Area Control / Area Influence

"The way to have Power is to take it" - William "Boss" Tweed

Tammany Hall is a game of backstabbing, corruption, temporary alliances, and taking power at all costs. If you want to rule New York, you are going to need to play the city's growing immigrant populations against one another. Help the immigrant groups who owe you political favors, call in those favors to slander your rivals, and win elections.

In Tammany Hall, players help immigrants settle in New York, collect political favors from those immigrant groups, send ward bosses into Manhattan to secure votes, and slander political opponents. An election is held at the end of every fourth year, and the player who uses his power base best will be elected mayor. The Mayor's grip on the city is tenuous at best. After every election, the Mayor must pay off his political rivals by placing them in offices that they can wield to try to take control of the city. Every player is your friend, every player is your enemy.

Tammany Hall was the political machine that dominated New York City politics by organizing the immigrant populations. While the organization's influence spanned from its founding in the 1790s to its collapse in the 1960s, this game is set in lower Manhattan roughly between 1850 and 1870 – the era of Boss Tweed.

Part of the Knizia tile-laying trilogy, this game is set in medieval Japan. Players compete to gain the favor of three factions: samurai, peasants, and priests, represented by helmet, rice paddy, and Buddha tokens scattered about the board, which represents some of the islands of Japan. The competition is waged through the use of hexagonal tiles, each of which help curry favor of one of the three factions (or all three at once!). Players can make lightning-quick strikes with horseback ronin and ships or approach more methodically. As each token (helmets, rice paddies, and Buddhas) is surrounded, it is awarded to the player with who has gained the most favor with the corresponding group.

Gameplay continues until all the symbols of one type have been removed from the board or four symbols have been removed due to a tie for influence.

At the end of the game, players compare captured symbols of each type, competing for majorities in each of the 3 types. Ties are not uncommon and are broken based on the number of other, "non-majority" symbols each player has collected.

Reef Encounter is about life on a coral reef! Using polyp tiles, players grow different types of corals, which they can protect from being attacked by other corals through judicious placing of their four shrimp counters. To be successful players must consume polyps from neighboring corals in order to acquire the 'consumed' polyp tiles that are the key to the game. The consumed polyp tiles have a myriad of uses (and have a similar effect to the action points in games like Tikal and Java). Most importantly they can be used to flip over or lock the coral tiles, which determine the respective values of the different types of coral at the end of the game.

Description from the designer, Richard Breese.

Expanded by:

Reef Encounter of the Second Kind

The year is 1888, and Steampunk technology has advanced at a prodigious rate! Probes have been sent to Mars, and soon astronauts will be manning rockets in order to mine the planet for newly discovered resources. The first is a brand new element, Celerium, that could prove to be a combustible energy source the likes man has never seen. The second is Sylvanite, an incredibly dense material unlike anything found on earth. In addition to these resources, glaciers have been discovered on the planet. Whoever controls these icy masses could work to create a livable atmosphere on Mars

In Mission: Red Planet, players work as mining companies compete to send astronauts to Mars in order to colonize and mine for recently discovered materials. Over the course of 10 rounds, players play one of their special agents every round to help fill the rockets heading to Mars with their own astronauts while simultaneously working to prevent their opponents from doing the same. Once landed, these astronauts must gather to control specific regions of the planet, each yielding one of the three resources: Celerium, Sylvanite, or Ice. After rounds 5 and 8, players gain score tokens for every region where they control the majority of the astronauts. At the end of the game, players score one final time, adding any bonuses received from Discovery Cards and Bonus Cards. The player with the most score tokens at the end controls Mars, and all the riches it can bring!

From Bruno Faidutti's website:

This one, designed with Bruno Cathala, started with the theme. We wanted to make a game about colonizing Mars, with shuttles leaving the blue planet towards the red one. The theme is strong, and well caught in the steampunk graphic style decided by Asmodée. In Mission: Red Planet, each player plays a colonial power which sends astronauts, in space shuttles, to occupy the most promising zones on the planet. For scholars, the systems merge a majority game, à la El Grande or San Marco, with a character/action card system, somewhere between Citadels and Hoity Toity/Adel Verpflichtet. Nothing really new here, but there was much work on it and we're really proud of the result.

Although referred to as a sequel to El Grande, El Caballero shares few aspects with its namesake, being a fun but intense brain-burner in which players explore and attempt to control the lands and waterways of the New World.

The players are following Columbus by exploring the islands he discovered. Players slowly explore the islands – by picking and placing land tiles that are most favorable to them – and discover wealth in the form of gold and fish. As they learn about the land and sea areas of this new land, they position their caballeros to try to maintain control of the important regions. Castillos give them a measure of protection from others, and ships allow them to establish trade and to fish for food. Success is measured in the size of land and sea areas they control. Their success is measured twice, and in the end these scores are summed and the winner declared.