Animals

Deep Dive

Deep Dive is a press-your-luck set-collection game in which you use your waddle of penguins to dive deep into the ocean to amass the most bountiful collection of food!

Turns are simple: Flip over an ocean tile, and see what you reveal. You can take what you reveal in the shallows or dive deeper, hoping for a larger catch — but the deeper you go, the more plentiful the predators become. As you surface with food, you build sets of three colors. Target the colors you need to complete sets and score the maximum number of points.

When one of the depths of the ocean has been fully explored, the game ends and the penguin waddle with the best sets of food wins!

—description from publisher

Fit to Print

Fit to Print is a puzzly tile-laying game about breaking news, designed by Peter McPherson and set in a charming woodland world created by Ian O’Toole!

Thistleville is the world’s most bustling little town — it’s a challenge to keep up with everything going on, from who took home first prize for their baked goods at the community fair to who has been digging in Mrs. Brambleberry’s carrot patch.

As an editor at one of the local newspapers, your job is to tell their stories!

The front page is due in just a few hours and you have no time for perfection. Grab the big stories before the other papers get a chance, and make sure you get the right photos too. A newspaper is a business, so the money has to come from somewhere — don’t forget the ads! After you’ve picked out a combination of stories, photos, and ads, it’s time to lay out the front page. Did you take enough tiles to fill the paper, but not so many that things have to be cut? Over the course of three hectic days, your skills will be tested as you compete to be the most newsworthy editor!

Fit To Print is a tile-laying game for the whole family. Players simultaneously collect newspaper tiles, stacking them on their desks until they think they have what they need to make the perfect front page. Then, they will yell “Layout!” and begin to lay out the page by carefully considering the placement of centerpieces, articles, photographs, and advertisements. When everything is just right, they yell “Print” to be the first off the press and gain their choice of centerpiece for the next round! This hectic spatial puzzle features over 100 unique newspaper tiles, 6 characters with their own special abilities, as well as 3 decks of Breaking News cards — so that each and every time you play you will be solving a new puzzle!

If real-time games aren’t your style, Fit to Print has a number of alternative modes to satisfy every type of puzzle gamer. In Slo-Mode players take turns drafting tiles from a shared market and arranging them on their front pages. In Puzzle Mode, take a specific set of tiles and piece together the highest-scoring arrangements. Whether you enjoy relaxing solo puzzles on your own, or frenetic action for up to 6 players, you will have a blast helping the critters of Thistleville tell their stories!

—description from the publisher

Bites

New version of the Spiel des Jahres Recommended Big Points with a new theme, more engaging components, and rule tweak cards to make sure every play is different.

Four page illustrated rulebook. 20min play time. Highly interactive with no direct conflict.

Players move ants along a trail and collect food as they go. However, the value of that food depends on how the other ants move.

Shared incentives mean you are always trying to figure out what the other players are up to. Variable "rules cards" tweak the rules to every game so that each play is fresh.

During setup, a trail of food is laid out. On each player's turn, they can move any ant to the next food in the trail that matches their color (red ant to apple, purple ant to grapes, etc). Then the player takes the food token directly in front of or behind the ant, saving it to score at the end of the game.

However, players don't know for sure how much the food is going to be worth until the matching ant makes it to the ant hill at the end of the trail. This creates shared incentives as players work together to advance some ants and hold others back.

Along the way players also have the chance to pick up chocolate, which can be turned into special actions, and wine, which provides a way to score bonus points.

There are four decks of cards that define the rules for the game. Each game, one card is chosen from each deck to provide a unqiue combination. Players have to adapt their strategy to the actions the other players are taking and the unique rules for this game. The "rule decks" are:

Ant Hill - Food tokens are worth more points if the matching ant gets to the hill FIRST. Or, food tokens are worth more points if the matching ants get to the ant hill LAST.
Wine - The wine tokens have a different way of scoring in every game.
Chocolate - The chocolate tokens provide a different special power in every game. And, the best way to use that power will change based on the other special rules in play.
Variant - One special rule that applies to this game which offers an extra twist.

Your actions will change the incentives for the other players. Can you manage these cascading effects to collect the most valuable food collection?

BOOoop.

A deceptively cute, deceivingly challenging & SPOOPY abstract strategy game for two players.

Every time you place a kitten on the bed, it goes “boop.” Which is to say that it pushes every other kitten next to it one space away. Line up 3 kittens in a row to graduate them into cats… and then, get 3 cats in a row to win.

But that isn’t easy with both you AND your opponent constantly “booping” kittens around. It’s like… herding cats!
And now, things just got boopier and spoopier -
with NEW Ghost Cats that float between the spaces. And so scary, cats will leap right over each other to get away!

Approachable but challenging abstract game following the incredible success of the original "boop" as a limited seasonal game.
Features a new quilted, fabric board that lays over the back of the box, completing the minature bed playing surface. 34 adorable wood cat and kitten playing pieces!
NEW Ghost Cats can boop cats over other pieces as they move across the board between spaces.

—description from the publisher

After Us

2083. Humankind died out decades ago, leaving behind mere vestiges of its time on Earth. As time went by, nature reclaimed land all over. In this resurgent world, apes have kept evolving. They've been gathering in tribes, growing, mastering human items, and advancing in their quest for knowledge. As the leader of such a tribe, you need to guide it towards collective intelligence.

After Us is a deck-building and resource management game featuring an original and intuitive combo system in which players are each leading a tribe of apes. Starting only with tamarins, they combine their cards each turn to collect resources and gather victory points, attracting new apes into their tribe along the way: powerful gorillas, resourceful orangutans, versatile chimpanzees, and wise mandrills. The first player to obtain 80 points prevails in the race to collective intelligence — and wins the game.

— description from the designer