Animals: Goats

The Atiwa Range is a region of southeastern Ghana in Africa consisting of steep-sided hills with rather flat summits. A large portion of the range comprises an evergreen forest reserve, which is home to many endangered species. However, logging and hunting for bushmeat, as well as mining for gold and bauxite, are putting the reserve under a lot of pressure.

Meanwhile, in the nearby town of Kibi, the mayor is causing a stir by giving shelter to a large number of fruit bats in his own garden. This man has recognized the great value the animals have in deforested regions of our planet: Fruit bats sleep during the day and take off at sunset in search of food, looking for suitable fruit trees up to sixty miles away. They excrete the seeds of the consumed fruit, disseminating them across large areas as they fly home. A single colony of 150,000 fruit bats can reforest an area of up to two thousand acres a year.

Just like that mayor, in Atiwa, you know that fruit bats — once scorned and hunted as mere fruit thieves — are in fact incredibly useful animals, spreading seeds over large areas of the country. By doing so, they help to reforest fallow land and, in the medium term, improve harvests. This realization has led to a symbiotic co-operation between fruit bats and fruit farmers. The animals are kept as "pets" to increase the size of fruit farms more quickly. Tall trees are left as roosts, providing shelter for them rather than hunting them for their scant meat. However, if you have a lot of fruit bats, you need a lot of space...

In the game, you will develop a small community near the Atiwa Range, creating housing for new families and sharing your newly gained knowledge on the negative effects of mining and the importance that the fruit bats have for the environment. You must acquire new land, manage your animals and resources, and make your community prosper. The player who best balances the needs of their community and the environment wins.

In Mountain Goats you work to move your goats to the top of 6 different mountains where they can score points as long as they stay there. You can share spaces with other goats on the way up, but there is only room for one goat at the top of each mountain. If someone else's goat moves to the mountain top, they will kick you off and you'll have to start your trek over.

It's a game about timing. You need to not just get to the top of the mountain, but get there when no one else is in position to knock you off.

It's a game about keeping your eye on your opponents. Maximizing your score, but also making sure you don't let anyone else score too much.

There is the fun chance to knock each other off the mountain. But it doesn't feel too mean because you can only knock back goats that are in a scoring position, and it isn't a huge setback. It is just a normal part of the cycle of the game.

—description from the publisher

Legend has it that a long time ago, mankind was ignorant to the extent of not knowing how to count or tell the years apart. The ever-benevolent Jade Emperor wanted to help mankind out. From there, the idea of a twelve-year cycle and the naming of each year in the cycle after an animal was born.

But how should the Jade Emperor choose twelve animals from among so many animals in the living world, while remaining impartial? To resolve this equitably, the Jade Emperor decided to hold a race involving all animals on his birthday. The first twelve animals to cross the river and reach the Heavenly Palace will have a year named after them, in the order of how they finished the race. The race became known as The Great Race and the twelve-year cycle was named the Chinese Zodiac.

Race for the Chinese Zodiac is a board game that recreates The Great Race. Each player has a hand of eight action cards (numbered 1-8) as well as energy cards of different values and karma tokens. Each player selects one animal token and takes the corresponding animal card, which grants the player advantages during the race. All players place their animal token on the start space of the racetrack. Players assemble the dual-layered and double-sided action wheel that's used to determine the effectiveness of each action and place it in the center of the table.

On a turn, all players select an action card and an energy card from their hand, then they reveal these cards simultaneously. If the action card selected is one value lower than the player's previously played action card, the player must spend one karma token; if two or more values lower, they must spend two karma tokens. Players then resolve all played actions based on the orientation of the wheel, ideally gaining movement, new energy cards, and karma. Everyone places their played cards face up in front of themselves, then rotate the wheel clockwise by one space and start a new turn.

The first animal to complete the race earns the coveted right of having the first year of the Chinese Zodiac named after it!

—description from the publisher

A cooperative board game of farming and friendship based on the Stardew Valley video game by Eric Barone. Work together with your fellow farmers to save the Valley from the nefarious JojaMart Corporation! To do this, you'll need to farm, fish, friend and find all kinds of different resources to fulfill your Grandpa's Goals and restore the Community Center. Collect all kinds of items, raise animals, and explore the Mine. Gain powerful upgrades and skills and as the seasons pass see if you're able to protect the magic of Stardew Valley!

The goal of the game is to complete Grandpa's Goals and restore the Community Center, which requires you to gather different types of resources represented by tiles. You have a fixed amount of turns to accomplish this. This is driven by the Season Deck of 20 cards, one of which is drawn each turn to trigger certain events. Cooperatively the players decide each turn where they will focus their individual actions and place their pawn in that part of the Valley. Using their actions, they visit specific locations, trying to gather resources to complete their collective goals. Actions include things like: watering crops, trying to catch fish, rolling dice to explore the mines, and many more. When the Season Deck is exhausted, the game ends.

You are sloths — cuddly, lazy, and, oh well, slothful.

All animals (including humans) like to take vacations, so everyone is together at a country resort. We sloths are sitting around, of course, while all the other animals are running throughout the resort. We want to look around, too, and traveling around the resort to pick up tasty leaves would be great — but running around ourselves is just too tedious. All the other animals are having fun, and we want that, too, but...we are so slothful.

And then we have an idea: We'll let ourselves be carried around by the other animals, thus getting around nicely. The other animals have so much energy that they'll even gladly carry us. They aren't slothful! Which of us sloths will be the first to get through the entire country and be victorious? We are ambitious, but so lazy!

Fast Sloths (a.k.a. "Faultier" in German) is a race game that at its core is a classic pick-up-and-deliver game — except that we ourselves are the cargo being delivered. We are being carried along the whole way and never take a single step on our own!

You always play with six out of twelve different animal species, and you can place the giant game board in four different combinations. On a turn, you draft 2-3 cards of different animal types from the top of their face-up decks, then you play as many animal cards as you like of a single type. Each animal provides a different type of movement or interaction with you, with ants carrying you along in a chain and the elephant throwing you with its trunk.

Fast Sloths is a game free from randomness that evolves only through the interaction between the players, doing so without any "take that" mechanisms — except for you snatching an animal from under the other players' noses because you need to use it yourself.

Each race offers new challenges for you to get to the different trees faster than the other sloths. Enjoy all 256 different combinations, each with countless starting positions of the animals on the game board...and we are already working on new game boards and more animals for even more fun combinations!