Players compete to build the most famous hotel/casino. Room tiles representing slot machines, lounges, restaurants, and other casino-related places appear on a central board and the players hold auctions to win the rights to have those rooms in their building, garnering them income, population, or fame. Bidding wars escalate, values fluctuate, and designers renovate until finally the hotel/casinos are put to the test to determine whose garners the most fame.
A new era is looming on the horizon. The future of Noria is right in front of you, and you must guide your flourishing trading empire into prosperity. Discover flying islands, buy ships, and build factories. Invest in prestigious projects, and secure their success by passing on secret knowledge to politicians. For even above the clouds, there is still room for improvement...
Noria is the debut title from Sophia Wagner, winner of the Spiel des Jahres fellowship in 2015. The talented, young author created an entirely new steampunk universe specifically for this game, and artists Michael Menzel and Klemens Franz have managed to bring her vision to life. At the center of the game is an innovative mechanism called "wheel building". Each player has an action wheel consisting of three rings, with slots for a number of different action discs. Over the course of the game, players try to obtain new discs and manipulate the rings of the wheel to optimize their action selection. Additionally, to ensure their investments bear fruit, they also need to bribe politicians with knowledge.
Clans of Caledonia is a mid-to-heavy economic game set in 19th-century Scotland. At this time, Scotland made the transition from an agricultural to an industrialized country that heavily relied on trade and export. In the following years, food production increased significantly to feed the population growth. Linen was increasingly substituted by the cheaper cotton and raising sheep was given high importance. More and more distilleries were founded and whisky became the premium alcoholic beverage in Europe.
Players represent historic clans with unique abilities and compete to produce, trade and export agricultural goods and of course whisky!
The game ends after five rounds. Each round consists of the three phases:
1. Players' turns
2. Production phase
3. Round scoring
1. Players take turns and do one of eight possible actions, from building, to upgrading, trading and exporting. When players run out of money, they pass and collect a passing bonus.
2. In the production phase, each player collects basic resources, refined goods and cash from their production units built on the game map. Each production unit built makes income visible on the player mat. Refined goods require the respective basic resource.
3. Players receive VPs depending on the scoring tile of the current round.
The game comes with eight different clans, a modular board with 16 configurations, eight port bonuses and eight round scoring tiles.
Through tactics and karma to wealth and fame...
In 16th century India, the powerful empire of the Great Moguls rises between the Indus and the Ganges rivers. Taking on the role of rajas and ranis – the country's influential nobles – players in Rajas of the Ganges race against each other in support of the empire by developing their estates into wealthy and magnificent provinces. Players must use their dice wisely and carefully plot where to place their workers, while never underestimating the benefits of good karma. Success will bring them great riches and fame in their quest to become legendary rulers.
"Wendake" is the name that the Wyandot People use for their traditional territory. This population, also known as the Huron Nation, lived in the Great Lakes region together with the Iroquois, Shawnee, Potomac, Seneca, and many others. In this game, you explore the traditions and everyday life of these tribes during the 1756-1763 period when the Seven Years War between the French and the English took place in these territories.
But this white man's war is really only a marginal aspect of the game; the focus is on life in the Native villages, fields, and forests. In this game, you won't find the traditional teepees since those were used by southwestern tribes who moved their camps to follow the herds of buffalo. The Natives of the Great Lakes were sedentary, living in long houses. The women farmed beans, corn, and pumpkins, while men hunted beavers in the forests, mainly to sell their pelts as leather.
In the game Wendake, you are placed in the shoes of a chief of a Native American tribe. You have to manage all of the most important aspects of their lives, earning points on the economic, military, ritual, and mask tracks. The core of the game is the action selection mechanism: You have the opportunity to choose better and better actions over seven game rounds, and the winner will be the player who can find the best combinations of actions and use them to lead their tribe to prosperity. Each player has their own 3x3 action board that is comprised of nine action tiles. The first time you select an action tile each year, you may choose any tile; the second and third times that year, you must choose another action tile in the same column, row, or diagonal as your previously selected tile(s). If the action tile you choose shows more than one action, you can use them only in the order shown, from top to bottom. After the last player has placed (and resolved) their fourth action marker, the restore phase begins.
During the restore phase, all players remove the action markers from their tiles and flip the tiles they used face down so that they show the opposite side. All players then move their action tiles down one row so that the top line of their action grid is empty and the three tiles from their bottom row are now outside of the grid; if any of these three tiles shows the ritual side, they must be flipped back to the action side. The first player may now set aside one of the three tiles below their grid and replace it with one of the six advanced action tiles near the board or with any action tile they already set aside in previous years. This new tile is added to the tiles below the player's grid. Then, whether a new tile was taken or not, they shuffle the three tiles that are below their grid and place them in random order on the top line of their grid, all showing the action side.
During the game, you score points in four tracks, with these tracks being coupled randomly at the beginning of the game. The game ends at the end of the seventh year, and for each pair of tracks, you score only the number of points indicated by the score marker on the lower value. Sum these points from the two pairs of score tracks to see who wins.