Contracts

In Pioneer Rails, you represent a railroad owner who has seen an opportunity to expand your empire across the new lands of the frontier. You'll compete against other railroad owners to plan your railway in the best way possible to connect establishments to the railroad and satisfy the demands of the locals.

In this flip-and-write game, you use poker cards to extend your railway tracks and build a poker hand at the same time. Each turn, you choose one of the revealed poker cards. The suit of the card helps you extend your railway, connecting you to new towns and surrounding features. When you connect to a town, you gain the ability to do a one-time bonus. When you surround a feature with your tracks, you activate it for endgame scoring. The value of the card is added to your poker hand, for which you'll score additional points at the end of the round.

Three common goals are also in play each game, giving you incentives to build in different directions.

The mechanism of surrounding features to activate them gives Pioneer Rails a satisfying "puzzley" feel to the game.

—description from the publisher

We’re in 19th century, sea transport is more and more important. Both corporations and naval forces require newer and newer ships. Try to put yourself in the role of their manufacturers. Hire employees, buy accessories, get favour of evaluating committees. Don’t forget to rent a canal and you can heave anchor.

Players take turns, beginning with a randomly selected player and continuing around the table clockwise. On their turn, they will choose one of the available actions from the Action Track. The action will get the player something they need to help build their ships. On the player's next turn, they will move that Action Card ahead of all the others and choose a different action.

If a player completes a ship on their turn (ships consists of little cards depicting bows, sterns, and (preferably several) middle pieces with several options to add equipment or crew), it is taken out for a shakedown cruise in a canal, during which they may score points for speed, crew, equipment, or safety.

As players take their turns, the line of Action Cards will advance around the Action Track. When the lead Action Card reaches the Starting Space again, the countdown marker moves down one space, and play continues.

The game ends when the countdown marker reaches the finish space. (It can also end early if the players run out of Ship Cards.) Bonus points are scored for Government Contracts, and the player with the most points wins.

The game lasts about 30 minutes per player.

—description from the publisher

A cup of coffee sure is relaxing — for the customer. For the coffee shop, however, orders tend to pile up during peak hours, and it is no different today at Coffee Rush. Your goal: Complete customer orders to increase your ratings and be recognized as the best barista!

In more detail, each player moves on the ingredient board to collect the ingredients that they need to fulfill orders — and fulfilling orders boosts your rating. Orders that are not fulfilled in time become penalties, which subtract from your rating. If a player has fulfilled three orders, they may activate an upgrade that lets them acquire ingredients more easily.

The game ends once all order cards have run out or after a barista collects their fifth penalty card. The player with the highest rating wins!

—description from the publisher

When all you can identify in the horizon for many long days is the line that detaches the sea from the sky, the glimpse of a distant shore appearing before you will make you shiver at the understanding that the adventure is about to begin.

You find yourself astonished, landing on the shore that will be the origin of an extensive exploration through the Galapagos, a magic place of inconceivable beauty and endless biodiversity. There, you will gather repertoires and expand your knowledge of the natural sciences. Your eyes will learn how to detect the hidden species in the tropical forest, gazing at the countless colors and textures of nature. After inspiring hours spent studying and getting to enlightening conclusions, you will rest under a sparkling sky, admiring the stunning complexity of the animal realm.

Darwin's Journey is a worker-placement Eurogame in which players recall Charles Darwin's memories of his adventure through the Galapagos islands, which contributed to the development of his theory of evolution.

With the game's innovative worker progression system, each worker will have to study the disciplines that are a prerequisite to perform several actions in the game, such as exploration, correspondence, gathering, and dispatch of repertoires found on the island to museums in order to contribute to the human knowledge of biology. The game lasts five rounds, and thanks to several short- and long-term objectives, every action you take will grant victory points in different ways.

Welcome to the Isle of Trains, where you are the conductor, and constructor of one of the island’s locomotives. You’ll build trains and load a range of goods to complete contracts across the island, and also deliver passengers to their destinations.

Isle of Trains: All Aboard is a card-based engine building game where cards have multiple uses: You can use cards as locomotives, freight cars, passenger cars, or buildings to improve the effectiveness and abilities of your train. Cards can also be spent to pay for the construction of your new train cars and buildings, or you can use your cards as cargo and load them onto available freight cars.

You will also have a range of passengers who want to be taken to different destinations. You will draw these passengers at random from a bag when you build passenger cars and certain locomotives. You can then load passengers into any available passenger car. When passengers are delivered to their destinations, they will give you an instant powerful bonus!

Loading cargo and passengers into opponents’ trains is important on the Isle of Trains as it’ll also gain you extra bonuses that turn! But this will help the other train conductors get a little closer to completing their goals, by giving them the cargo or passengers, which they can then use for deliveries and big end game points!

The game ends when a certain number of contracts have been completed, or a certain number of passengers are delivered. You win by scoring the most points, which you earn by building up your train, completing contracts, and delivering passengers.

Isle of Trains: All Aboard is all about balancing the need to upgrade your train, with loading cargo or passengers onto opponent’s train for big bonuses, and delivering cargo and passengers to their destinations before anyone else. Build your engine effectively enough to be remembered as the greatest train conductor on the Isle of Trains!