Economic

Europe. Summer 1997. You and your most creative friends have discovered two problems with a common solution: mad cows in England and unexploded bombs in France. You've decided to bring these two powder kegs together just to see what happens – and you wouldn't say "no" to a little money on the side, so round up your herd, march them through France, and set them loose behind the Cordon Rouge. If you're lucky, you'll come home rich before Greenpeace gets hold of you.

Either way, there's something magical about blowing up cows.

Unexploded Cow is a money game in which players are trying to collect enough points to win the pot. On every turn, you will buy cows and pay for special effects by putting money in the pot, then try to discover bombs with your own cows in an effort to take money out of the pot. All along, you will be earning points from the French as you liberate town after town from the terrors of unexploded bombs, and the player who scores the most points gets whatever's left in the pot.

Unexploded Cow is best played as a series of short games, each of which takes about thirty minutes. The game is quite simple and very chaotic: You'll have a blast.

Axis & Allies (2004) aka Axis & Allies Revised Edition is the first Avalon Hill version of the classic light weight war game Axis & Allies. The game simulates the entire scope of World War II.

The game is nominally designed for five players, representing the Allies: United States of America, United Kingdom and Russia vs. the Axis: Germany and Japan. However, it is most often played as a two-player game.

Axis & Allies features a simple dice-based combat system; a small number of types of naval, air and land units; territory control; and technology research to improve unit capabilities.

Major new features of Axis & Allies (2004) include new units (e.g. destroyers, artillery), revised unit capabilities (e.g. armor defend at 3, fighters cost 10 IPCs), directed technology research, and totally new victory conditions (key territories must be controlled to win the game).

Homesteaders is an auction and resource management game in which players bid on the opportunity to build certain types of buildings, then spend resource cubes to build one of several buildings of that type. The buildings confer abilities, income, and points; some automatically and some requiring a worker.

The game lasts ten rounds, with each round consisting of an auction phase followed by a building phase. After the last round, players take one final income phase and have one last chance to buy and sell goods and use their building abilities before scores are tallied.

Players score for their buildings, bonuses conferred by buildings, and points earned throughout the game from selling resource cubes. The player who builds the best combination of buildings and best manages the nine different resources in the game will score the most points and win – as long as they don't take on too much debt!

Power Grid: Factory Manager is the new stand-alone game in the world of Power Grid. It was released at Spiel '09 in Essen, Germany.

Each player owns a factory and tries to earn the most money during the game. To be successful, each player must use his workers to buy the best machines and robots at the market and to run the machines most effectively in his factory. Because of increasing energy prices, the players must be careful to check the energy consumption of their factories and to avoid using only energy-consuming machines. Otherwise, their profit will suddenly vanish, the worst fear of a good businessman.

Power Grid: Factory Manager uses a clever market mechanism for choosing the supply of factory tiles in the market.

Martin Wallace's streamlined redesign of Brass.

Players are tycoons in the early days of the Industrial Revolution; a time when traditional craftsman were being rapidly replaced with steam-powered machines. Players invest in the production of raw materials, the manufacture of goods, and the transportation networks needed to connect them to their markets.

Like Brass, the strategic space is vast, and player decisions are limited by cards. In Age of Industry, however, cards are color-coded to regions rather than specific cities, allowing the players to be more flexible with their plans, while at the same time continuing to limit the decisions available. The color-coded region cards will also support expansion maps.

In addition, the original Brass rules were simplified by eliminating the canal period; there is only one period, the railway era. There is also a new, non-specific industry, which will change with each map.

According to Wallace, "You can now play something with the depth of Brass, but in half the time. The game will have a double-sided map, with Germany on one side and southern New England on the other."