American West

Boomtown is a game with auctions, dice, and some fun and nasty action cards to play on your fellow gold diggers.

There's gold in them thar hills!

In Boomtown, you start as a gold digger and try to end as a tycoon.

To do this, you must first buy the best mining concessions, hoping to find gold veins. You can also try to become the Mayor of Whiskey River or San Narciso, in order to get a small cut on concessions sales, or build a saloon where lucky prospectors will spend their nuggets in moonshine whiskey. If business is really bad, you can still rely on bank or stagecoach hold-ups to reestablish you. A well placed stick of dynamite can also solve some minor problems.

In the mountain there are veins of precious stones. The players build tunnels in the mountain, establish stations in the mountain and in the city, discover veins of precious stones, acquire precious stones, and sell them. The players get points for stations in the city and for selling precious stones. The winner is the player with the most points.

October 2008: The game is published in an international edition in Essen 2008 in English, German, French and Dutch.

2009: The 2nd edition will be published in a dutch/french version (QWG Games), a german version (Huch&Friends), an italian version (Red Glove) and an english version (Eagle Games/FRED Distribution).

Here's a description of the game from Phalanx Games:

In the late 18th century, the fast growing population of the emerging United States of America showed an increasing interest in the Wild West. Millions of poor immigrants were arriving from Europe, and the population of cities on the East Coast swelled enormously. Endless plains and huge mountain ranges – thinly populated by Native Americans and rich in game, farmland and minerals - started luring large numbers of them. Settlers traveled in wagon trains, and established themselves ever further west until they finally reached California and the Pacific coast.

The players represent shrewd businessmen who benefit from passing wagon trains, continuously moving westward across the North American continent. It is divided into huge vertical tracts of land: New England, the East Coast, the Great Plains, the Midwest, the West and finally, California.

Homesteaders is an auction and resource management game in which players bid on the opportunity to build certain types of buildings, then spend resource cubes to build one of several buildings of that type. The buildings confer abilities, income, and points; some automatically and some requiring a worker.

The game lasts ten rounds, with each round consisting of an auction phase followed by a building phase. After the last round, players take one final income phase and have one last chance to buy and sell goods and use their building abilities before scores are tallied.

Players score for their buildings, bonuses conferred by buildings, and points earned throughout the game from selling resource cubes. The player who builds the best combination of buildings and best manages the nine different resources in the game will score the most points and win – as long as they don't take on too much debt!

Over a hundred years of legend awaits you and your skills as you vie to be the lucky prospector to hike out of the Superstition Mountains with The Lost Dutchman's Gold. However, this expedition for lost gold isn't for the faint of heart. You will face grizzly creatures and dastardly disasters around every corner and even the ghost of The Lost Dutchman himself while contending with your opponent's thirst for gold that grows with every nugget uncovered.

In this treacherous treasure adventure, prospectors must balance their skills to take on fierce creatures and dangerous disasters with their search of gold. Will you find the most treasure by prospecting or will the map lead you to victory? No one path guarantees victory but with the right amount of skill and a little bit of luck you can be the first prospector to uncover the famed Lost Dutchman's Gold!

Are you up to the challenge of uncovering the legendary gold of the Lost Dutchman?

The Lost Dutchman is a treasure mining game for 2-5 players in which players are competing to mine as much of the Lost Dutchman's Gold as they can before the water supply runs short bringing the hunt for treasure to a parching halt. Players can also win by successfully navigating the Community Treasure Map and finding the ever illusive Lost Dutchman's Gold Mine.