Medieval

Life in the village is hard – but life here also allows the inhabitants to grow and prosper as they please. One villager might want to become a friar. Another might feel ambitious and strive for a career in public office. A third one might want to seek his luck in distant lands.

Each player will take the reins of a family and have them find fame and glory in many different ways. There is one thing you must not forget, however: Time will not stop for anyone and with time people will vanish. Those who will find themselves immortalized in the village chronicles will bring honor to their family and be one step closer to victory.

Village is a game full of tactical challenges. A smart and unique new action mechanism is responsible for keeping turns short and yet still tactically rich and full of difficult decisions. Also unique is the way this game deals with the delicate subject of death; as a natural and perpetual part of life in the village, thoughts of death will keep you focused on smart time-management.

Paraphrased from Opinionated Gamer's review:

Each player’s turn consists of taking a cube and then taking the action of the area they just took the cube from. The board has multiple different zones with specific attributes, a market, a travel zone, a crafting zone, a church, and a council house. Many of these offer multiple options, so even if you take a cube from the crafting area, you can get an ox, a horse, a cart, a plow, a scroll, or convert wheat to gold. Each zone is seeded with cubes of four colors plus black cubes which serve as curses, there are lots of turns per round. Some areas offer short-term scoring, others offer long-term scoring, and still others offer only end-game scoring. The round ends when there are no cubes at any location. The game ends when either the village chronicle or the anonymous graveyard is full.

Players in Mascarade start with six coins and a randomly dealt character card. Characters stay face up just long enough for players to more or less memorize them, then are turned face down. Your goal is to be the first player to hold 13 coins, and while you start nearly halfway to that goal, you can go down just as surely as you can go up!

On a turn you take one of three actions:

1) Announce your character: Claim the power of a certain character and take the associated action. You don't have to have that character card in front of you to take this action, but if someone else says that they're that character and reveals the card to prove it, that player takes the action instead while you lose one coin to the tribunal.

2) Swap cards or not: Take another player's character card along with yours, place them under the table, shuffle them around a bit, then give one card back to the other player while keeping one for yourself. You (presumably) know whether you changed characters and can have some idea of who you are now, but that other player might be in the dark.

3) Secretly look at your character: Look at your character card to make sure of who you are.

Play continues until one player obtains 13 coins and wins!

Mascarade includes more character cards than the number of players, so not all characters will be used in each game. The rules suggest that you use certain characters in your first games, but once you know the game, you can try many other distributions. The first edition of Mascarade contains 13 characters. The beggar (woman) has no special ability. Bruno Faidutti says on his blog: "...she has no ability so far. I always like to find blank cards in a game, for which I can imagine my own effects. Here, the card is not blank – it has a picture and a name, but you can devise its effect, and I'm sure there'll be some prize for the best idea."

One player tries to erect a cathedral, while the other is in charge of building a fortress, an element that also seems to be part of the book; the one who succeeds first in erecting his building has won the game.

Each of the two buildings consists of three sections/cards; each of those sections require a different combination of materials. Action cards enable players to get to construction materials; other action cards upgrade these materials, such as iron into bells, sand into cement or wool into cloth.

(From the Nuremberg preview at Gamepack.nl.)

The king is holding a great banquet for all the nobles in the realm so that they can bathe in his splendour. Artists and troubadours will bring the necessary entertainment. It is meant to be a feast that will long be remembered!

The guests attending the feast hall feel the same, for in the corners of the castle deadly plots are being developed. The guests are divided into two factions, with both planning to "dismiss" the king. One faction plans to smuggle a dagger into the feast hall to "open the king's heart to the realm" at the right time, while the other faction hopes to give the king "renewed motivation" with a poisoned drink.

In The Last Banquet, each player is a guest at the feast and needs to help his faction reach its goal and ensure that this will truly be the king's last banquet. The game includes 25 role cards, each portraying a person on the front and listing that person's skills on the back. In addition to "The Last Banquet", several other scenarios are provided in the rules that can be played with each of the roles. (GameHeads' Oliver Wolf notes, "Playing time ranges from 30 minutes up to 90 minutes or more, with more people tending to need more time to play." Also, some scenarios involve more than two factions.) Obstacle cards provide challenges for players to overcome.

When a faction succeeds in its goal, all players who belong to that faction win the game.

Fantasy Frontier is a fantasy board game of airships and exploration for 2 to 4 players with a playing time of 45 to 90 minutes. Each player controls a unique airship with a crew of pioneers. Players manage the actions of these pioneers each turn in an effort to scout the land, gather resources, construct townships, and even battle it out in aerial combat. Creating geographic patterns via tile placement, the players will develop a new world each time they play. Players compete to be the first to score the required number of victory points to win the game. Points are scored by building townships, completing geographic patterns, and fighting their rivals in airship battles!

Every turn, players must carefully manage the actions of five workers, which can be assigned the following tasks:

Piloting the Airship - Moving their airship token around the board.
Research & Development - Drawing map cards with geographic patterns and discovering development cards to improve their airships.
Scouting the Land - Drawing terrain tiles to place on the map to expand the community game board.
Gathering Resources - Landing the airship and exiting the workers to collect food, wood, stone and gold, with these resources being used to improve the performance of workers and to build townships.
Construct a Township - Landing the airship and disembarking the workers to build a township, which provides a reoccurring resource stream and is worth victory points.
Aerial Combat - Engaging in airship battles with other players to slow their progress and potentially score victory points.
Repair Ship Damage - Repairing the damage taken in battle.

Fantasy Frontier is a unique gaming experience, blending a peaceful Euro play-style with the optional take-that element of combat, creating a game unlike any other.