Area Enclosure

Ancient Balinese legend describes a host of powerful spirits who help poor rice farmers achieve success. These farmers have long used a sophisticated irrigation system to organize rice cultivation by integrating religious devotion and social responsibility with traditional farming methods. Even modern farmers seek to placate the spirit world in their quest to produce an abundant harvest.

In Spirits of the Rice Paddy, players must compete with fellow rice farmers to construct and tend rice paddies. Oxen can build walls and remove large rocks. Ducks can be employed to eat harmful pests and fertilize the fledgling crops. Weeds must be kept at bay. Most importantly, water must be conserved and released with the greatest of care. With a little luck, all that back-breaking labor will pay off in the end. The good news is that the spirits are eager to assist, granting many special abilities, blessings, and magic. The farmer who produces the most rice over seven rounds wins the game.

By all appearances, it's just two players taking turns laying stones on a 19×19 (or smaller) grid of intersections. But once its basic rules are understood, Go shows its staggering depth. One can see why many people say it's one of the most elegant brain-burning abstract games in history, with players trying to claim territory by walling off sections of the board and surrounding each other's stones. The game doesn't end until the board fills up, or, more often, when both players agree to end it, at which time whoever controls the most territory wins.

The earliest mention of Go (圍棋 (wéi qí)- "surrounding game") appears in the "Analects" of Confucius (551-479 BC), while the earliest physical evidence is a 17×17 Go board discovered in 1952 in a tomb of the former Han dynasty (206 BC- 9 AD). There is a tangle of conflicting popular and scholarly anecdotes attributing its invention to two Chinese emperors, an imperial vassal and court astrologers. One story has it that Go was invented by the legendary Emperor Yao (ruled 2357-2256 BC) as an amusement for his idiot son. A second claims that the Emperor Shun (ruled 2255-2205 BC) created the game in hopes of improving his weak-minded son's mental prowess. A third says the person named Wu, a vassal of the Emperor Jie (ruled 1818-1766 BC), invented Go (as well as games of cards). Finally, a fourth story suggests that Go was developed by court astrologers during the Zhou dynasty (1045-255 BC).

A Go set, consisting of a very general-purpose grid and colored stones, can also be used to play a variety of other abstract strategy games, such as Connect6, Go-Moku, Pente, and others.

The goal is to have the fewest number of groups of tiles on the board at the end of the game.

The players take turns placing one of their five tiles on a 9x9 grid and then draw another tile to replace it. There are three tiles which each player can place on each space: a letter, a number, or the item which represents the 3x3 sector of the board the space is in.

If another player has placed a tile it may be captured by playing a legal tile in its place, only if removing the tile doesn't break a group of tiles belonging to the player into more than one group. If players tie for the fewest number of groups at the end of the game, then the winner is the one who captured the fewest opponents' tiles.

In Hey, That's My Fish!, players want to catch as many fish as possible with their waddle of penguins. Each turn, a player moves one penguin in a straight line over hex-shaped ice tiles with 1, 2 or 3 fish on them. The player then collects the hex from where the penguin started its movement from the table, thereby creating a gap which penguins can't cross on future turns. When a penguin can't move, it's removed from play with its owner claiming the tile on which it stands. The player who collects the most fish wins.

Ready to start exploring a previously uncharted island? Good! You and the other players each have a team of five scientists, and you want to capture animal species so that you can study them — and, of course, score points.

The game board in La Isla consists of a set of oddly-shaped tiles that are placed in a circular arrangement around a central polygonal tile. Thirty-five animal tokens (seven each of five types) are placed at random on spaces numbered 2, 3 and 4 on the game board; these numbers equal the number of camps that surround these spaces.

On a turn, a player has three cards that he places face-down in the A, B and D spaces on his card display. All players reveal their A cards at the same time, then place them in one of the three slots at the top of their display; the image depicted on the top of this card shows the special power that the owner of this card has available. Once a player has filled all three slots on her display, future cards placed with the A action cover an existing card.

After revealing the cards in their B slots simultaneously, the players collect the goods depicted in the lower-left corner of their individual card.

Each player in turn then places one of his scientists on a camp, first paying two resources of the type matching that camp. (If all of a player's scientists are on the board, she moves one of these scientists.) If the player now has a scientist on each camp surrounding an animal space, she takes that animal tile, scoring points for it as noted on the board (4, 3 or 2 points).

Finally, the card in the D slot increases the value of one animal. You (and only you!) immidiately score one point per animal of the type you moved up on the scale. If you don't have an animal of that tpe you don't get any points. Each animal has a points threshold so that if you move an animal up, say, four times, each animal of this type is worth an extra point at the end of the game. The scale goes up to five so that every animal can be worth up five points at the end of the game. When the sum of these values for all five animals equals seven, nine or eleven (based on the number of players), the game ends at the conclusion of the round. Players then tally their final scores to see who wins.