City Building

In Western Town, each player is a Marshal of an expanding town in the Old West of the U.S. in the early 1860s. Each Marshal wants to develop the most prosperous town, one that President Lincoln himself would be proud to visit.

The three principal criteria that allow you to win the game are population growth, charm/attractiveness, and wealth, as measured by gold. Turns are regulated by the visits of Lincoln, who determines, bit-by-bit, the value of the towns relative to those three criteria. These criteria can and do change every round, and you will need to adapt to these changing criteria to win this game!

Each player has his own board on which he will be building his town. Every building gives him different, and increasing, rights and abilities, and therefore power. The bigger your town gets, the better – but managing too much growth is challenging, so you'll need to make difficult choices at the beginning of each round as to which buildings you'll bring into play.

This "building-adding" mechanism helps players stay in the game and not get lost in the overwhelming number of choices available. Of 22 different buildings, six of them are identified every round as "bonus" buildings, and players are forced to adapt varying strategies and test new combinations of these buildings for their town as the game progresses.

In addition to logic and strategy, Marshals will need to bluff and occasionally resort to questionably bending the law a bit, to succeed in building their Western Town. And as if that weren't enough, there are even occasional Indian attacks to deal with as well!

Carson City is a strategic game played in four rounds, and in each one of them, the players choose a character from the seven available that gives certain advantages.

After selecting characters, your cowboys are placed on action track locations that allow you to construct buildings, houses, or roads; claim ground; earn money; or score victory points. When more than one player is on the same location, get ready, it is time for a duel! Roll the dice and see if you are the last one standing and lay claim to the goods!

During the game, you can take various actions that earn you victory points for your plots, pistols (the hired help), and buildings. At the end of the game, your buildings, houses, mountains, and money contribute to your victory points, and the person with the most points wins. So go round up your posse of gunslingers and get ready for some Wild West action in Carson City!

In Florenza, the players are the heads of the most powerful families in Florenza during the Renaissance period. The goal of the game is to become the most famous patron of the arts by hiring the most famous artists of the period and financing their works.

Each player can commission artworks in his own district, the Cathedral, or in the civic buildings of the city. Each artwork requires money and resources to complete. To earn the money and resources the artists need, the players send their workers to labor in various workshops, possibly even in their opponents’ districts. Additional workers can be earned by offering charity to the church. During the game, players will earn prestige points, primarily by completing artworks. prestige points can be spent during the game, but at the end of the game they will be the player’s primary source of victory points.

All of the characters in the game are real historical figures that lived and worked in Italy during the Renaissance. Most of them worked in Florence. All of the buildings in the game were real Renaissance workshops. The artworks the players can complete include the masterpieces of some of the most famous artists in the world.

Note from the designers directly from the rulebook:

"We apologize if we included some characters in the game who never worked in Florence during the Renaissance, but we wanted to include all of the most important artists (in our opinion) from that golden age of Italian art and culture. Michelangelo, for example, left an important mark on the history of the city—and the Renaissance period—even if he was only in Florence for a short time. We also added some portraits of military leaders (created by Ivan Zoni) to the rulebook. They are not involved in the game, but they were influential members of public life during this era.
The names of the buildings, parts of the Cathedral, and the workshops are in the literal form they had in Italy during the 1400-1600 period. Some of them are unchanged in the modern Italian language, some have changed a little, and others have completely disappeared or remain only in some dialects. We chose to maintain those words, without translating them into a language that the real artists didn’t know. We hope you agree with our choice, and we hope you have a good time playing Florenza!"

Set in the Italian countryside, this game features various city-states vying for population. Each player is given two cities to start with, and is charged with expanding the different aspects of the cities to attract larger populations.

Players build farms to feed their people, quarries to finance their expansions, marketplaces to allow growth in their cities, and bathhouses to keep their people clean and healthy. Additionally, structures can be built that give the city influence in one of three categories. Superiority in one of these categories will cause population to shift from other nearby cities when the Voice of the People is decided at the end of each turn.

At the end of six turns, the player with the most victory points, which are determined from well-rounded cities, well-fed populations, and overall size of population, will be the winner.

Note: The correct pronunciation is like "Cheetah", but with the accent on the last syllable: "La Chee-TAH".

In Saint Petersburg, you'll be buying different types of cards: workers, buildings, aristocrats, trading cards, and the new market cards. In every phase, a new type of card will be available for purchase. You'll start with workers, who are good at bringing in rubles. The new market (yellow) cards bring in new resources. Having the majorities in these resources from round to round will earn you additional victory points. This battle for the lead enhances the game experience and expands the tactical and strategic possibilities of the players. In the next phase, buildings can be acquired, mostly granting victory points. Aristocrats provide a mix of victory points and rubles, and also lead to a large end-game point bonus that can't be ignored.

Trading cards allow already purchased cards to be improved. These phases will repeat until one of the card decks runs out. At this point, the final victory points are counted, and the winner is declared.

For this new edition of Saint Petersburg, we've kept the well-known and loved basic game, but also added an additional game phase. This will allow us to fully integrate the fifth player into the game. The new market phase will introduce a new mechanic providing additional victory points and rubles. The purple action cards from the banquet expansion will also have matching cards for the market phase. And, of course, for lovers of the old version, it will still be possible to play the game by the original rules.