American West

One day Coyote crossed the river with his friends, but he was carrying too many things and almost drowned before Bear pulled him out of the water. Poor Coyote had lost everything.

They sat down by a fire to dry off and rest. Coyote became jealous of the other animals because they still had all their things, so he challenged them to a bluffing game to win their belongings. The other animals agreed to the challenge as they thought Coyote would never win. After all, he is known to never tell the truth — but in this game everybody has to lie because no one knows the truth...

In the bluffing game Coyote, you always see the cards of the other players, but never your own. When it's your turn, you must announce a number that is less than the total of all the cards in the game, yet higher than the previous number given. Alternatively, you can challenge the number previously announced. Finally, when all the cards are revealed, you'll see who has the cunning Coyote on their side.

Coyote is in the same game line as Spicy, with the game box and card backs being decorated with a special metallic print in copper. As in the tradition of the Northwest Coast Tribes, copper is a symbol of prosperity and cultural wealth.

The artist Zona Evon Shroyer (Yupik Alaskan Native) is a master of the traditional Northwest Coastal art, whose richness of detail and complexity requires years of study and practice. For the cover illustration of Coyote, she designed a modern silhouette for the coyote, which she then filled in a classical manner with other animal motifs: turtle, beaver, and bear — the animals that he is sitting around the fire with and playing a game, in our little story.

—description from the publisher

In Pioneer Rails, you represent a railroad owner who has seen an opportunity to expand your empire across the new lands of the frontier. You'll compete against other railroad owners to plan your railway in the best way possible to connect establishments to the railroad and satisfy the demands of the locals.

In this flip-and-write game, you use poker cards to extend your railway tracks and build a poker hand at the same time. Each turn, you choose one of the revealed poker cards. The suit of the card helps you extend your railway, connecting you to new towns and surrounding features. When you connect to a town, you gain the ability to do a one-time bonus. When you surround a feature with your tracks, you activate it for endgame scoring. The value of the card is added to your poker hand, for which you'll score additional points at the end of the round.

Three common goals are also in play each game, giving you incentives to build in different directions.

The mechanism of surrounding features to activate them gives Pioneer Rails a satisfying "puzzley" feel to the game.

—description from the publisher

Moon River uses the Kingdomino game system — but without dominoes.

In the game, you will build a personal landscape of tiles to score points, but instead of tiling dominoes in your landscape, the game uses half-dominoes in which one edge has a jigsaw puzzle-style connection. You combine two of these half puzzle pieces to craft your own dominoes. This mechanism is meant to provide more variability and randomization in each play.

Instead of building your landscape around a central castle, you start from the river and expand away from it. Also, the crowns (i.e., the victory point multiplier) from Kingdomino are replaced by cow meeples, with players being able to use cowboys to move them.

Welcome to the Isle of Trains, where you are the conductor, and constructor of one of the island’s locomotives. You’ll build trains and load a range of goods to complete contracts across the island, and also deliver passengers to their destinations.

Isle of Trains: All Aboard is a card-based engine building game where cards have multiple uses: You can use cards as locomotives, freight cars, passenger cars, or buildings to improve the effectiveness and abilities of your train. Cards can also be spent to pay for the construction of your new train cars and buildings, or you can use your cards as cargo and load them onto available freight cars.

You will also have a range of passengers who want to be taken to different destinations. You will draw these passengers at random from a bag when you build passenger cars and certain locomotives. You can then load passengers into any available passenger car. When passengers are delivered to their destinations, they will give you an instant powerful bonus!

Loading cargo and passengers into opponents’ trains is important on the Isle of Trains as it’ll also gain you extra bonuses that turn! But this will help the other train conductors get a little closer to completing their goals, by giving them the cargo or passengers, which they can then use for deliveries and big end game points!

The game ends when a certain number of contracts have been completed, or a certain number of passengers are delivered. You win by scoring the most points, which you earn by building up your train, completing contracts, and delivering passengers.

Isle of Trains: All Aboard is all about balancing the need to upgrade your train, with loading cargo or passengers onto opponent’s train for big bonuses, and delivering cargo and passengers to their destinations before anyone else. Build your engine effectively enough to be remembered as the greatest train conductor on the Isle of Trains!

Embark on a journey of exploration and discovery along the historic John Muir Trail through the High Sierras of California. Explore the majestic mountains and lush meadows, the picturesque waterfalls and alpine lakes. Scale the heights of Yosemite's iconic Half Dome or Sequouia's Mt. Whitney! Enjoy meandering through Evolution Valley or Tuolumne Meadows, pausing to take in the beauty of Thousand Islands Lake or cooling your feet in the Kings River. Be humbled beneath a giant and ancient Sequoia, or catch (and release) a Golden Trout, listen to the song of an Ouzel, watch Marmots at play, or spot the rare Snow Plant. Happy trails!

Trailblazer: The John Muir Trail takes place over the course of twelve days/rounds of hiking and backpacking along the John Muir Trail (JMT). You will experience daily trail encounters, choose to explore destinations along the trail, acquire and manage natural and personal resources, discover and observe the sights and sounds of your environment, adapt to ever-changing weather conditions, and move along the entire trail, all while wisely using the items in your backpack to maximize your experience.

You can earn trail points in several ways along the route, such as placing workers on your tracks, collecting sets of field guide cards, scoring instantly with destination cards, and using your backpack gear efficiently.