Family Game

Favor of the Pharaoh

In ancient Egypt, even a lowly peasant could seek an audience with the Pharaoh, and in Favor of the Pharaoh 2–4 players vie for the Pharaoh's favor by working their way up through Egyptian society, gathering influence (represented by dice and powers) to gain entry to the next level of society. Once any player gains the Queen's influence, a final contest occurs for the Pharaoh's favor.

Favor of the Pharaoh tasks players with building a dice-rolling engine—not to mention adding and manipulating dice—in preparation for a final roll-off between all players to gain the Pharaoh's favor and win the game.

Favor of the Pharaoh includes more than one hundred tiles, over twenty standard and custom dice, dozens of bonus tokens, level bars, locking pyramids, and more. With so many combinations of level bars and tiles, no two games will ever be set up the same!

Animals on Board

The accessible and clever game Animals on Board features a two-tiered cardboard ark that will hold each player's animal tiles. At the start of the game, each player draws three animal tiles, chooses one of these tiles, and places it on a bracket of his ark without showing it to the other players.

The leftover animals that players initially drew begin forming what will become a single animal collective in the center of the table. The total number of animals in the collective is based on the number of players, but one animal in the collective will always be face-down. Each player also starts with one food crate and may never have more than five food crates at any time.

On each turn, a player has two options: (a) split a collective of animals into two groups and take a food crate, or (b) take one of the animal collectives into their ark by paying a food crate for each animal in that group. As players choose their group of animals, they drop out of the turn. The first player to drop out of a turn starts the next turn. The game ends when an ark has at least ten animals on board.

Before scoring, all animals in pairs are discarded because a guy called Noah claims all animal pairs for himself. Single animals score the points imprinted on the tile (from 1-5) and herds of animals automatically score five points each. Remaining food crates also score one point each.

Scrabble Deluxe

In this classic word game, players use their seven drawn letter-tiles to form words on the gameboard. Each word laid out earns points based on the commonality of the letters used, with certain board spaces giving bonuses. But a word can only be played if it uses at least one already-played tile or adds to an already-played word. This leads to slightly tactical play, as potential words are rejected because they would give an opponent too much access to the better bonus spaces.

Skip-a-cross was licensed by Selchow & Righter and manufactured by Cadaco. Both games have identical rules but Skip-a-cross has tiles and racks made of cardboard instead of wood. The game was also published because not enough Scrabble games were manufactured to meet the demand.

My First Stone Age

Travel to the past with Jonon and Jada, two stone age children, to rediscover how the first humans settled the world around them.

In My First Stone Age, a children's version of the Stone Age family game, the players collect goods and build their own settlement.