four letters (the Discovery Edition contains 28 tiles and the Wooden Box edition has 32 tiles). The board starts with 16 tiles and more are added during the game. On a turn, players find words (at least three letters long) on the board. Words can be situated vertically, horizontally, or diagonally. When a player finds a word, they use transparent tokens to highlight the letters in the word.

Over the course of the game, the board expands beyond the inital 4 x 4 layout, as players earn new letter tiles and add them to the wordsearch field. The first player to use up all of their tokens wins.

Welcome to sunny Gopher Gulch, home of a unique gopher population known far and wide for their bright and colorful coats! Due to their particular diets, our local gophers have developed fur in remarkable shades of red, purple, and orange… this is a sight that has to be seen to be believed, and every season we get bus after bus of excited tourists like yourself, eager to see our little furry friends! Quite a few Gopher Ranchers have set up shop around town, and each of them will try to show you exactly what you’ve come to see. Thanks for visiting Gopher Gulch, please remember to tell your friends!

~The Gopher Gulch Tourism Board

Players are gopher ranchers in the town of Gopher Gulch, each placing tiles to build their own warren of burrows, hoping to attract all three types of gophers. It’s a delicate balancing act where every tile counts. Build your warren, forming burrows of three different colors. Complete a burrow of a particular color that is longer than the current shortest burrow in that color, and the gopher living there moves into the new one; it stays there until it gets lured away again by an even bigger burrow! There is one less gopher of each color than there are players, so not everyone will be able to host all three gopher types at once.

Every once in a while the tour bus will arrive, and the tourists will be most excited to see the types of gophers promised to them by their tour schedule. If your ranch is missing those particular gophers, you’ll get complaints from the tourists. At the end of the tourist season, the rancher with the fewest complaints wins!

From the publisher, Rio Grande Games:

Players compete in the building of Mall World, scheduled to be the largest indoor shopping mall in the world. In the planning of a mall this size, it is important to get the right shops in the right locations and the player best able to do this will win the game!

The players are building a research station at the bottom of the sea, trying to find Atlantis, recover sunken treasures, and extract raw materials. The board shows the sea floor as a grid with shades indicating the levels of depth.

Each round consists of three phases :

-expanding the station : extra research stations will be added, these give advantages depending on their type, cost to build depends on the underwater landscape on which they are placed. More stations in use of the same type give better advantages. They must be occupied by a scientist before any advantage can be enjoyed.

-deploying scientists : players must pay to bring them into the game. They can be moved around to start using the research stations. Once deployed they remain at this station. When using a station built by another player there is a cost.

-exploration : Up to 3 submarines can be launched when certain requirements are met. These explore outside the base searching for scientific and financial treasures as well as trying to find remains of Atlantis. The amount of built research stations and deployment of scientists greatly aid in the performance of the submarines.
All players have special goals, consisting of sea discoveries that provide more points when recovered.

The game ends when certain tiles or all of the Atlantis tiles are found, when nobody buys/builds anything to expand the base and when not a single sea discovery was recovered.

Points are scored for recovered Atlantis chips and sea discoveries. Discoveries corresponding to the player's special goals score more points. The total of the discoveries is multiplied by the points gained from the stations. Extra points are given for left over money.