Modular Board

Fluxx: The Board Game lives up to its card game namesake as this board game is all about change: changing rules, changing goals, and changing tiles on the board.

Players start the game with their three pieces in the center of a 3x3 grid of tiles, with each tile divided into four spaces and each space showing an icon of some type (chocolate, sun, cookies, etc.) or an octagon or a portal. Players each start with three cards in hand, and the overall goal of the game is to collect 3-6 goal cards, with the exact number possibly changing during play.

On a turn, a player draws one card, plays one card, then moves one space, with all of those values being subject to change during gameplay; depending on what's currently allowed by the rules, you can also use movement points to rotate or move tiles in the play area. If you have a piece on each icon shown on the topmost goal card in play, you claim that card and are that much closer to winning. Players can also claim goal cards they have in hand by, again, placing their pieces on the appropriate icons. Other cards in the game allow players to change the rules, the game board, the ownership of player pieces, and so on.

At the mouth of the river of the dead is the mighty city of Asphodel. It is known by many other names, some call it Purgatory some Stygia. Many lives that were cut short by violence or tragedy resume here fighting each other in a nightly battle to gain the strength to move on while fending off the attacks of rival factions. Asphodel is a strategic skirmish game set in the afterlands.

Factions of ghosts fight over locations to gain enough resolve to move on. These locations exist as shadows of places in the world of the living. In the afterlands locations may be adjacent to other places that are actually many miles apart in the living world. Set up -----Each player begins by either choosing or randomly drawing one of the available factions:

The Drowned, whose lives were cut short by tragedy at sea, or perhaps at the bottom of a well.

The Burned, victims of fires, radiation, and explosions. Their connection to the fire has lasted into the next world.

The Gremlins, tinkering souls who lost their lives to the machines they still love.

The Mystics whose pursuit of knowledge and power has become even greater on the shadowy side of the shroud.

And the Poltergeists whose violent brutal ends leave them raging, and lashing out across the asphodel meadows and possibly beyond.

Players take turns moving their Ghosts, who are represented by dice. Ghosts will be banished, and summoned back to Asphodel. Ghosts may find the resolve to transcend this purgatory, scoring points for the player or they may find themselves stuck in Asphodel, wandering the twilight city forever.

Players move their workers around the board (which is composed of variable groups of hexes) building houses along the banks of two rivers. Each turn certain hexes along the river pay out, either in money (which you use to build houses) or lumber (used to make dams). The first player to construct all five of their buildings (four houses and one hacienda) or a hacienda and three houses that are all on a riverbank, wins. Players build dams to change the flow of the rivers.

In The Staufer Dynasty, the players are nobles in the 12th century, accompanying Henry VI on his tour of the areas of Europe brought under control by the Staufer family, an area that included much of modern day Germany, went from the Baltic Sea in the North to Sicily in South. You're eager to improve your own lot in the land by placing envoys and nobles in positions of power in the six regions represented in this game.

The game lasts five rounds with each player having three actions per round. Players take action in order of their family members on the action board from top to bottom, and on a turn you either take a supply action (moving to one side of the action board) or a move/deploy action (moving to the other side).

For a supply action, you pick one of the spaces on the supply table, move the indicated number of envoys and nobles from the province to your personal court, then claim any chests underneath that space. The treasure chests come in different colors, with each color having a different function in the game: the brown treasure chests score points based on how many you collect, the orange ones provide immediate points or figures, the blue ones provide a one-shot bonus, and the purple ones let you collect one of the privilege cards on display. The privilege cards often modify other actions or give you a bonus for doing a particular thing.

For a move/deploy action, you decide which office seat you want to occupy in a particular region. If this seat isn't in the region where the king is located, you need to spend one envoy as you move clockwise away from the king, placing each envoy in the top part of those regions, until you reach the region that you want to occupy. You then pay the cost of the office seat, placing one figure — possibly a noble if the seat demands it — in that seat and all the other figures in clockwise order, one per region. When you occupy a seat, you claim the chest underneath it.

After everyone has finished their actions, you score for the round — but you score only in the region indicated in the current row of scoring tiles (Aachen, Nijmegen, Palermo, etc.) and the region that best meets the condition laid out in a separate part of the current row of scoring tiles (fewest chests, most occupants, where the king is located, etc.) If these two regions turn out to be the same one, you score that region only once. Players score points for having the most office seats in a region (or the second- or thirdmost most office seats) based on the point tile placed in the region at the start of the game. Each region also has a printed bonus that players receive, such as bonus chests or additional envoys.

To end the round, you remove all of the office occupants of the region that scored, add new chests under each office seat in those scoring regions and each space on the supply table, then sweep the king clockwise 1-3 regions. As the king moves, he returns all of the envoys that he encounters in the regions that he enters to their owners. After five rounds, players score for their treasure chests as well as for how well they completed their secret job cards, and the player with the most points wins.

Game description from the publisher:

Don't expect to lie around the sun, lazily sipping cocktails and passively watching hula dancers, because the tactical game Hawaii is not a paradise for idlers, but rather for bold, active strategists. Restlessly, they'll move their pieces on the game board, facing constant challenges in terms of making their beautiful villages on this beautiful island as profitable as possible. Only those who will be able to use their dwindling resources to meet the increasing demands over five rounds will find a spot for themselves on the beach.

In Hawaii, players must make use of their limited resources to score points by growing their villages and exploring the surrounding islands. Your chieftains move around the board to purchase new tiles for their villages, hopefully grabbing the best deals before their opponents. Three different currencies are used to pay for these trips, so make sure you don't run out of any of them too quickly. Players are also rewarded for providing for their people (measured essentially by how much they bought on a given turn), but your meager income shrinks as the game goes on. Players will have to balance a number of ways to score points to secure their victory.