Worker Placement

Neuland is a game about logistics and planning. In the beginning of the game, the land lies undeveloped, a series of blank hexes representing mountains, forests, and grasslands. Players win by building and using prestige properties that allow them to place their family's coat-of-arms onto the board -- first to place all their coats of arms wins.

To use these buildings, though, requires the player have the correct raw materials. Swords and cloth, for example, or coins and paper. Each one of these materials needs even more basic materials, such as iron ore, coal, and so on backward toward the most basic elements such as food, wood, and stone.

To cull these materials from the land, one builds buildings -- a Stonecutter's Hut, Smelter, Coin Manufactury, and so on. Once on the board, buildings can be used by any player, not just the one who built them.

A player doesn't collect these resources for safekeeping as in The Settlers of Catan or Keythedral. Instead, resources claimed via buildings must be used up either in the player's current turn or his next one. If he doesn't, the resources spoil and are removed from the board.

Essentially, the challenge of the game is one of planning logistical supply chains which will allow one to process these resources most efficiently to build the prestige properties the fastest. Since it's a perfect information game, one can also see what one's opponents are scheming, and place workers to interrupt their supply chains, possibly causing their resources to spoil and making the player start from zero again.

Neuland's most interesting innovation is perhaps its Time Track Mechanism, in which players who take less actions in a turn will have turns more frequently, and can forward-plan in order to take a long turn of nearly twenty actions instead of the ordinary maximum of ten.

Neuland was originally published by Eggert-Spiele in 2004, and republished by Z-man in 2006 with some significant rules changes. A majority of BGG users seem to strongly prefer the original Eggert-Spiele rules. Also heavily recommended is the rules re-write file available for download here on BGG, for the one that comes with the 2nd edition is nearly incomprehensible.

You are a Necromancer. In fact, you are a particularly dangerous one, as you are a Necromancer with a business plan. Your zombies will dig up and loot valuables from graves, and while they're there, they can also grab fresh body parts so you can make MORE zombies to dig up MORE graves. Sounds good, right? Unfortunately, it's so good that other Necromancers are now competing with you for the choice cemeteries!

Players start with zombies of varying values. They take turns placing zombies in specific location to "dig" up graves, steal from opposing laboratories and vaults, and to attack other player's zombies to try and prevent them from digging or stealing (and possibly dismember the opposing zombie beyond further use).

Once all the zombies have been placed, zombies still in position will steal body parts or treasure from opponents, and those set to dig will dig the row, column, or specific space of the graveyard they are assigned to. If you are competing for spaces in the graveyard (which is the norm), players compare the combined brainpower of their digging zombies, and the higher value gets to the contents of the grave first.

Then you may use your new-found corpse pieces and equipment to assemble new zombies to do your bidding!

The goal is to have the highest total in treasure and unused body parts at the end of the game.

In Drum Roll each player takes over the role of a circus owner in the early 1900s. Each player moves around Europe hiring performers and giving shows.

There are five main categories of performers: the Tamers, the Acrobats, the Bizarre, the Magicians, and the Jugglers. Each of them have different demands the player must fulfill in order to give their best performance.

The requirements, which vary between performers, are Rehearsal, Equipment, Supplies, Costumes, and Promotion. There are three levels of performances that each performer can end up doing in a show: a poor one, a good one, and an outstanding one. The higher the level of performance, the more requirements each performer will have to fulfill in order to achieve it.

The better the performance, the more each player can get out of it. When performers do outstanding performances, the player must choose between getting the maximum amount of benefit out of them, or getting the Prestige Points they are offering. There are also other ways to improve a circus such as trailers, investments, and personnel that will help your performers do their best.