Quarto! has a 4×4 board and 16 pieces. Each piece has four dichotomous attributes – color, height, shape, and consistency – so each piece is either black or white, tall or short, square or round, and hollow or solid. The object is to place the fourth piece in a row in which all four pieces have at least one attribute in common. The twist is that your opponent gets to choose the piece you place on the board each turn.
Every year the Emperor walks through the imperial gardens to greet the spring, every year he stops beneath the Sakura trees, and every year you try to paint his picture. This will be your year. Artists from near and far will step over their rivals to be closest to the Emperor as he reaches the cherry blossoms, hoping to paint a portrait that will please him. However, should one of them accidentally bump into the Emperor, they would be sure to earn his ire!
Sakura is a light tactical game of pushing your luck, and pushing your friends. Each player will simultaneously decide how far to move both their character and the Emperor. The player closest to the Emperor when the Cherry Blossoms are reached will gain a huge amount of prestige, but if you push too far you risk bumping into the Emperor and walking away in disgrace.
The first delicate flowers herald the end of a harsh winter. The sun shines longer day by day and pushes the snow back. Lush meadows bloom, and curious marmots slowly awaken from hibernation. Finally, spring is coming into the mountains — the perfect time for a hike. Choose your route carefully, watch out for the burrows of the marmots, and pack enough snacks. Your chances to earn an edelweiss hiking pin are rather low if you sit hungry in the snow.
Spring Meadow is the grand finale of Uwe Rosenberg's puzzle trilogy following 2016's Cottage Garden and 2017's Indian Summer. The complexity of this game — the most interactive of the trilogy — is set in between those two games, and fans of the trilogy will find familiar elements combined in an innovative way.
Place your meadow tiles with 0-2 holes skillfully on your mountain board to receive extra tiles when creating or expanding groups of holes. Find your way around the burrows of the marmots because they can restrict you during tile placement. Scoring takes place depending on the players' selection of meadow tiles from a central game board. Whoever has the largest meadow during a scoring receives a hiking pin, and the first player to earn their second hiking pin during scoring wins.
New puzzle challenges are guaranteed with 172 tiles in 49 shapes.
As the head of an international archaeological team, it is your job to establish camps across the four corners of the globe and uncover the long-lost golden scarabs of Scarabya.
Scarabya is a tile-laying puzzle game, in which your goal is to score scarabs by positioning your tiles such that they create enclosed zones of 1 to 4 squares. Each scarab in an enclosed zone is worth a number of points equal to the number of squares in its zone. Players all play the same tiles, in order. Each turn, a new tile is drawn and all players simultaneously place their copy of the tile on their individual boards. The game is over after all 12 tiles have been drawn (and either placed or discarded). The player with the most points wins.
Patchwork Express features the same basic gameplay as Patchwork, but with a smaller playing area and with larger and less complex pieces.
In the game, each player tries to build the most aesthetic (and high-scoring) patchwork quilt on a personal 7x7 game board. To start play, lay out all of the light-colored patches at random in a circle and place a starting marker in a particular location. Each player takes some buttons — the currency/points in the game — and someone is chosen as the start player.
On a turn, a player either purchases one of the three patches standing clockwise of the starting marker or passes. To purchase a patch, you pay the cost in buttons shown on the patch, move the starting marker to that patch's location in the circle, add the patch to your game board, then advance your time token on the time track a number of spaces equal to the time shown on the patch. You're free to place the patch anywhere on your board that doesn't overlap other patches, but you probably want to fit things together as tightly as possible. If your time token is behind or on top of the other player's time token, then you take another turn; otherwise the opponent now goes. Instead of purchasing a patch, you can choose to pass; to do this, you move your time token to the space immediately in front of the opponent's time token, then take one button from the bank for each space you moved.
In addition to a button cost and time cost, each patch also features 0-3 buttons, and when you move your time token past a button on the time track, you earn "button income": sum the number of buttons depicted on your personal game board, then take this many buttons from the bank.
What's more, the time track depicts six 1x1 patches on it, and during set-up you place six actual 1x1 patches on these spaces. Whoever first passes a patch on the time track claims this patch and immediately places it on their game board.
At some point during the game, dark-colored patches are added to what's available for players to take, and these pieces are smaller than the light-colored ones, making it more likely that they'll fill in holes on a player's board.