3D Games

As owners of a fantastic steam park, you're to build gigantic, coal-powered rides to attract as many visitors as you can – but building attractions won't be enough. You'll also need to manage your employees, invest in advertising in order to attract and please the different kinds of guests visiting your park, and, above all, keep the dirt that your park produces under strict control!

Steam Park is an easy-to-learn game with two difficulty levels: one for the less experienced gamers and a more strategic one for those who want a more exciting challenge. In this management game, you'll have to build your own amusement park and make it the largest and most profitable in the region. By constructing the three-dimensional, wonderful rides designed by Marie Cardouat, you will see your park grow right before your eyes. Choose your strategy! Build Stands to attract more Visitors, or Toilets to keep the Dirt under control. Whatever decision you take, take it quickly: The less time you spend planning, the more time you'll have to maintain your park. Thanks to a clever, original action-choosing mechanism, winning in Steam Park is as much a matter of being the best as of being the fastest!

Players take turns choosing blocks and giving them to each other to place on their structure. A player may pay a certain number of 'beans' to refuse a block and it gets passed to the next player. When a player's structure falls, they are out of the game. Last player standing wins.

Description of Bandu (1992, Milton Bradley, 2-6 players):
Bandu is based upon the game of Bausack. Each player is given a base block and a number of beans. During a turn, a player chooses a wood block from a common supply and either holds a Refuse or Use auction. All player bid with their beans and the winner/loser must place the piece on their tower. If your tower falls you are out of the game. The last tower standing wins.

Description of Sac Noir (Rio Grande Games, 2-8 players):
There are five variations on how to play. The goal in all of them is to build a tower. The bag contains very different wooden pieces (i.e. an ashlar, an egg, a ring, a fir tree etc.) as well as a sack of beans for the "auction variation" of the game. Depending on the variation you choose, either each player builds his own tower or all build one together. The "auction variations" are the most suspenseful and surprising. One might end up spending quite some beans to avoid building an especially difficult element. Gambling and bluffing abilities are needed just as much as a feeling for statics and construction skills. It's a game with almost endless building possibilities. It's a challenge for steady hands and shaky suspense for clever tacticians.

The players are adventurers seeking gold in an abandoned mine. Each ventures into the mine equipped with a lantern (with a limited amount of oil). The outer ring of hexes can be searched for additional equipment (torches, oil to refuel the lamp, mushrooms...) whilst the inner hexes are where the gold is to be found. First player to bring back six gold nuggets wins. Or,if all adventurers are killed, the player whose spider has scored the most kills wins...
Finding gold isn't as easy as it seems; the richest hexes (smack in the mine's center, of course) only yield gold on a 4+ (on a d6); using the lantern gives a +1.
Where it gets really fun is with the mine's other denizens: each player controls, in addition to his adventurer, a spider that hops from rock column to rock column (the pivot points where hexes meet; the board is 3D so this works really well) spinning webs --little cardboard barriers that slide into place between rock pillars. Adventurers "attack" the webs when they try to step through and could stay tangled (the adventurer pieces are slotted so they can be put on top of the web they're stuck in). Whilst thus caught, spiders can try to bite them --four bites and you're eliminated! The lantern is very useful in such a case as its light scares the spiders away.
The spiders can co-operate to build stronger webs, and it isn't unusual for one spider to strengthen the web an adventurer is caught in so another spider has a better chance of biting him.
All in all, a very enjoyable game. Works best with the full set of six players.

The Perfect Ten is a knock-down, drag-out battle of wits where two teams race to score a perfect ten correct answers in ten different categories. The categories are Geography, Sports, Science, History, Quotes, Music, Literature, Nature, Arts, and Movies. Each question has four possible answers, and teammates must work together to pick the best answer for each question. Once teams finish answering their ten questions, they flip over the 3-D game board and score the other team's answers. Now here's where it gets tricky – you'll find out how many answers you got right, but not which answers you got right. During the next round, you might change answers that were already right, and leave answers alone that were wrong! Counting to 10 was never this hard! Teams will continue playing each round until one team scores The Perfect Ten. This game requires trivia smarts, teamwork, strategy and a little luck! Game comes with 50 question strips, 2 pillars, 2 frames, 1 magnetic game board, 1 scoring platform, 1 plastic question holder, 2 plastic stoppers, 2 moving pegs, 20 yellow scoring magnets, 60 blue colored magnets, 60 white colored magnets, 60 purple colored magnets, 60 green colored magnets, and game instructions. For 2 - 6 players, Ages 12 and up

Space Checkers adapts traditional checkers to the 3rd dimension. Instead of 12 men on an 8x8 square, each side has 8 men on a 4x4x4 cube. The adaptation is straight-forward: Black sets up near the south lower edge and can only move north and up; Red sets up near the north upper edge and can only move south and down. Captures and crowning are 3D analogs to the 2D case.

Rather than having 4 large levels, the board is split into 4 towers of 2x2 portions. This allows one to more easily reach the pieces at the interiors of each level, without interfering with the visualization of the complete cube.