Abstract Strategy

Players craft potions in a secret marketplace. Hide ingredients to deceive opponents, and use magical powers to mix concoctions. But beware - your opponents are brewing schemes of their own!

Apotheca is played on a 4x4 grid. Players gain points by making matches of three potions of the same color in a row. The first player to make three matches wins. It's easily learned, but the combination of asymmetric powers and secret facedown potions make the game a delicious challenge.

On each turn, players take 2 of 4 possible actions:

Reveal: Reveal a secret potion and gain a gem of that color
Restock: Draw, look at, and place secret potions on the board until there are exactly 3
Power: Use one of your active apothecary powers
Hire: Spend gems to hire new apothecaries

Whenever a player makes a match, they must place it on one of their apothecaries. This removes that apothecary's power for the rest of the game, so it's important for players to keep revealing potions, collecting gems and hiring new apothecaries... all while keeping their opponents at bay!

Deduction is key to Apotheca. Players trap each other with clever spatial moves, bluffing and misdirection. The action economy is very well balanced, so every turn offers an opportunity for strategy and tough decisions.

The feeling of the game differs with every number of players:

2 player is the most cerebral and controlled
3 player is the most chaotic, yet still within your grasp
4 player is played in teams, offering neat collaborative gameplay

Tic Tac Ku is played on a game board which is a 3 x 3 grid of Tic-Tac-Toe boards. In the simple game, the object is to get a Tic-Tac-Toe on any of the 9 boards. In the advanced game, the object is to get 5 Tic-Tac-Toes.

Game description from the publisher:

Earn precious diamonds by outwitting your opponents and matching up your dominoes over key areas of the game board. Accumulate extra earnings by playing dominoes that match your pawn's placement on the scoring track. Double Double Dominoes is a new spin on a classic game; it's where dominoes and a classic style board game come together to provide hours of family entertainment.

LOKA is a fantastically sculpted Chess sets and a brand new take on playing Chess, brought to you by Alessio Cavatore's River Horse and published by Mantic Games.

LOKA is played with fantasy-inspired Chess pieces, each evoking the powerful imagery of one of the four elements.

From the kickstarter page 'At its heart, LOKA uses the rules of Chess, and Alessio has some significant twists in mind in the form of new mechanics:

Choose your army - Each player get to choose which pieces they put onto the board, meaning both players command different armies on the battlefield – do you field a small but elite force with three Queens, or do you go for a mass horde of Pawns?

Fantasy Scenery – Change the shape of the battlefield with movement blocking terrain that alters the path you’ll take into combat.

Dice Driven Combat – a simple and elegant system using eight sided dice adds some unpredictability to combat, placing extra emphasis on strategy and positioning as pieces build in power with support from their comrades."

By all appearances, it's just two players taking turns laying stones on a 19×19 (or smaller) grid of intersections. But once its basic rules are understood, Go shows its staggering depth. One can see why many people say it's one of the most elegant brain-burning abstract games in history, with players trying to claim territory by walling off sections of the board and surrounding each other's stones. The game doesn't end until the board fills up, or, more often, when both players agree to end it, at which time whoever controls the most territory wins.

The earliest mention of Go (圍棋 (wéi qí)- "surrounding game") appears in the "Analects" of Confucius (551-479 BC), while the earliest physical evidence is a 17×17 Go board discovered in 1952 in a tomb of the former Han dynasty (206 BC- 9 AD). There is a tangle of conflicting popular and scholarly anecdotes attributing its invention to two Chinese emperors, an imperial vassal and court astrologers. One story has it that Go was invented by the legendary Emperor Yao (ruled 2357-2256 BC) as an amusement for his idiot son. A second claims that the Emperor Shun (ruled 2255-2205 BC) created the game in hopes of improving his weak-minded son's mental prowess. A third says the person named Wu, a vassal of the Emperor Jie (ruled 1818-1766 BC), invented Go (as well as games of cards). Finally, a fourth story suggests that Go was developed by court astrologers during the Zhou dynasty (1045-255 BC).

A Go set, consisting of a very general-purpose grid and colored stones, can also be used to play a variety of other abstract strategy games, such as Connect6, Go-Moku, Pente, and others.