Abstract Strategy

Seaside

Seaside is a game that features only wooden tokens, and being lightweight and super portable, can be played everywhere. Bring it along on your next adventure!

The sun is shining, as a light, salty wind sends cottony clouds scudding across the sky. Sandpipers filling their bellies with strange insects, crabs hiding under piles of rocks, seashells washed up on the sand, curling waves that break along the beach. Nature in its simplest beauty.

One token at a time, create your Seaside with the elements the sea sends your way. The goal of the game is to have the highest stack of tokens.

How to play:

Put all tokens in the Bag and mix them up. The Play area is divided into 2 spaces: The sea (central area) and the Seaside (area in front of each player)

On your turn, draw a token from the Bag, look at it secretly, choose the side that interests you and apply its effect. Once you have chosen the side of the token you'd like to play, it will remain like that for the rest of the game.

Once you've applied the token's effect, your turn is over; pass the Bag to the player on your left.

There are two types of tokens:

Tokens with a blue design are thrown into the sea

Tokens with a white design are placed on your Seaside

If you pick a token with a blue design and throw it into the sea, you immediately take another turn. Your turn ends when you pick a token with a white design and put it on your Seaside.

The key to the game lies in the interaction among the various elements of Seaside’s ecosystem. The Sandpiper allows you to fetch Isopods from the Sea. The more Beaches you have, the more Shells you can collect from the Sea. Having one Rock does nothing, but the second one you place allows you to collect all the Crabs from the Sea... and even steal one from another player! Finally, Waves wash across the Beach tiles and flip them over.

As soon as the bag is empty, the game is over. Stack up all the tokens from your Seaside, and the player with the highest stack wins!

—description from the publisher

Flowers: A Mandala Game

In Flowers: A Mandala Game, your goal is to collect flower tiles by achieving majorities through clever card play. Skillfully build mandalas to claim the best tiles, combining and multiplying them to create exquisite flowers of your own!

To set up, layout the game cloth showing three large "mandala" flowers. Shuffle the 36 half-flower tiles in separate decks — 18 each of black and white, with the black flowers being gray, purple, and red on the opposite side and the white ones being green, orange, and yellow — then place one black tile and one white tile face up in each flower. Each player starts with a hand of cards, with the cards coming in six colors that match the flower tile colors.

On a turn, a player lays down one or more cards of the same color onto one of the flowers. (Each player keeps their played cards separate, facing toward themselves.) If that color is already present in the mandala, the player then flips the card(s) face down; if not, the player leaves them face up. If the player laid down one card, they draw two cards from the deck; if they played two or more, they don't draw any cards.

After playing, if you have at least one face-up card on a flower and more cards than any other player, take that flower's "claim" token and place it on your cards. Then, if that flower now has all six colors face up around it, destroy the mandala. Whoever has the claim token on their cards places one of the flower tiles from this mandala in front of themselves; if they already have a flower tile of the same color, they flip this "complete" flower face down. Whoever has the secondmost cards on this mandala takes the second flower tile. Anyone who took a flower tile discards all of their played cards on this mandala; everyone else returns their played cards to their hand. Draw a black tile and white tile from the stack to create a new mandala.

Continue play until someone completes their third flower, then everyone scores their points. Each separate flower half is worth as many points as the number of flowers on it. For each complete flower, if one of the tiles is 3x, triple the number of flowers on the other tile; if both tiles have flowers, double the number of flowers on the tile with fewer flowers. Whoever has the most points wins.

Quoridor Pac-Man

Embark on a new adventure with Quoridor Pac-Man, an exclusive edition of Quoridor that allows you to play as either PAC-MAN or one of the four ghosts.

Explore two game modes: opt for the classic Quoridor challenge that has you navigating through the maze, or dive into a variant that brings back the nostalgic vibes of the iconic PAC-MAN video game!

Winter

Every winter, the lake freezes over. It won’t last long, so we have to play as soon as possible, trying to dominate the frozen parts of the lake before everything unfreezes and we lose everything. In order to win, choose key spaces wisely before your rival does, and control them. Show that the cold never bothered you.

In Winter, two players compete to be the player with the most chips of their color on the lake at the end of the game. The game is divided into two phases. In the first, the freezing phase, players will create the frozen lake in a contiguous form using their snowflake cards. They’ll also attempt to secure zones in which they’ve managed to group four snowflakes of their color using chips. In the second phase, the unfreezing, they’ll undo the creation by moving and retrieving their cards and chips of their color. At the end of the game, the player with the most chips on the table is declared the winner.

Winter is an abstract game for 2 players ages 8 and up. Games last 10 minutes in which good decisions are everything. This is a reissue of the 2016 edition with all new mechanics.

Winter was the winner of the 2021 Cardboard Edison Award. It’s the first of a series of the 4 Seasons series that will continue later with Autumn, Summer, and Spring.

Beacon Patrol

You are captains of the Coast Guard. Together you check beacon buoys and lighthouses to ensure the safety of the North Sea coast.

You place your tiles next to tiles that are already on layed out, move your ships and explore the sea.

Your goal is to explore as many tiles as possible. A tile is considered explored when it’s connected to other tiles on all four of its sides.

Beacon Patrol is a coop tile laying exploration game in which you navigate the coast of the northsea to secure its beacon buoys, lighthouses and waterways.

—description from the designer