Components: Miniatures

Mission: Red Planet (Second/Third Edition)

With technology rapidly developing and the human population growing, Victorian-era Earth is in dire need of fuel, land, and other natural resources. Fortunately, automated probes sent to Mars have discovered celerium, an ore that can be combusted to produce ten thousand times more power than a steam engine, and sylvanite, the densest substance ever found. More incredibly, the probes found ice that could be used in terraforming the planet, bringing the idea of colonizing Mars even closer to becoming a reality.

As the head of a mining corporation, these minerals and ice found on Mars could make you unfathomably wealthy – if you can reach them before your competitors. You have ten rounds to send your astronauts into space, occupy the planet's most resource-rich zones, and harvest as much celerium, sylvanite, and ice as possible. At your command is a team of nine professionals. Each has a unique skill set, from helping your astronauts traverse the Red Planet to blowing up spaceships before they launch.

In each round in Mission: Red Planet, players start by secretly deploying one of their character cards, with this card determining both when they place astronauts on the spaceships awaiting launch to Mars and which special action they take during the round. Each spaceship has a specified destination, and until an astronaut sets foot in a region, no one knows which resource they'll find. Players collect resources (worth points) three times during the game, and they each have a secret mission card that might grant them additional points at game's end. During the game, players might acquire an additional mission or a research card that changes the value of what awaits on Mars.

The 2015 edition of Mission: Red Planet features the same gameplay as the original 2005 edition, but it includes:

Components for up to six players instead of five
Special two-player variant rules
New action cards and revised mission and discovery cards
Mars' moon Phobos as a new zone that astronauts can explore before possibly returning to the planet itself

The Dark Quarter

Welcome to New Orleans, Louisiana, circa 1980: a vibrant city of music, food, and magic. Neon lights flicker in dirty puddles up and down Bourbon street; the innovations of the modern world clash with ancient and terrible traditions; and murder is never simple. The Beaumont Agency, staffed with a roster of brilliant, colorful, and ultimately flawed private investigators, specializes in solving cases that no one else can crack.

In The Dark Quarter, a co-operative app-driven adventure game set in a dark, fantastical vision of 1980s New Orleans, players each take control of a Beaumont agent and work alongside one another to solve the worst crimes that New Orleans has to offer. It's a world full of magic, where hexing curses are sold on every street, where voodoo priestesses and creatures of the night are lurking around every corner, and where even the most mundane crimes have a tinge of the supernatural to them.

Through multi-scenario campaigns, the game tells a rich, dynamic story and invites players to make critical decisions that will not only affect their characters, but change the direction and course of the story. The characters are not simply avatars, easily replaceable from scenario to scenario; instead, they are woven into the very fabric of the story itself. Their destiny and the destiny of New Orleans are inextricably linked together.

—description from the publisher

Nemesis

Playing Nemesis will take you into the heart of sci-fi survival horror in all its terror. A soldier fires blindly down a corridor, trying to stop the alien advance. A scientist races to find a solution in his makeshift lab. A traitor steals the last escape pod in the very last moment. Intruders you meet on the ship are not only reacting to the noise you make but also evolve as the time goes by. The longer the game takes, the stronger they become. During the game, you control one of the crew members with a unique set of skills, personal deck of cards, and individual starting equipment. These heroes cover all your basic SF horror needs. For example, the scientist is great with computers and research, but will have a hard time in combat. The soldier, on the other hand...

Nemesis is a semi-cooperative game in which you and your crewmates must survive on a ship infested with hostile organisms. To win the game, you have to complete one of the two objectives dealt to you at the start of the game and get back to Earth in one piece. You will find many obstacles on your way: swarms of Intruders (the name given to the alien organisms by the ship AI), the poor physical condition of the ship, agendas held by your fellow players, and sometimes just cruel fate.

The gameplay of Nemesis is designed to be full of climactic moments which, hopefully, you will find rewarding even when your best plans are ruined and your character meets a terrible fate.

Horrified: World of Monsters

You're one of Earth's premier monster experts, and you've come to a mysterious arcane-punk town centered around the Void, a doorway between worlds from which terrors of all ilk might erupt.

Horrified: World of Monsters is a standalone game that features gameplay similar to 2019's Horrified, and in this co-operative game, you'll face off against the riddling Sphinx, the reclusive Yeti, the ravenous Jiangshi, and the Great Old One itself, Cthulhu. Each monster presents a unique challenge, and you can face them individually or in combination, with players pooling their unique skills to overcome puzzle-like obstacles inspired by monstrous legends and lore to gather item tokens, protect citizens, and avoid attacks.

The inclusion of Cthulhu brings the Horrified line its first multi-phase puzzle, with one puzzle in the realm of World of Monsters and one in Cthulhu's realm.

Horrified: World of Monsters includes rules for mixing and matching the monsters in this game with those in Horrified: Greek Monsters.

Skyrise

The Mayor has enlisted some of humanity's greatest visionaries to help build Skyrise: a magnificent city in the sky, dedicated to art, science, and beauty. But only one artisan can be remembered as the greatest!

Prove your genius by using a brilliant spatial auction system to win sites to build in, earning favor across Islands and factions, scoring secret and public objectives, courting mysterious Patrons, and building your own unique Wonder.

Skyrise tells an interactive story of a growing cityscape, hard decisions, scarce resources, and ever-rising stakes that will keep you enthralled until the final scores are revealed.

Skyrise is a brand new game inspired by Sebastien Pauchon's 2008 Spiel Des Jahres recommended Metropolys.