Auction: Sealed Bid

You are the leader of a prehistoric tribe, deciding which members of your tribe go hunting and what prey they want to catch. To guide you, the Elders have created challenges that you can complete by painting on the wall of your cave.

Each round in Prehistories, you and your fellow tribe leaders bid simultaneously (and secretly) to decide who hunts where. The more hunters you have, the bigger the game you can catch, but the slower you are. The fastest player — that is, the one with the smallest sum of hunters — goes first, but they have few hunters with which to hunt. To hunt, you assign your hunters to one or more locations to catch the prey waiting there. Prey is represented by polyomino tiles, and the larger the tile, the higher the sum required. If you have just enough hunters to catch your prey, they might be wounded in the process, which means you'll draw fewer hunter cards at the end of the round to refill your hand. (They distrust your leadership when you get them injured!)

In the second phase of a round, you paint your cave with the animal tiles collected during the hunting phase. Your cave is represented by a 7x7 grid that starts with a few tiles already in place. The first tile you place goes in the left-hand column, and all subsequent tiles must touch tiles already placed, with all tiles being oriented so that the animals are viewed with their legs (or fins) down. (Cavemen have simple tastes and want everything to be representational.)

When you fulfill the wishes of the Elders by painting your cave in certain ways — such as completing a horizontal line or connecting opposing corners or surrounding a legendary animal on all sides — you place one or more totem tokens on that challenge. Whoever first discards their eight totem tokens wins.

Buying and selling paintings can be a very lucrative business. Five different artists have produced a bunch of paintings, and it's the player's task to be both the buyer and the seller, hopefully making a profit in both roles. He does this by putting a painting from his hand up for auction each turn. He gets the money if some other player buys it, but must pay the bank if he buys it for himself. After each round, paintings are valued by the number of paintings of that type that were sold. The broker with the most cash after four rounds is the winner.

Part of the Knizia auction trilogy.

Throw the egg! Grab the pepper! Being a teppanyaki chef over a hot hibachi grill sure looks entertaining — but could you be one?

In Hibachi, players are Japanese teppanyaki chefs who must use their hibachi grill to please hungry customers. To do this, players take turns each round throwing discs (poker chips) onto the board. Where the chips land determines which ingredients the chefs can buy or sell and which special actions they might be able to take. One at a time, the locations on the board are resolved as the chips are turned over to show their hidden values.

You must collect the correct ingredients to cook the required dishes, and if you're the first to complete three orders from customers, you win!

In Camel Up: Off Season, each of the 3-5 players has their own caravan of four camels that can carry goods, with the camels being able to carry 3, 4, 5, and 6 goods. Goods come in four types — carpets, vases, dates, and (non-date) fruit — and these goods will be available at markets, with one more market in play than the number of players. Each double-sided market indicates how many face-up and face-down cards are placed there, in addition to the special power of that market.

At the start of a round, players bid to see who selects goods first from a market, with the bidding rules being set by the back of the topmost goods card in the deck. Whoever wins the bid pays their money to the bank, while everyone else keeps their coins. (Coins are victory points, so you might not want to throw away too many of them!)

The winning bidder chooses a market, uses the power of that market (if they wish), then takes all of the goods from that market, flips them face up (if needed), then loads the goods on their camels. A camel can hold goods of only one type, and if a goods type is on a camel, then you must continue placing that good on the same camel. Each camel has a goods limit, however, and if you exceed that limit, then you must throw away all of that type of good.

Each other player in clockwise order then chooses an unchosen market, optionally uses its power, and collects and loads its goods. Each player then has the option of selling goods from at most one camel, with each type of goods paying out in different ways:

Dates: Cards show 1-4 dates, and the more you sell at once, the more money you receive.
Carpets: Cards come in six colors, and you can't sell the same color twice in a batch. Again, the more you sell at once, the better.
Vases: Cards come in three types (with some overlap), and you can sell only one shape at a time
Fruit: Cards come in four types worth different amounts, and you can sell only the lowest-valued fruit.

Place a 1 coin on the unchosen market, flip all the other markets, refill those markets with cards, then start the next round. When the deck runs out, complete one more round — selling once from each of your camels — then whoever has the most money wins.