Area Control / Area Influence

Toward the end of the 6th century A.D., King Ethelbert of Kent established the old Roman city of Canterbury as his new capital. In Canterbury, 2 to 4 players represent Saxon Lords who are charged with building the city into a prosperous capital. The Saxon Lords must use the city's meager starting resources to build up the 25 districts of Canterbury and provide key services to its citizens.

The key services are (in order from most basic to most prestigious) water, food, religion, defense, commerce, and culture. As new structures are built in the city, the city grows more prosperous. While each Saxon Lord jealously guards his or her own prosperity and achievements, they all benefit as a whole from the growing prosperity of the city itself. When the city reaches the peak of its prosperity, the game ends and the player with the most individual prosperity wins.

Legacy: Gears of Time is a strategic card game, mechanically rooted in its time travel theme. Players each play cards from their own hand, draw from a central draw pile, move and play technologies on a single timeline, while placing their influence cubes on existing technologies.

Legacy is played on a timeline that grows at the end of each of 4 rounds. Players take turns during a round consisting of 3 actions each. During each turn, you may travel back in time, play a technology card from your hand, influence an existing technology, or draw two cards (keeping only one).

As you travel back in time, Technologies are played from your hand by paying their discard cost. Any technologies you play generate influence for you automatically.

Having more influence than your opponents is the key to claiming rewards for a technology! At the end of each round, rewards are given for each technology and its dependencies. One Influence cube from each technology will come off at the end of each round, forming your influence pool to be used in future rounds to influence existing technologies. Keep in mind, a technology is only considered successful if all of its dependencies exist previously on the timeline.

Since there are several copies of each technology, you may be able to preempt and eliminate an existing copy by playing yours earlier in the timeline! Be sure there is room for your new technology, though; each time-frame has a capacity equal to it's distance from the present.

There are also a few rare but powerful Fate cards, each allowing you to break the rules in interesting ways. Fate cards have no discard cost and don't require an action to be played.

By strategically influencing existing technologies, adapting to your opponents actions, and carefully choosing when to go further back in time, you will find yourself victorious over your rivals! History remains intact until the Ancient Machine demands you return to the past to rebuild history, and your Legacy, once more.

Summary:

4 Rounds
4 Turns per Round
3 Actions per Turn (any mix of the following):
Travel back in Time
Play a Technology card
Influence an existing Technology
Draw two cards (keep one)

Dinosaurs reside on the modular hexagons of the super-continent Pangaea. Each hex can only support a certain number of animals. Not only that, the continent is splitting up with parts of the land disappearing and new lands emerging elsewhere. Players try to disperse as widely as is wise while still dominating each continent where they exist. The game ends as the meteorite strikes, ending the age of the great dinosaurs.

Players begin by placing herds of their dinosaurs on the single continent of Pangea, made from tiles of various terrain types. They then take turns, which comprise of drifting tiles, conducting optional actions, and finally resolving any of their own tribes that have been left in water or on overpopulated tiles. The first phase, the drift, involves a player moving a landscape tile of the same type as depicted on the card they play. The tile must be moved further away from the South Pole (the centre of Pangea) than it already is, must remain a part of the same continent and must be attached to a continent with that player's herds. Players have 4 action points to spend on other optional actions, including another drift, migrating herds, rescuing swimming herds and reproducing to create more herds.

Points are scored during the game whenever a new separate continent is formed as a result of a landscape tile drift, as well as at the end of the game for each continent. During the game, the player with the most herds on the new continent scores 2 points, while the player with the second-most scores 1. End-game scoring is much more significant, as the player with the most herds gains 1 point per landscape tile on the continent, and the player with the second most scores half that amount.

The final round begins when the meteor strike card is drawn, and the game then ends. After final scoring is completed, the player with the most points wins.

Premiere: Essen 2002

From the publisher, Rio Grande Games:

Seehausen am See. For many years, more and more people visit this idyllic village during the annual summer fest. In these three weeks, the breweries and beer gardens in the village make more money than during the rest of the year. So, you and your opponents become hardened businessmen, who rush to Seehausen am See to invest in the businesses there with an eye toward the large profits that come during the festival. During these three weeks each will invest in the businesses and try to get his people in management positions in the breweries and beer gardens where he owns stock. The players also work to increase the size of their favorite beer gardens so that they can earn more money. In the end, it is not the size of the beer gardens or who is in charge, but the amount of money in the players’ pockets...

Nieuw Amsterdam was founded by the Dutch West Indies Company in order to encourage the lucrative beaver pelt trade with the local Native American hunters along the Hudson River. To establish a trading post there, they needed a town and a fort, which was built on the tip of Manhattan Island. To encourage European patrons – that is, settlers of means or noble birth – to populate the colony, they granted them both land and indentured servants. The patrons became the lords of a new feudal system not unlike that seen in Europe.

In Nieuw Amsterdam, players are those patrons, and they bid on action lots in order to build businesses, work land for both food and building materials, compete in elections, ship furs to the Old World, and trade with the Lenape Indians – a process that gets more complicated as players claim more land and push the Lenape camps farther up the Hudson River.