Action Point Allowance System

A long time ago at the Japanese Imperial court, the Chinese Emperor offered a giant panda bear as a symbol of peace to the Japanese Emperor. Since then, the Japanese Emperor has entrusted his court members (the players) with the difficult task of caring for the animal by tending to his bamboo garden.

In Takenoko, the players will cultivate land plots, irrigate them, and grow one of the three species of bamboo (Green, Yellow, and Pink) with the help of the Imperial gardener to maintain this bamboo garden. They will have to bear with the immoderate hunger of this sacred animal for the juicy and tender bamboo. The player who manages his land plots best, growing the most bamboo while feeding the delicate appetite of the panda, will win the game.

Grand Conquest is very similar to earlier versions of Donald Benge's Conquest. However it adds some interesting features. Now there are camels, catapults, siege engines and a moat around the five home points. The tube package comes with a vinyl roll out map, pieces in more distinguishable colors than previous versions, and a separate puzzle book (The Conquest games have had collections of puzzles developed similar to chess puzzles that are quite entertaining and engaging for abstract strategy players).

Re-implements:

Conquest

Panic Station is a paranoia-driven partly cooperative game in which you control two characters in the Extermination Corps sent out by the government to investigate the presence of fiendish alien life forms.

Players need to move both their Androids and Troopers through the base, exploring and gathering equipment that will help them to complete their mission: to find and destroy the Parasite Hive hidden somewhere in the inner depths of this hell. When a player manages to get his Trooper into the Hive location and play three gas can cards to fuel his Flamethrower, he wins the game for the humans.

However, one of the players is a Host. He must keep this identity secret, infecting as many team members as possible to gain allies and prevent the humans from completing their mission. Only players who carefully watch the behavior of team members and find a good balance between cooperation and paranoia will stand a chance against the infected players and roaming parasites.

The game uses a unique exponential traitor-system and combines tactical play with a compelling psychological mindgame amongst players.

Panic Station is a game of growing paranoia in which no one can truly trust anyone. Can you maintain your sanity and destroy the source of this evil?

Neuland is a game about logistics and planning. In the beginning of the game, the land lies undeveloped, a series of blank hexes representing mountains, forests, and grasslands. Players win by building and using prestige properties that allow them to place their family's coat-of-arms onto the board -- first to place all their coats of arms wins.

To use these buildings, though, requires the player have the correct raw materials. Swords and cloth, for example, or coins and paper. Each one of these materials needs even more basic materials, such as iron ore, coal, and so on backward toward the most basic elements such as food, wood, and stone.

To cull these materials from the land, one builds buildings -- a Stonecutter's Hut, Smelter, Coin Manufactury, and so on. Once on the board, buildings can be used by any player, not just the one who built them.

A player doesn't collect these resources for safekeeping as in The Settlers of Catan or Keythedral. Instead, resources claimed via buildings must be used up either in the player's current turn or his next one. If he doesn't, the resources spoil and are removed from the board.

Essentially, the challenge of the game is one of planning logistical supply chains which will allow one to process these resources most efficiently to build the prestige properties the fastest. Since it's a perfect information game, one can also see what one's opponents are scheming, and place workers to interrupt their supply chains, possibly causing their resources to spoil and making the player start from zero again.

Neuland's most interesting innovation is perhaps its Time Track Mechanism, in which players who take less actions in a turn will have turns more frequently, and can forward-plan in order to take a long turn of nearly twenty actions instead of the ordinary maximum of ten.

Neuland was originally published by Eggert-Spiele in 2004, and republished by Z-man in 2006 with some significant rules changes. A majority of BGG users seem to strongly prefer the original Eggert-Spiele rules. Also heavily recommended is the rules re-write file available for download here on BGG, for the one that comes with the 2nd edition is nearly incomprehensible.