Card Drafting

The Abyss power is once again vacant, so the time has come to get your hands on the throne and its privileges. Use all of your cunning to win or buy votes in the Council. Recruit the most influential Lords and abuse their powers to take control of the most strategic territories. Finally, impose yourself as the only one able to rule the Abyssal people!

Abyss is a game of development, combination and collection in which players try to take control of strategic locations in an underwater city. To achieve this, players must develop on three levels: first by collecting allies, then using them to recruit Lords of the Abyss, who will then grant access to different parts of the city. Players acquire cards through a draft of sorts, and the Lords of the Abyss acquired on those cards grant special powers to the cardholder — but once you use the cards to acquire a location, that power is shut off, so players need to time their land grabs well in order to put themselves in the best position for when the game ends.

From the Publisher:
Spring/Summer 2010
Pitch: Ancient Egypt... The temple of Sobek is being built and the market place is thriving. Loads of goods arrive by ship for the construction site and it is a race to pick the best items in order to sell them with the most profit.

Of course, with so much at stake, not all the moves are legal, corruption is everywhere and cordiality scarce. Because in the end there can be only one winner!

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Famous Bruno Cathala's (Cyclades, Dice Town, Shadows Over Camelot, Mr. Jack, MOW...) latest design is a fast paced card game well suited for the whole family, with tactical choices, luck, and a bit of cunning.

Each turn you have to choose if you want to take a goods card, play a character with a special power or display a set of matching goods cards.
While taking a profitable card, you often collect corruption points, which add up in a pile in front of you.
During each each round five sets of nine cards are put at the players' disposal. When all cards are gone, there is a scoring for all displayed cards, but beware, the player with the most corruption sigils sees his income almost cut down in half.

The game ends after 3 rounds or if a player has reached a hundred points.

Online Play

Yucata (turn-based)
Board Game Arena (realtime and turn-based)

Runebound is a classic adventure game from Fantasy Flight Games in which mighty heroes must take on the perils of Terrinoth. The game can be largely played without conflict between the players but victory can only be claimed by the first player to defeat the Dragonlord Margath, so the players are actually in a race to level up and acquire powerful weapons, armour and allies in order to take on the final adversary.

Runebound features a series of 4 Adventure Decks that helps to pace the speed of the game and ensures that the players level up by acquiring experience before they are ready to take on a harder set of challenges (events and monsters).

Several of the key features of Runebound are that combat is played out in 3 phases, Ranged, Melee and Magic and a player has the ability to specialise in a particular discipline, although this may make them vulnerable against certain creatures. The game also features a novel movement system using a series of terrain dice.

Runebound is playable solo and is expandable by many adventure packs that alter the final challenge (replacing the Dragonlord for example). Runebound 2nd Edition also has a series of big box expansions that provide a new map or central map overlay to alter the game in some way.

Runebound 2nd Edition is different from 1st Edition in that the original game featured a d20 and this was replaced by 2 10-sided dice, which helped to better balance the luck factor.

Reef Encounters of the Second Kind was released at Essen 2006. It is an expansion set for Reef Encounter, introducing new creatures, opportunities, and tactics to the basic game.

The crown of thorns starfish with their voracious appetites have now found the reef and will consume any corals that they can reach. Blue shrimps will assist host shrimps in protecting the larger corals, but these blue shrimps are notoriously unreliable. Meanwhile, the polyp tiles now come in a variety of different forms, and even the rocks are liable to change shape.

A selection of cards provides one-off opportunities to influence the game, to introduce or to move the blue shrimps, or to affect the scoring at the end of the game. An appropriate card is also required before a parrot fish can consume its first coral.

Contents: 4 blue wooden shrimps, 48 special tiles, 56 cards (28 in English and 28 in German), and 2 rules sheets, one in English and one in German.

Expands:

Reef Encounter

Reef Encounters of the Second Kind Microbadge :

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