Trading

In the Super Mario Bros. Power Up Card Game, you want to survive the perils of the Mushroom Kingdom and make it safely to the Castle, but to do that, you'll need to use your wits and deduction skills to figure out how to take out everyone else who might beat you there.

Each round, players receive a secret level card at random, with these cards being numbered 1-12. After looking at their card, each player in order can swap their card with the one held by their right-hand neighbor. Will you get something better? Maybe! If someone has a castle card, they're immune from trade or disasters this round. After everyone has traded or passed, players can play "? Block" power-ups to affect their strength or others. Whoever has the lowest score in a round loses one of their life tokens, and if you lose all four life, you're out of the game!

The Stifling Dark is a one-vs-many hidden-movement horror board game with an innovative line-of-sight mechanic for 2-5 players. One player takes the role of the adversary, whose goal is to prevent the other players (the investigators) from escaping through a variety of unique actions. As an investigator, your only goals are to survive and escape.

Investigators move around the board in a point-to-point fashion using their base movement speed. They may sprint to move more quickly, but they need to keep an eye on their stamina so they don't become exhausted. Additionally, investigators can pick up and use items, lock and unlock doors, or use their flashlights to try and find the adversary. Meanwhile, the adversary is secretly moving around the board, trying to stop the investigators from escaping. There are a variety of investigators to choose from, each with their own special abilities. The adversary also has multiple attacks and abilities that change how you play the game.

Will you fix the car and drive out, or will you override the gate and try to sneak out? The investigators will need to decide if they want to stick together to watch each other's backs, or split up to race towards the exit. Either way, they must move quickly - the longer the game takes, the more chances the adversary has to stop them!

The game ends when either all of the investigators escape (meaning the investigators won) or the adversary achieves their win condition (which is different for each adversary).

Bohnanza: Dahlias is a special edition of Bohnanza for 3-5 players that features the same gameplay as the original design.

In the game, you plant, then harvest flower cards in order to earn coins. Each player starts with a hand of random flower cards, and each card has a number on it corresponding to the number of that type of flower in the deck. Unlike in most other card games, you can't rearrange the order of cards in hand, so you must use them in the order that you've picked them up from the deck — unless you can trade them to other players, which is the heart of the game.

On a turn, you must plant the first one or two cards in your hand into the "fields" in front of you. Each field can hold only one type of flower, so if you must plant a type of flower that's not in one of your fields, then you must harvest a field to make room for the new arrival. This usually isn't good! Next, you reveal two cards from the deck, and you can then trade these cards as well as any card in your hand for cards from other players. You can even make future promises for cards received right now! After all the trading is complete — and all trades on a turn must involve the active player — then you end your turn by drawing cards from the deck and placing them at the back of your hand.

When you harvest flowers, you receive coins based on the number of cards in that field and the "meter" for that particular type of flower. Flip over 1-4 cards from that field to transform them into coins, then place the remainder of the cards in the discard pile. When the deck runs out, shuffle the discards, playing through the deck two more times. At the end of the game, everyone can harvest their fields, then whoever has earned the most coins wins.

What if the animals were the ones who ran the zoo?

…Presumably, this wild government would be built upon the support of fellow creatures and fueled by the fame, attention, and prestige of wide-eyed visitors. Naturally, the most aspirational beasts would lobby for a position in the star exhibit, and the lead star would be elected Zoo Mascot.

In order to join the star exhibit, each species must campaign its way up the hierarchy of enclosures with the majority support of animal voters. And the lead star will be the species that has earned the most laurels from both raving fans and jealous rivals along the way.

How does one gain support and earn laurels? Through crafty politicking, clever negotiations, and ruthless schemes. There can only be one Zoo Mascot, after all.

Where are you going? That is the ultimate question of Zoo Vadis.

Zoo Vadis is an evolution of Reiner Knizia’s classic negotiation game, Quo Vadis? It retains the elegant, political gameplay that fans have come to love while introducing many innovations and improvements by:

Enhancing the 3-player game and tailoring the board to all player counts through neutral, bribable figures—roaming peacocks
Widening the player count with a second game board for 6-7 players
Expanding the possibilities for strategic negotiation with asymmetric animal abilities
Increasing tactical opportunities with new special laurel tokens
Broadening the appeal of the theme and presentation with vibrant zoo art by Kwanchai Moriya and Brigette Indelicato
Enlivening the production with chunky animal figures and functional player screens

Like the original design, the game ends immediately when the Star Exhibit is full. Only the animals who have reached the Star Exhibit qualify for victory, and the winner is the player with the most laurels.

–description from publisher

The Illiterati are an evil secret organization that has taken over the world. Your job as a member of the League of Librarians is to save the world's books — one word at a time.

Illiterati is a real-time, co-operative word game in which players work together to form words and bind books. Each player starts the game with five letter tiles and a red torched book that shows a condition that player must achieve to restore that book, e.g. using 8+ tiles with at least 3 green symbols, create words that are all animals. A library of three random tiles is placed in the center of the table. The game takes place in three-minute rounds, and before the round begins each player draw seven letter tiles from the draw bag.

Once the countdown begins, players can talk and trade letters as much as they want with one another and the library to try to achieve their goal. Once time ends, if the library contains too many letters — and this threshold is based on your difficulty level — then you trigger a burn event. Flip all of these letters face down, then remove one of them from the game, then discard excess letters to the discard bag. If you burn too many letters, you lose the game. If you didn't burn any letters and you've completed your goal, flip your red book face down and draw a blue waterlogged book to give yourself a new goal.

At the end of the round, draw an illiterati villain card and resolve its effect. If you've drawn this villain previously — and the deck contains five copies of five villains — then all of the previous effects from this villain also resolve in a chain attack from newest to oldest. Villain attacks often strip letters from words, which means you'll need to create new words with what's left during the next round to avoid burning another letter.

Once all players have completed two books — or three or four depending on your difficulty level — draw one more book, the Final Chapter, with all players needing to complete this challenge in the same round, e.g., using 12+ tiles, create words in which all of your vowels are the same color. If all players meet this goal during the same round, you win; if even one person fails, another villain attacks, then you draw new tiles to start another round. You can discard and redraw up to seven tiles at the start of a round, but you must draw a second illiterati villain card that round — and if the villain deck runs out, you lose.