Components: Meeples (Animal) / Animeeples

Wondrous Creatures

Welcome to the world full of fantastic creatures! You are an admirer, a creature enthusiast who will join the journey of forming the world’s leading creature reserve.

Unique Worker Placement: Wondrous Creatures’s worker placement mechanism provides an intriguing Hex Puzzle experience. Your deployed worker interacts with surrounding icons to bring in resources or cards, and works to activate special effects!

Transforming Terrains: As the game progresses, powerful special effects are newly placed on the map. Get creative and use these special effects to unleash your very own powerful combos!

100+ Different Creature Cards: Collect and combine various different creature cards. Every creature holds its own distinctive ability and provides a deep strategic tableau building experience. Each card beautifully illustrated by Sophia Kang, will immerse you into a wonderful world of Wondrous Creatures.

Evolving Worker Abilities: Your workers hold their own unique abilities. As you progress through the game, unlock their abilities and strengthen your workers!

—description from the designer

Everdell Farshore

The Forever Sea is calling...

The rugged coast north of Everdell Valley is a land brimming with adventure and mystery. Stalwart sailors search for bountiful islands and valuable treasures. Dutiful monks inhabit abbeys and scriptoriums, meticulously translating and illuminating. Hard-working folk gather resources and build their cities in unison with the ever-changing waves of the mighty ocean.

Welcome to Everdell Farshore, a standalone game set in the country of Farshore. Through each season, you lead a crew of critter workers to build up a prosperous city and to explore the enchanting ocean beyond. You must plan your actions carefully in order to build and to sail, for only by adapting to the winds of change will you succeed.

The wind is high. The sun is breaking the horizon. It is time to set sail for adventure!

—description from the publisher

Camel Up (Second Edition)

In Camel Up, up to eight players bet on five racing camels, trying to suss out which ones will place first and second in a quick race around a pyramid. The earlier you place your bet, the more you can win — should you guess correctly, of course. Camels don't run neatly, however, sometimes landing on top of another one and being carried toward the finish line. Who's going to run when? That all depends on how the dice come out of the pyramid dice shaker, which releases one die at a time when players pause from their bets long enough to see who's actually moving!

This 2018 edition of Camel Up features new artwork, a new game board design, a new pyramid design, engraved dice, and new game modes, including crazy rogue camels that start the race running in the opposite direction! You never know how a race will end!

Bites

New version of the Spiel des Jahres Recommended Big Points with a new theme, more engaging components, and rule tweak cards to make sure every play is different.

Four page illustrated rulebook. 20min play time. Highly interactive with no direct conflict.

Players move ants along a trail and collect food as they go. However, the value of that food depends on how the other ants move.

Shared incentives mean you are always trying to figure out what the other players are up to. Variable "rules cards" tweak the rules to every game so that each play is fresh.

During setup, a trail of food is laid out. On each player's turn, they can move any ant to the next food in the trail that matches their color (red ant to apple, purple ant to grapes, etc). Then the player takes the food token directly in front of or behind the ant, saving it to score at the end of the game.

However, players don't know for sure how much the food is going to be worth until the matching ant makes it to the ant hill at the end of the trail. This creates shared incentives as players work together to advance some ants and hold others back.

Along the way players also have the chance to pick up chocolate, which can be turned into special actions, and wine, which provides a way to score bonus points.

There are four decks of cards that define the rules for the game. Each game, one card is chosen from each deck to provide a unqiue combination. Players have to adapt their strategy to the actions the other players are taking and the unique rules for this game. The "rule decks" are:

Ant Hill - Food tokens are worth more points if the matching ant gets to the hill FIRST. Or, food tokens are worth more points if the matching ants get to the ant hill LAST.
Wine - The wine tokens have a different way of scoring in every game.
Chocolate - The chocolate tokens provide a different special power in every game. And, the best way to use that power will change based on the other special rules in play.
Variant - One special rule that applies to this game which offers an extra twist.

Your actions will change the incentives for the other players. Can you manage these cascading effects to collect the most valuable food collection?

Boonlake

With a group of pioneers, you have left civilization behind to settle along the shores of Boonlake, a long-forgotten region inhabited by humans long ago. This unexplored area beckons you! Become part of a new community and commit yourself to the common good. Explore the landscapes, build houses and settlements, raise cattle, produce raw materials, and develop an infrastructure. Do your best to automate these processes. Seize the opportunity to make the best of your new life in Boonlake.

Boonlake is an expert game in which you are finding yourself improving your life — and your group's life — in this new territory...but how you accomplish this is completely up to you! Due to a novel action mechanism, each game progresses differently. Each action needs to be considered carefully since the other players also benefit from the action you choose. Besides this, the action determines how far you may move your ship — the further and faster, the better!

—description from the publisher