Dice Rolling

Merchants & Marauders lets you live the life of an influential merchant or a dreaded pirate in the Caribbean during the Golden Age of Piracy. Seek your fortune through trade, rumor hunting, missions, and of course, plundering. Modify your ship, buy impressive vessels, load deadly special ammunition, and hire specialist crew members. Will your captain gain eternal glory and immense wealth - or find his wet grave under the stormy surface of the Caribbean Sea?

In Merchants and Marauders, players take on the role of a captain of a small vessel in the Caribbean. The goal is to be the first to achieve 10 "glory" points through performing daring deeds (through the completion of missions or rumors), crushing your enemies (through defeating opponents and NPCs in combat), amassing gold, performing an epic plunder or pulling off the trade of a lifetime, and buying a grand ship. While some points earned from performing various tasks are permanent, players earn points for amassing gold, which can be stolen or lost (or at least diminished) if their captain is killed. Points due to gold are hidden so there's some uncertainty about when the game will end.

A big component of the game is whether (or when) to turn "pirate" or remain as a trader or neutral party. Both careers are fraught with danger: pirates are hunted by NPCs (and other players) for their bounty and blocked to certain ports while traders are hunted by non-player pirates as well as their opponents and generally have to sacrifice combat capability for cargo capacity. Although players can kill each other, there is no player elimination as players may draw a new captain (with a penalty) so it's possible to come back from defeat.

"The Game of Scattergories," published in 1988 by Milton Bradley, is a great game for any group to play. In the game each player fills out a category list 'with answers that begin with the same letter.' If no other player matches your answers, you score points. The game is played in rounds. After 3 rounds a winner is declared, and a new game can be begun.

Similar to:

Facts in Five

In Myrmes, originally shown under the name ANTerpryse, players control ant colonies and use their ants to explore the land (leaving pheromones in their wake); harvest "crops" like stone, earth and aphids; fight with other ants; complete requests from the Queen; birth new ants; and otherwise dominate their tiny patch of dirt, all in a quest to score points and prove that they belong at the top of the heap, er, anthill. After three seasons of scrabbling and foraging, each ant colony faces a harsh winter that will test its colonial strength.

In game terms, each player has an individual game board to track what's going on inside his colony – that is, whether the nurses are tending to larvae or doing other things, where the larvae are in their growth process, what resources the colony has, which actions are available to workers when they leave the colony, and so on. The shared game board shows the landscape outside the exit tunnel that all colonies share; after exiting this tunnel, workers ants can move over the terrain to place pheromones (which gives them access to resource cubes), clean up empty pheromones (to make space), hunt prey (by discarding soldiers) or place special tiles (but only if they've developed the ant colony).

The game lasts three years, and at the start of each year three season dice are rolled to determine the event for each season: extra larvae or soldiers, more VPs for actions, and so on. Within each season, players can spend larvae to adjust the event for themselves on their personal player board. (Put the kids to work!) After adjusting the event, player allocate nurses to birth larvae, worker or soldier ants or to use them for other actions. The worker ants then do their thing, working within the colony itself (although only one colony level is open initially) or traveling to the outside world to hunt prey (ladybugs, termites, spiders), lay down pheromones (which later lets them claim resources on these spaces), place special tiles (like an aphid farm or sub-colony), or clear out pheromones left by ants from any colony. After harvesting, nurses who didn't tend to births then take additional actions, such as opening a new tunnel that only your colony can use, clearing a new level within your colony, or meeting one of the six objectives (capture a certain number of prey, build special tiles, and so on) laid out at the start of the game.

After three seasons, players must pay food to get their colony through winter, losing points if they can't. Whoever has the most points after three years wins. All hail our new ant overlords!

Dragon Strike has similar game play to Milton Bradley's HeroQuest.

One player acts as the "Dragon Master" (i.e., the DM) and controls the placement, movement, and action of the villains. The rest of the players control one of five different hero types (Warrior, Wizard, Thief, Elf, or Dwarf) and attempt to complete various adventure goals. Dragon Strike takes the HeroQuest game play and goes a step further in a few directions:

1) The Wizard and Elf have more spells at their disposal and a greater variety to choose from,

2) Dragon Strike comes with 4 different game boards (vs. HeroQuest's single board), one of which is outdoors,

3) a slightly more advanced combat system which uses different polyhedral dice (instead of all six-siders) and has concepts like flying creatures which can only be hit with spells and missile weapons, and

4) a (cheezy) 30 minute VHS video tape which introduces players to the game and sets the "mood" for playing.

Note: This game is available by request only and requires having a membership to play.
See game associate for details.

The Outer Belt expansion to Alien Frontiers adds ships and colony tokens for an additional player and expands the playing board. This side-board expands the moon with a new territory, and introduces the nearby Asteroid Belt. Asteroid Counters move through the belt during the game, changing their docking requirements as they change their positions. Staking a claim to an Asteroid will give you resources, a derelict ship, or new alien devices. Outer Belt can accommodate 2 to 5 players (up to 6 players when combined with Alien Frontiers: Factions).