mythology

In Norse legend, Freya, the goddess of fertility and passion, owed at least part of her reputation for irresistable beauty to an enchanting necklace - the Brisingamen.

You are a dwarf craftsman making jewelery of silver and precious gems. Use your team of dwarfs to mine jewels and set these into settings of fine silver which you can sell to earn prestige among your peers. Of course the grander the jewelery, the greater the prestige, but you have a quota to fill so you must work quickly. Various magical potions and abilities are available through the black market to aid you but you will need to use them wisely. Finish the Brisingamen for Frey and her favours will bring even more prestige than the finest jewelry.

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Send your dwarfs racing into the mine to collect jewels with an interesting leap frog action that has them moving fastest when they work together. Once you get some jewels you can complete a piece of the Brisingamen or get a Setting card to create another piece of jewelry. Work on the Brisingamen and Freya rewards you with Free Action tokens that you can use for extra actions or for victory points. Ability cards let your dwarfs move faster, whisk jewels out of the mine, block other player's dwarfs or steal jewels.

In this game the players are ancient gods that are trying to make their chosen tribes prosper and conquer the land. The twist is that the gods/players don't know all their chosen tribes at the beginning of the game, these are given to them only every other round.

There are 24 different tribes which start on predefined spaces on the board. These tribes are divided into four different levels and have as many counters on the board at the beginning of the game as their level indicates (1, 2, 3 or 4 tokens).

The biggest part of the game are the battles between the tribes. The funny part is that the players are not restricted to use their tribes in the fighting, they can make other tribes fight among themselves.

If you read French, check out the link to the official web site in the links section.

Game description from the publisher:

Mythic Greece is in chaos: Athena and Hades are at war and have sent their greatest heroes to battle. Take on the role of these generals out of legend, leading fantastic armies and lead your troops to victory!

Mythic Battles is a game which simulates epic confrontations and battles that will take your breath away. Thanks to its innovative system – the Building Battle Board (BBB), which combines game mechanisms from miniature games, board games and card games – Mythic Battles offers you an experience the likes of which you have never seen. Recruit your army, play your cards to activate your units, roll your dice to resolve combat – reinvent your way of playing!

This box contains two complete armies to play with two or four players, an initiation campaign, as well as all that's required to play as you wish. Other armies and units will periodically be released to flesh out your campaigns.

Write your legend in the blood of the fallen!

Ghost Stories is a cooperative game in which the players protect the village from incarnations of the lord of hell – Wu-Feng – and his legions of ghosts before they haunt a town and recover the ashes that will allow him to return to life. Each Player represents a Taoist monk working together with the others to fight off waves of ghosts.

The players, using teamwork, will have to exorcise the ghosts which will appear during the course of the game. At the beginning of his turn, a player brings a ghost into play and places it on a free spot, and more than one can come in at the same time. The ghosts all have abilities of their own – some affecting the Taoists and their powers, some causing the active player to roll the curse die for a random effect, and others haunting the villager tiles and blocking that tile's special action. On his turn, a Taoist can move on a tile in order to exorcise adjacent ghosts or to benefit from the villager living on the tile, providing it is not haunted. Each tile of the village allows the players to benefit from a different bonus. With the cemetery, for example, Taoists can bring a dead Taoist back to life, while the herbalist allows to recover spent Tao tokens, etc. It will also be possible to get traps or move ghosts or unhaunt other village tiles.

To exorcise a ghost, the Taoist rolls three Tao dice with different colors: red, blue, green, yellow, black, and white. If the result of the roll matches the color(s) of the ghost or incarnation of Wu-Feng, the exorcism succeeds. The white result is a wild color which can be used as any color. For example, to exorcise a green ghost with 3 resistance, you need to roll three green, three white, or a combination of both. If your die rolls fall short, you can also use Tao tokens that match the color in addition to your roll. You may choose to use these after your roll. Taoists gain these tokens by using certain village tiles or by exorcising certain ghosts. One of the Taoists has a power that allows him to receive such a token once per turn.

To win, the players must defeat the incarnation of Wu-Feng, a boss who arrives at the end of the game. There are also harder difficulty levels that add more incarnations of Wu-Feng, in which to win, you must defeat all of them.

There are many more ways to lose, however. The players lose if three of the village's tiles are haunted, if the draw pile is emptied while the incarnation of Wu-Feng is still in play, or if all the priests are dead.

Tzolkin: The Mayan Calendar presents a new game mechanism: dynamic worker placement. Players representing different Mayan tribes place their workers on giant connected gears, and as the gears rotate they take the workers to different action spots.

During a turn, players can either (a) place one or more workers on the lowest visible spot of the gears or (b) pick up one or more workers. When placing workers, they must pay corn, which is used as a currency in the game. When they pick up a worker, they perform certain actions depending on the position of the worker. Actions located "later" on the gears are more valuable, so it's wise to let the time work for you – but players cannot skip their turn; if they have all their workers on the gears, they have to pick some up. 

The game ends after one full revolution of the central Tzolkin gear. There are many paths to victory. Pleasing the gods by placing crystal skulls in deep caves or building many temples are just two of those many paths...