Chaining

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!

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

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.

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

In Harmonies, build landscapes by placing colored tokens and create habitats for your animals. To earn the most points and win the game, incorporate the habitats in your landscapes wisely and have as many animals as you can settle there.

Starting with the first player and proceeding clockwise, each player will choose a set of 3 terrain tokens from the central area to place on their personal board. They may optionally choose an Animal card from the 5 displayed and/or place an Animal cube from their Animal card(s) on any completed patterns on their board that match their personal Animal cards. There is a 4-card limit per player. After their turn, refill with a new set of 3 tokens and a new Animal card if needed.

Placement of the terrain tokens will depend on the personal Animal card goals, and scoring rules for the various terrain types (mountain, field, forest, etc). For example, mountain tiles score based on how high they are (1 tile scores 1, while 3 tiles stacked score 7), but the mountain scores zero if it is not adjacent to at least one other mountain. If all the cubes on a given Animal card have been placed, the card is set aside and a new card can be drawn. The cards are scored at game end based on the highest number that isn't covered by a cube.

The games ends when there are no tokens left in the bag to refill the central area, or at least one players has 2 or fewer empty spaces on their player board. Play continues until all players have had an equal turn that round. The player with the highest points is the winner.

Optionally, you can use Nature's Spirit cards for richer gameplay. During setup, each player chooses 1 of 2 spirit cards and places a Spirit cube on the card. They follow the same placement rules as Animal cards, but tend to have an ongoing effect once completed. The spirit card does count towards the 4-card hand limit.