Grid Coverage

In Factions: Battlegrounds, you take on the role of a general who's leading an army of troops, spellcasters, beasts, and mythological monsters into battle. You and the opposing generals determine the battleground, gather resources, and score points by eliminating enemy units. Whoever first captures 25 points of units wins.

In more detail, to set up choose one of the six factions in the game; each faction has twelve unique units and five "home terrain" cards that work well with your units. Players then take turns building the battleground by placing one terrain card at a time into the 3x3 grid, each terrain card is divided into a 2x2 grid, so the entire grid of play is 6x6. Whoever places terrain first has an advantage since they have more home terrain than other players, while players who go later during set up determine the location of resource centers on the battleground or recruit their starting units last so that they can respond to the choices of opponents. Units cost 1-5 gold, and each player can spend up to 10 gold on starting units, keeping anything unspent.

During a round, all units have the chance to move, with the highest-ranked units moving first and with ties being broken in favor of whoever has the most captains, followed by whoever has the most units. Each unit has a movement, attack, and health value, along with an indication of whether it generates gold or mana and (possibly) a spell that it can cast. After moving a unit, you can attack with it, whether melee or ranged as indicated on the card. If you defeat an enemy unit, you can points equal to its cost in gold, so while expensive units tend to be the most powerful, they also provide an opponent with their biggest target for points.

Prior to activating a unit on your turn, you can pay gold to recruit new units, and those units will slip into rank order for the turn, possibly allowing you to put a high-ranking unit into play directly and giving an opponent someone on the battleground that they didn't expect.

Once all the units have moved, players collect resources for units that gain them automatically and for units located on resource centers. Rounds continue until someone has collected 25 points of captured units, at which point they win immediately.

Factions: Battlegrounds is centered on inclusion and diversity, incorporating mythology from all over the world and representing traditionally European-based fantasy elements with underrepresented cultural elements.

Every stick is a sword. Every bike is a steed. Every memory is a possibility.

In Vivid Memories, you’ll take turns collecting fragments of childhood memories, weaving a tapestry of colored threads in your mind. Throughout your journey, you’ll store important moments in your memory bank -- gaining new abilities to help you score.

Cleverly create connections and earn rewards for completing core memories, matching the imagination behind each moment, and working toward your lifelong aspirations for victory.

During the game, players take turns collecting fragments of memories from moment tiles, placing them in their "brain" board to weave a tapestry of colored threads. Using abilities at the end of each round to cleverly create connections, players are rewarded for how they store memory fragments while working toward completing “core memories”, which give repeated benefits each round. Through their journey, players store important moments in their memory bank -- gaining new abilities and new opportunities to score -- all while working to collect fragments and moments that match what they aspire to be.

—description from the designer

Travel Blokus is the smaller, 2-player verson of Blokus. It is an abstract strategy game with transparent, tetris-shaped, colored pieces that players are trying to play onto the board. The only caveat to placing a piece is that it may not lie adjacent to your other pieces, but instead must be placed touching at least one corner of your pieces already on the board.

The tiles in the Blokus To Go version are made with square holes cut into them that allow them to be snapped onto square-shaped "nubs" on the playing field. There are also two storage trays that hold the tiles for travel. These trays cover the board when the game is not being played and fold open in order for players to access the tiles.

Paris is a two-player board game by José Antonio Abascal infused with Parisian aesthetics by the boardgame’s artist Oriol Hernández. The game is set in late 19th century Paris during the 1889 “Exposition Universelle,” or world’s fair, when public electricity was a hot topic. Electricity spread throughout the city, creating today’s beautiful nocturnal Parisian streets and coining Paris’s nickname “La Cité de la Lumiére”, the city of lights.

The most well-lit buildings are admired more highly by passers-by. In the first phase, players can either place tiles or grow their reserve of buildings. The cobblestone tiles are divided into 4 random spaces (their color, their opponents’ color, a streetlight or a mixed-color space where either player can build).

Then, in the second phase, players build on top of their color or the mixed spaces, in effort to position their buildings as close to as many streetlights as possible. More streetlights solicit more adoration and points. The player with the best lit buildings steals the hearts of Parisian pedestrians and wins the game.

—description from the publisher

Dragons are back into our world, and they are in vogue! As the proud owner of group of islands where dragons nest, you’ll have to manage both the tourists’ expectations and the dragons’ appetite…

Dragon Parks is a drafting game which makes use of transparent cards. Select a new card each turn to put on one of your three islands, adding or covering dragons in this park as you do. Some dragons hate to be covered by others and will snap back at you, and if you manage to hatch an egg by covering it, it will attract new visitors!

After 3 turns, the season ends. You will then score visitors depending of the number of different dragons visible on each island, with a bonus for the dragon type in vogue this season, and extra visitors if you attract the Legendary Dragon to your parks… But beware, if you have fewer sheep available than you have dragons, you will lose visitors equal to the difference!

The game ends after 3 seasons, and the player with the most visitors at the end wins!

-description from publisher