City Building

In City of Iron, 2-4 players compete to build up a small nation in a world of machines, magic, and money. Become the leader of one of four rival races: the industrious humans, the toad engineers, the scholarly Cresarians, or the clever hogmen.

Corner the market on goods like machine parts or bottled demons. Research steam-age technology and recruit mercenaries to control the continent. Build sea-going schooners or cloud-cutting airships to reach faraway lands and flying islands. Your cities have limited capacity, so you’ll have to decide what to keep and what to demolish when building advanced structures.

The future of a nation is in your hands. Build unbreakable foundations for an empire or disappear into the dusty pages of history.

King Solomon presided over a golden age of peace and prosperity in ancient Israel. During this time Solomon instituted an unprecedented building program. As one of Solomon's chief governors, you must procure materials and oversee construction of buildings and roads across the land for the glory of Solomon. You will also help to construct the Temple, one of the wonders of the ancient world.

Kingdom of Solomon is a worker-placement game with a few new twists and turns. Do you claim a resource space, an action space or throw in all your remaining pawns to grab a powerful Bonus Space? Will you spend your resources to extend Solomon's kingdom, take some points in the Market or add to the Temple? These and many other choices await you in this highly interactive game.

You play Kingdom of Solomon in rounds of four phases. You start the round placing your pawns to get resources, take actions or get a bonus. In this placement phase players take turns, each placing one pawn at a time. After all pawns have been placed, players resolve what they get from placing their pawns. This is called the resolution phase, and each player, in turn, resolves the placement of all their pawns before the next player. Next the players can go to the Market to sell or buy resources. In this market phase, like the placement phase, players alternate taking turns, except that players take turns in reverse order. The last shall be first, and the first shall be last. Finally, you build in the building phase. Players, one at a time, can build a building, roads and add blocks to the Temple.

When you place pawns to take actions, you can get an additional resource for a resource space, trade one resource for another, steal a resource from an opponent, get victory points or draw Fortune cards. You can play Fortune cards at any time. Fortune cards provide resources, victory points or special actions. Bonuses your pawns can gain for you include one of every resource, three Fortune cards or victory points with a rearrangement of turn order so you become the new first player.

You use resources to build things. Each thing costs a specific set of resources. The buildings you build give you victory points and additional spots to place pawns for resources or actions. Roads link resource spaces into resource regions so you can get more resources per pawn placed in the resource region. Building Temple blocks give you either victory points or temple tokens that help you gain or keep the High Priest. The High Priest lets you take advantage of another player’s resource region and gives you victory points at the end of the game.

The game ends at the end the round when a player places all his building tokens on building sites, there is a building token on each of the building sites, or the Temple is complete. The player with the most victory points wins.

Game description from the publisher:
In Urbania the city center has seen glory in its past. But the future calls to you for renewal! Build the new city upon the old, and forge ahead with progress, hammering new profits from those old foundations! Plan a new landscape and garner power and prestige to yourself!

Keyflower is a game for two to six players played over four rounds. Each round represents a season: spring, summer, autumn, and finally winter. Each player starts the game with a "home" tile and an initial team of eight workers, each of which is colored red, yellow, or blue. Workers of matching colors are used by the players to bid for tiles to add to their villages. Matching workers may alternatively be used to generate resources, skills and additional workers, not only from the player's own tiles, but also from the tiles in the other players' villages and from the new tiles being auctioned.

In spring, summer and autumn, more workers will arrive on board the Keyflower and her sister boats, with some of these workers possessing skills in the working of the key resources of iron, stone and wood. In each of these seasons, village tiles are set out at random for auction. In the winter no new workers arrive and the players select the village tiles for auction from those they received at the beginning of the game. Each winter village tile offers VPs for certain combinations of resources, skills and workers. The player whose village and workers generate the most VPs wins the game.

Keyflower presents players with many different challenges and each game will be different due to the mix of village tiles that appear in that particular game. Throughout the game, players will need to be alert to the opportunities to best utilize their various resources, transport and upgrade capability, skills and workers.

Keyflower, a joint design between Richard Breese and Sebastian Bleasdale, is the seventh game in the "Key" series from R&D Games set in the medieval "Key" land.

2212: Ginkgo Biloba, the oldest and strongest tree in the world, has become the symbol of a new method for building cities in symbiosis with nature. Humans have exhausted the resources that the Earth offered them, and humanity must now develop cities that maintain a delicate balance between resource production and consumption. Habitable space is scarce, however, and mankind must now face the challenge of building ever upwards. To develop this new type of city, you will gather a team of experts around you, and try to become the best urban planner for Ginkgopolis.

In Ginkgopolis, the city tiles come in three colors: yellow, which provides victory points; red, which provides resources; and blue, which provides new city tiles. Some tiles start in play, and they're surrounded by letter markers that show where new tiles can be placed.

On a turn, each player chooses a card from his hand simultaneously. Players reveal these cards, adding new tiles to the border of the city in the appropriate location or placing tiles on top of existing tiles. Each card in your hand that you don't play is passed on to your left-hand neighbor, so keep in mind how your play might set up theirs!

When you add a new tile to the city, you take a "power" card of the same color, and these cards provide you additional abilities during the game, allowing you to scale up your building and point-scoring efforts.