Economic

Carson City is a strategic game played in four rounds, and in each one of them, the players choose a character from the seven available that gives certain advantages.

After selecting characters, your cowboys are placed on action track locations that allow you to construct buildings, houses, or roads; claim ground; earn money; or score victory points. When more than one player is on the same location, get ready, it is time for a duel! Roll the dice and see if you are the last one standing and lay claim to the goods!

During the game, you can take various actions that earn you victory points for your plots, pistols (the hired help), and buildings. At the end of the game, your buildings, houses, mountains, and money contribute to your victory points, and the person with the most points wins. So go round up your posse of gunslingers and get ready for some Wild West action in Carson City!

It is 1729 in pre-revolution France, a time when the aristocracy has all the power and the means to rule the country. As a wealthy, well-educated aristocrat, you have travelled the world and had the fortune to enjoy your life to the fullest – but you see that history is about to change course and you know that in order to stay strong, your family must prepare well. You need to find new allies. You must absorb smaller families and use their potency to strengthen your kin. You have to arrange wise marriages, nurture strong connections at court, obtain titles, build mansions, and find the right spouses for your daughters and sons...

Legacy: The Testament of Duke de Crecy enables you to build a powerful dynasty in 18th century France as you step into the shoes of a French noble and compete for lasting honor. Over three generations, you – a resourceful patriarch or matriarch – will attempt to create a lasting legacy by establishing a house with ties to many different wealthy and powerful families from France and abroad (Spain, Italy, Russia and other countries).

This card game offers endless possibilities. Each time you build a family, you write a unique story, bringing to life the diverse relationships between parents and their children, between cousins, uncles, aunts, nephews and nieces. Whether you are looking for the best husband for your only daughter or a suitable wife for one of your two sons, whether you are looking to add new blood to your family by marrying into foreign nobility – you will be working to make your family rise in status through prestige and wealth, new skills and abilities.

In Legacy: The Testament of Duke de Crecy – known previously as Nobles of Paris and winner of Ducosim Spelontwerp in 2009 – you will find 75 spouse cards with unique traits, more than twenty secret missions, nine titles, and nine "contribution to the family" cards. This all culminates in a highly thematic card game that will satisfy players who enjoy exploring many different paths to victory.

Legacy is a worker placement game in which you take actions to improve the standing and/or wealth of your family. You will expand your family, creating an ever-growing tableau, the family tree. You will need to balance the three 'currencies' in the game, Prestige (converts to Honor points at the end of each generation, of which there are three), Income (your income which converts to hard cash at the end of each round, of which there are 9), and Friend cards (which are actual connections/friends, and are the only way to marry into wealthy/famous families, and can only be received through actions, such as marrying a woman who brings some of her social contacts with her).

Prestige, Income and Friend cards can be gained and lost. You can, for example, lose some prestige by marrying someone infamous or lose some Honor points (i.e. reputation) by asking friends for money. There are also numerous actions you can take that will affect one of the three 'currencies' detrimentally, such as bribing someone to get a title (for which you need to pay, but also in the loss of friends who felt they deserved that title, and not you), or the maintenance of a beautiful new park you have built for the people (losing you income). Finally, you can also take actions that result in the loss of some of your social contacts (friends), due to jealousy, or people simply no longer wanting to be associated with you.

These currencies are carefully balanced by the male and female friend cards in the game. Generally men will give you income and possibly prestige, but will cost you a dowry/wedding costs. Women, on the other hand, will give you connections (new friends you can choose from the current socialites (cards lying open on the table) and possibly prestige, and will sometimes even earn you a dowry!

The card interactions allow for multiple different paths to success, but you must choose your road strategically, planning out where you want to be headed, else you will be left behind in the dust by those with greater and more successful plans than yours.

Cacao is a tile-placement game that immerses players in the exotic world of the "fruit of the Gods". As the chief of your tribe, you must lead your people to prosperity through the cultivation and trade of cacao — and to do that, you'll need to put them to work in the best way possible.

In the game, each player has an individual deck of square worker tiles, with the number of workers on each side of the tile varying from tile to tile. The playing area starts with only a couple of jungle tiles in play: a cacao field and a small market; two jungle tiles are laid face up, and the remaining jungle tiles stacked as a draw pile.

On a player's turn, she places one of her worker tiles on the board adjacent to one or more jungle tiles already in play, then (if two worker tiles are next to an empty space) adds one of the jungle tiles to the playing area in this space. Her workers then get busy and deliver the results of their effort: If you placed workers next to a cacao field, you receive one or two cacao markers per worker; if they're next to a market, you can choose to sell one cacao marker per worker at the listed price; if next to a well, you receive water; if next to a temple, they stand and look good until the end of the game; and so on. She then refills her hand from her personal deck to three worker tiles.

Once all players have used all of their worker tiles, the game ends. Players score (or lose) points based on their water supply, and each temple rewards whichever players sent the most workers to it. In the end, whoever has collected the most gold wins.

VivaJava: The Coffee Game is all about finding that perfect blend of beans to create the next best-seller in the coffee houses and kitchens of the world.

In the game, players send their researchers to hot spots around the globe to gather the perfect bean. This may bring them into contact with other players who are also on the hunt, creating a crucial choice: Go it alone and continue to research, or join forces with that opponent, hoping to combine beans from both player's bags and share the score with a superblend. Going it alone with research can often prove useful as players spend time in the lab developing abilities that grant them an advantage. However, in VivaJava the bold taste of victory will go only to those players who are able to balance solitary research with cooperation amongst their fellow gamers.

The rich depth of varying strategies and social play will satisfy most players' thirst for unique gameplay, but VivaJava has even more brewing. This flexible game can accommodate up to 8 players, and through smooth simultaneous actions, play is quick and constant with little downtime.

Set during the tumultuous 'yellow journalism' years at the end of the 19th century, Penny Press has players taking on the role of newspaper magnates such as Pulitzer and Hearst as they strive to become the dominant paper in old New York City.

Players move up on the circulation track throughout the game by publishing newspapers, and they are awarded bonuses at the end of the game for best covering the five news 'beats' or leading news categories of the day: War, Crime & Calamity, New York City, Politics, and the Human Condition.

To publish newspapers, players assign some or all of their five reporters to the popular stories of the day. When they're ready, players 'roll the presses' to claim those stories where their reporters have a majority and assemble them on their 'front page' player mat. The score of each press run is determined by the current values in each of the five news beats. Stories also have 'star' values, and the player with the most stars in each news beat gets that beat's endgame bonus.

The end of the game is triggered when one player publishes his fourth (in a two- or three-player game) or third (in a four- or five-player game) newspaper. The player who moved farthest along the circulation track is the winner of Penny Press.