Nautical

Game description from the publisher:

Bremerhaven is a clearly structured but complex economic game about the famous harbor town in the north of Germany. Each player builds his own unique harbor and tries to reach the highest combination of money and prestige by the end of the game.

Each round, players are trying to get the most influence on the action fields they want to use. Since you place your influence cards face down, you have to watch closely what the other players might want to do. (You can even place more than one card on one spot.) The options are varied: Get a new ship with new goods into your harbor, close a new contract, change the values of the four different goods, improve your influence card-hand, expand your harbor, buy a new building, or simply rise in the nautical ranks to get more money. But you have to be careful: Every ship and every contract will stay in your harbor only for a short while. (The transporters and trains are waiting!) If you fail to coordinate the incoming and outgoing goods, you might have to pay penalty for not fulfilling a contract!

Bremerhaven ends after a defined number of rounds, and the rules include both a short version and solo rules. Visually the game will be in the vein of Le Havre.

The floodwaters are rising and the animals need to board the ark!

In this deceptively simple game, players move their boats around a steadily deteriorating landscape, matching pairs in order to rescue stranded animals.

Animals that are rare at the end of the game are worth more points than those that are common.

Two by Two is #6 in the Valley Games Modern Line.

Awards

Games 100 - Runner-up for Best Family Game (2012)

Online Play

Yucata (turn-based)

The S.S. Nvrsnks is going down, and who is always first off a sinking ship? The rats!

Abandon Ship is a game in which you play to move your group of rats off the ship before the rising water drowns them. The Nvrsnks is also loaded with valuable points-earning cheese, but don’t let desire for that lovely food send your rats to the watery depths. Your opponents may also share some of the rats in your group; they may want to move the rats in a different manner from you.

Game Play
Before play, each player gets secretly assigned three colors - these are their rats.
Players roll colored dice (there is one for each rat and one neutral die) and the active player chooses one of them to move the corresponding rat forward (or backwards in case the die shows an anchor). Encircled numbers and symbols can be used for a rat of any color. The next player rolls the remaining dice (in case there was an x next to the number, the previously used die remains in the pool) and does the same. When there is only one die left, the ship sinks a number of fields according to a token drawn. If the water level reaches a rat, the rat and the corresponding die is taken out of the game. When a rat reaches a cheese token, the player who moved the rat gets the token.
The first rat to reach the top deck gets nothing; the second rat scores 5 points, the third one 3 points and the fourth one 2 points. Most points wins.

Goa, a strategy game of auctions and resource management, is set at the start of the 16th century: beautiful beaches, a mild climate, and one of the most important trading centers in the world. Competing companies deal in spices, send ships and colonists into the world, and invest money. Are you on top or at the bottom? It depends on how you invest your profits. Will you make your ships more efficient? Enhance your plantations? Recruit more colonists? Only a steady hand in business will help.

Each turn begins with an auction phase, where each player gets to auction one item (and the starting player two items). The first item being auctioned gives the right to go first the next turn (along with a card that gives an extra action). If you buy your own item, you pay it to the bank. If someone else buys the item you sell, they pay you. Items include plantations complete with crops, income tiles (income in money, ships, plantation refills each turn etc.), ships, settlers, and later on tiles that score points for certain achievements.

After the auction, players get three actions to either improve their technologies or produce things such as spices on plantations, ships, money or build more plantations. Each player has a board showing their advancement for various things: getting ships, planting new spices, getting colonists, etc. The more a player advances along one track, the better one is doing that particular action. The further you get along a certain track, the more points that track is worth at the end, and there are also rewards to the first player who reaches the last two levels along each track. On the other hand, each player normally needs to perform the actions for all the tracks at some point, so it's not necessarily a good idea to concentrate on just a couple of them. Goa is a game that gives plenty of opportunity for tough decisions, since a player always has at least one action too few.

The game mixes an interactive element of the auction, which encourages you to nominate things that other players want so you receive cash with the solitaire management of your plantation, which then interacts later on as players race to be first in the top tech levels.

The 2012 edition of Goa includes four new tiles and a new play variant, as noted on the cover of the Z-Man Games edition.

The players explore the islands of Polynesia. The winner is the player who scores the most points from putting tiles on his display. Palms, huts, shells, and boats on the tiles influence the scoring. It can be played with 2 to 5 players.