Tile Placement

Galactic Emperor is a fast paced empire-building game of exploration, conflict, and struggle for dominance. The last Galactic Emperor has met with a sudden and quite fatal accident. Now there is a power vacuum in the galaxy, and you’re one of the Planetary Dukes who wants to fill it. Each player controls a space sector with a home planet, and for a time, shares the power of the galactic throne. During the fight for control, the central Omega Sun is heading toward collapse… a cataclysm that will only accelerate the chaos!

The game plays over several rounds, and within each round, the roles players choose determine what happens next. There are 7 different types of roles: Explorer, Steward, Merchant, Engineer, Warlord, Regent, and Scientist. All players get a turn to act during each role. Players discover planets, gain resources, build ships, and attack space fleets in a desperate effort to grind foes into cosmic dust!

The player with the most victory points at the end of the game wins, becoming the ultimate Galactic Emperor!

A boardgame based on a computer game (instead of the other way around) and designed by Klaus Teuber, Anno 1503 views the era of colonization strictly from the home country perspective. Two to four players send ships to explore islands scattered about a 5 x 12 square ocean (the more players, the more islands). The settlement of the new lands is, however, strictly abstract.

Each player's turn begins with the roll of one 6-sided die. A "6" is a random event (pirates, fire or good fortune - bad twice as often as lucky, and most likely to damage players who are doing well). On other results, each player gains a commodity from one of his five workshops. The player who rolled may then buy commodities from the bank, sell them to his colonists for gold (no trading among players), or use them in various combinations to recruit new colonists, promote existing ones, or build ships. After that, ships can sail for the unknown lands.

Each island bears on its hidden side an outpost, a treasure or a trade agreement. After being discovered, these items are brought back to the home country (and the ship is removed from play, requiring the player to build a new one in order to keep searching). Outposts increase the productivity of workshops. Treasure yields either gold or free colonist promotions. Trade agreements reduce the gold needed to buy commodities from the bank.

Besides being useful in these ways, outposts, gold and agreements are among the game's victory conditions. A player wins by being to first to attain three out of five objectives, namely, four outposts, 30 gold, three trade agreements, three colonists promoted to the top rank of "merchant" and the construction of four public buildings. The buildings (8 types, each bringing some advantage) cost nothing but don't become available until a player has recruited at least four colonists. After that, each new colonist adds a building (unless they've been preempted by other players; there aren't enough for everyone).

Overall, the game falls squarely into the "simultaneous solitaire" category. Except in the race for islands, the players scarcely interact at all. They do, however, have a great many choices to make in the course of play.

For when you're lookin' for a fight!

While mankind has fought with itself, the forces of evil have gathered and prepared for one final, apocalyptic assault. Each group has fine tuned their forces and stands ready to fight for ultimate control of the earth.

You are the leader of one of these groups, and you alone will determine who has control of the earth for now...

Hidden Conflict is an innovative, tile-based, skirmish game that allows players to fight for global domination as either the forces of good or one of the many evil groups vying for control. Players build an army from the beautifully illustrated tiles and face off against their foes. The game plays equally well with two to six players.

This large box contains 240 "Army" tiles, complete rules and 6 player "cheat" cards.

Based on the novel by Frank Schätzing, continuing the Kosmos line of literature-based games. The world is facing an ecological catastrophe caused by previously unknown marine life forms. Each player represents a nation sending their scientists out to confront the threat.

The action cards form the core of the game. For each round, the cards are shuffled and placed in a row. Each player in turn order takes the leftmost card from the row, until there are no more cards left. Instead of the leftmost card, players can also buy a different card by paying with victory points.

At the end of each round, players score points according to the sizes of their largest research networks. At the end of the game, extra points are given out based on whether research stations are connected to the center of the game board.

Description from BoardgameNews.com:

The Gonzaga family ruled part of northern Italy for nearly five hundred years, losing control to the Hapsburgs from Austria in 1708. During their reign, two daughters of the House of Gonzaga married Holy Roman Emperors. In Gonzaga, players must get into the expansionist spirit of the times and build fiefdoms across Europe to stake a claim on harbors and cities, while also trying to complete secret missions. The game lasts 7-12 rounds, and players are competing in some of six regions in Europe. (The number of regions and the specific regions vary based on the number of players and the scenario tile drawn at the start of the game.)

A round starts with each player drawing a fief card from their individual deck; each fief card depicts one of twelve fiefs: plastic components comprising multiple hexagonal loops with castles on some of these loops. Each player then secretly chooses both a region card and an action card, then reveals them simultaneously. Part of the fief (but not all of it) must lie in the chosen region, and the action card determines whether a player must play the fief on one or more harbors, on one or more cities, on open land, or on both harbors and cities. With this last action – the alliance card – a player can alternatively place one or two of six individual rings on the board, even on spaces that another player has already claimed with a fief. You score points for covering cities and harbors, for connecting at least three harbors in a sea, and for setting aside your fief as a donation to the church. The cards you play are set aside for the next turn, thereby forcing you to switch regions and actions as you place fiefs.

The game ends either after twelve rounds or after a trigger point based on the cities and harbors not covered. The player with the most connected fiefs, including the individual rings, scores a bonus, then players reveal their hidden objectives and score based on the number of target cities they covered.