Pick-up and Deliver

Several millennia ago, the tiny planet Solenia lost its day-and-night cycle: Its northern hemisphere is forever plunged into darkness, and its southern hemisphere is eternally bathed in sunlight. Your mission is to carry on your ancestors' honorable task of traveling the world to deliver essential goods to the inhabitants of both hemispheres. While the Day people want you to deliver the rarest gems and stones, the Night people sorely need wood and wheat to survive. Be efficient and outpace your opponents to collect the most gold stars by the end of the game!

A game of Solenia plays out over 16 rounds, and in each round, each player plays one card from their hand onto an empty space of the 5x5 game board. You can play the card on either:

A floating production island, to gain as many resources as the value of the card you played of the type corresponding to this space
A floating city, to fulfill a delivery tile by delivering the resources depicted on it.

You must play your card adjacent to the airship in the center of the playing area or adjacent to another card of yours already played. When someone plays a 0 card, the airship advances one space, then at the end of your turn, you remove the back edge of the board, give players resources based on the cards they have on this strip of the playing area, flip the strip over (turning night to day or dawn to dusk or vice versa), and place it on the other side of the game board.

The game ends when each player has played all 16 of their cards. The player with the most gold stars wins!

—description from designer

At the center is the Ziggurat, where you must bring 4 sacrifice tokens to win. But to deliver them, you must have sufficient Mana reserved by praying in temples, which players build. You bring your sacrifices from 4 huts that you build, and you can breed at an empty hut to increase your people. To build huts, temples, and Mana, you use rocks and timber that you collect from quarries and forests.

Each turn, you can move 5 places, placing new tiles if you go off the map, seeding stones or timber if they are quarries or forests, and carrying resource to empty plains if you want to build. Building a hut or temple, breeding, or drawing an action card ends your turn, and you bank Mana if you have people on temples. So gradually, you build up your clan and have them do different things. Some stand at temples to pray, some explore and carry resource, others help build or breed. And when you deliver a sacrifice, you kill the messenger too, thus needing to breed more.

Expanded By

Mesopotamia: Expansion

In a game of Pioneers, the players attempt to populate the cities shown on the game board with their pioneers, using coaches to transport them around the map. Each pioneer has a specific profession, and can only be settled in a city where their work is needed.

After all the pioneers riding in a coach have been deployed on the game board, the player controlling the coach earns money and victory points. In addition, the players construct roads between the cities, expanding their own network and earning money from other players who use the roads. At the end of the game, each player will be rewarded with additional victory points based on the number of their pioneers in their largest network of connected roads. The player with the most victory points wins!

Prior to Essen 1999, a group of students created Splotter Spellen to sell some of their own game designs. This game is regarded as one of the highlights of that group. The object of the game is to deliver as many people to their destinations as you can. To accomplish this, players place route markers on the board to connect passengers to their destinations. However, the destination types (work, bar, home) vary from turn to turn, so you can follow certain passengers as they make their way through the daily grind.

Players may buy more buses (they start off with one), build onto their bus route, bring new passengers to the city (via the trains), expand the city by adding more buildings, and run their buses. There is another option, the clock, but more on that later. The action board has one other clever feature. On some actions, route expansion and building, the first player to choose that action actually gets to execute the action last! Which leads to some interesting games of chicken and some painful decisions.

Buying more buses allows a player to carry one more passenger every time they run their buses - hence scoring, in the best case, one more point. Depending on how the city gets built, however, finding lots of passengers on the street can be tricky.

Bus routes extend from either end of a Settlers-style initial placement. Extensions are appended to either end. Routes may only run parallel if a route is completely blocked at both ends - seems pretty rare - so getting one end pinched off can be painful (but isn't it always?). All new passengers will arrive at one of two train stations so that is one concern when route building. One must also be careful to run by a nice mix of building types. And, when building, one must always have an eye towards spoiling other players' routes by placing a mix of building types at each of their intersection so that all of their passengers just walk! Finally, when carrying passengers, one wants to be careful to set up to carry the same passenger next turn.

The stakes have been raised. Imagine living in a place so wretched that it's not plagued by one, two, or even three monsters — but seven of the most horrifying fiends!

In this game, you'll come face to face with them all as you work together to rid the town of the maniacal or misunderstood creatures…before it's too late.

Horrified includes high-quality sculpted miniatures (Frankenstein, The Bride of Frankenstein, The Wolf Man, Dracula, The Mummy, The Invisible Man, Creature from the Black Lagoon). Its innovative, easy-to-learn, cooperative gameplay has players working together against the monsters with varying levels of difficulty. Just as each monster is unique, they require different strategies and tactics to be defeated.

—description from the publisher