Trading

A game of outrageous bluffing, honest haggling, and crafty negotiation. It's Halloween! Time to don your scariest costume and run through the neighborhood shouting "Trick or Treat!". Collect costume and treat cards, and you're on your way to winning Halloween Party. But beware - your opponents may play tricks on you!

Simple enough. But is it? Halloween Party has a ghoulish Twist - You can't play your own cards! You must trade with your opponents, playing the cards they give you, and letting them play your cards. Can you trust them to trade the cards you want? Probably not. But that's where the fun begins...

A winner of the 2000 Concours International de Créateurs de Jeux de Société.

In an interesting departure from his normally computational-heavy game structure, Reiner Knizia put together this negotiation game. Players are represented on the board by a group of politicians moving through a network of committees, and need to seek support from their competitors to advance upward toward the Senate. Supporting an opponent gains you prestige, needed in quantity at the end of the game. Once all five Senate positions are filled, the game is over, and only players who have a politician in the Senate are eligible to win. Of those players, whoever has the most prestige wins.

Ostia is an economic game of trading goods and donating them to the senate of Rome. You have to decide, whether you want to earn money for your goods or whether you want to donate some of them to the senate. The senate grants victory points for the most needed goods, but no money. Therefore you have to put some goods to the market, hoping that they are rarely sold there to earn enough money for the next trading phase.
The ranking of goods mostly needed changes each round and you can see the ranking for the next round. Accordingly you may decide to keep some of the goods for next round, when they are more valuable to the senate. But you can keep only one card of goods per storehouse and storehouses are expensive.

This entry covers the 2002 release of Sid Meier´s Civilization: The Boardgame by Eagle Games. This game is unrelated to the similarly named 2010 FFG game Sid Meier's Civilization: The Board Game.

A boardgame version of the award-winning PC strategy game. Create a civilization to stand the test of time! The game begins in 4000 BC where the players found a pair of villages of a fledgling people.

Each player’s civilization :

Explores the world around them, discovering resources and the native people that defend them.
Expands by sending settlers out to create new cities.
Researches new technologies to gain advantages over the other players.
Builds unique “Wonders of the World”.
Increases the size of their cities (4 sizes from village to metropolis) to increase production.
Builds military units to defend what’s theirs, and to conquer what’s not.

Features:

2 sets of rules (standard, and advanced) allow anyone to play the game.
784 plastic pieces featuring 22 different, professionally sculpted playing pieces that represent cities, settlers, armies, navies, artillery, and air units from 4 different eras.
Over 100 full color Technology and Wonder cards.
A giant 46” x 36” gameboard featuring the artwork of Paul Niemeyer.

This game has been reimplemented in 2007 as Civilization CHR ("open source" project)

Star Trek: Catan takes two well-known media properties and merges them into, well, into something that is 95% The Settlers of Catan glossed with Trek tropes and spiced with a Trek-themed version of a mini-expansion previously only available in German.

In Star Trek: Catan, players start the game with two small Outposts at the intersection of three planets, with each planet supplying resources based on the result of a dice roll. Players collect and trade these resources – dilithium, tritanium, food, oxygen and water – in order to build Starships that connect regions in the galaxy, establish more Outposts and Starbases (upgraded Outposts) at new intersection points in order to increase resource acquisition, and acquire Development Cards that provide Victory Points (VPs) or special abilities.

On a dice roll of 7, a Klingon ship swoops in to prevent resource production on one planet while taxing spacegoers who hold too many resources.

Star Trek: Catan differs from the basic Settlers in one aspect: a set of Support Cards formerly available only in German as Catan Scenarios: Helpers of Catan. Each Support Card features a special ability and one of Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Sulu, Scott, Uhura, Chekov, Chapel, Rand, or Sarek. Some special abilities make basic actions better, such as reducing the costs of Starbase upgrades or allowing the player to trade a resource of their choice at 2:1 for a turn, while others break rules, such as protecting the player from discarding on a 7 or producing a resource when the player rolls a number that wouldn't otherwise produce for them. Players get a specific Support Card during setup based on turn order, with later players getting generally more useful abilities to compensate for early player advantage. When a player uses a Support Card ability for the first time, they may trade it in for a Support Card of their choice or keep it for a second use, but they may only trade immediately after use.