Abstract Strategy

Illimat has the style and flavor of a classic card game with a dynamic twist. As you play, you combine cards and collect them, trying to gather more than your opponents. But hidden Luminaries and changing seasons can alter your plans. Featuring a cloth board, metal tokens, and illustrations by Carson Ellis.

Illimat supports two to four players and a single round takes approximately fifteen minutes. The cloth board is divided into four fields, and the box the game comes in is also a component of the game: it sits in the center of the board and sets the seasons for each field, which affects the actions that can be performed in each field. Turning the box and changing the seasons is a critical part of the strategy of the game.

Illimat has been playtested with devoted gamers and people who haven't played a game in years. The result is a game that's easy to learn, dynamic, and just a little bit addictive.

—description from the publisher

Yama (å±±) is an abstract strategy game inspired one of the classics - Connect Four.

The goal still the same; make a line of four-in-a-row of your color and win. The twist here is that the rotating board of Yama contains triangular slots that stand the cube up on its corner - revealing three sides, each of which can be seen from a different point of view. And it is in one of these three point-of-views in which you must try to form your line of four-in-a-row.

With Yama we strove to design the components such that they convey the rules. The cubes are painted such that no matter how you orient it one side will show a different color to the other two. The way placing three cubes in a cluster forms a valley for placement of the next level which covers up and block your opponent, or cliches your victory. These all contributes to making Yama one of the easiest and most intuitive game to learn.

However the game itself is treacherously easy to lose yet deeply strategic and tactical when played by two equally skilled players. The three dimension aspect of the victory goal and the three dimensional aspect of the cube placement can be very tricky to wrap your head around - leading to surprising twists and turns that belies it simple rules and components.

Chromino – short for "chromatic domino" – challenges players to empty their hand of chromino tiles first. Each such tile has three colors on it laid out in a 1x3 row. At the start of the game, each player takes a hand of eight chrominoes and a special start tile with a wild center square is placed face-up on the table. Each turn, a player either places a chromino from his hand onto the table – with that chromino tile matching at least two colors on adjacent tiles already on the table – or else he draws a new chromino tile from the stock, playing this tile if possible and keeping it otherwise. The first player to empty his hand wins.

Chromino includes variant expert rules.

A deceptively cute, deceivingly challenging abstract strategy game for two players.

The Mensa award winning, Game of the Year, boop, is back with a new Holiday edition and has really leveled up game play (literally!!).

The hoomans are hanging ornaments on the highest boughs of the tree, but those clever cats are leaping up and boopin’ them right off. You can win “Naughty” by knocking off 3 of your opponent’s ornaments or “Nice” by lining up three cats in a row!

The 4-tiered game board ‘tree’ presents a surprisingly mind-bending 3D challenge for players. And the alternate win condition of knocking off 3 of your opponent's ornaments creates new strategic problems to solve, elevating the play experience to a new high!

—description from the publisher

Wild Duo is a game collection that includes 5 games for 2 players. You can play these games with two players or in larger groups (4/6/8/10), in which case the games are rotated between the groups of two. There is definitely enough variety, as each of the games is a unique gaming experience.

The games are perfectly playable for both children and adult players, as the gaming experience depends entirely on your, respectively, your fellow player's skills. That's why some games can be decided after only 5 minutes, while others last 30 minutes.

Each of the games deals with a different animal species or a specific behavior of this animal species and thus takes the players on a journey into one of 5 worlds. Each of the five rule explanations therefore always includes an exciting, thematic text on the corresponding animal species.

—description from the publisher