Chaining

Knitting Circle

Knitting Circle is a stand-alone follow up to the puzzle game Calico! In this tile-laying game for the whole family, players are knitters competing to create the coziest, most beautiful assortment of garments.

Rounds are simple - collect yarn from the central basket and knit it into garments while trying to get your color combinations and patterns just right! Earn victory points by completing garments, adding buttons, and fulfilling bonus scoring goals. Along the way, your furry feline friend can help you out by reaching their grabby paws into the bag to secure you the best yarn!

With variable scoring goals, and dozens of unique template cards, each game of Knitting Circle brings a new spatial puzzle to your table!

Aspens

Aspens is a quick-playing strategy board game for two players, where you harness the wind and sun and carefully balance growth with expansion to outgrow and outwit your loved ones.

In Aspens, players compete to grow the largest forest on a shared board - having to balance how much they invest in building their "engine" to increase the odds of generating trees on future turns, with the pressure of needing to expand to claim territory and ultimately be crowned the winner.

Players start by seeding and growing a forest space adjacent to each water tile. This is where players determine their initial strategy and appetite for risk. Then play begins.

On your turn, you roll the sun die, and BOTH players generate trees for spaces they have grown tall enough to capture the sun. Then you roll the wind die, determining which directions you can grow outward in. The active player then plants their trees, balancing between growing existing spaces UP with more trees, or expanding OUTWARD from their forests, following the wind. This is the core crux of tough decision making and strategy comes in - balancing future investment with rapid expansion.

Play continues until all spaces are claimed, and the player with the most spaces is crowned the winner!

Gatsby

Welcome to the Roaring Twenties! Gatsby is a two-player game in which you take on the role of either Dorothy Williams or James Miller, competing to spread their influence and draw the attention of the great Jay Gatsby.

On the board are three locations, each offering different opportunities to get character tiles: the cabaret, the finance center, and the racetrack. To claim these characters, each player will take turns moving the action marker on one of the four action spaces — but not the one just taken by the opponent — then activating it.

These actions let you place two influence tokens on one or two locations, allowing you to claim characters in different ways, depending on the location. In the cabaret, your tokens must form a continuous line from one side of the board to the opposite side or cover the four-star icons at the same time. In the finance center, influence lets you climb up the track. In the racetrack, your tokens are placed in races, trying to be the player with the most tokens on that race line when it's filled.

On all three locations, some special spaces on the board grant bonuses when you place a token on them: swapping two tokens on the board, forcing your opponent to take a specific action, or gaining a special action tile!

A player wins immediately if they control three characters of the same color or one character of each of the five colors. If all character tiles from a single location have been claimed before one of these conditions is met, the player with the most stars on their characters wins.

—description from the publisher

Sunrise Lane

In Sunrise Lane, players take on the role of construction companies attempting to build up a residential neighborhood, and to do this, they need to pick prestigious plots of land on which to build houses and town structures.

In more detail, the game board depicts a grid of spaces that each show 1-5 dots in a single color, and each player has a set of colored House pieces, with the colors having no connection to the space on the board. On a turn, you either draw 2 colored cards from the deck and add them to your hand (with a limit of 5 cards in hand) or discard cards to place a building, then draw a card.

When you build, you must build adjacent to a pre-existing structure (or the central space at the start of the game), and you must discard 1 or more cards of the same color as the dots in the space on which you want to build. You can discard 1-5 cards, after which you place 1-5 of your House pieces on this space, then score points equal to the number of dots on the space multiplied by the number of House pieces you placed. You can build multiple buildings on a turn as long as you build your next one adjacent to the last one you built.

When a player has 2 or less House pieces in their supply, the game ends, then players score endgame points, with two of the districts awarding points for the highest buildings and the other two for the most buildings. Additionally, points go to the player with the longest group of adjacent buildings.

Skara Brae

Around five thousand years ago, a resilient group of farmers and hunters built a thriving community on the Orkney Islands of Northern Scotland. Rather than discarding their empty shells, broken tools, bones, and other waste, they used them to form large mounds of earth over hundreds of years. Later generations dug into these midden piles to create a series of rooms and tunnels to shelter from the harsh winds and cold winter months.

The aim of Skara Brae is to gather various resources in order to feed, clothe, and shelter the growing number of settlers. Players take turns drafting cards and using their workers to furnish, cook, craft, clean, and trade. At the end of each round, players need to provide for their settlers and will likely create more midden that needs to be cleaned up. After four rounds, the player with the most points wins.

—description from designer