In Bakong you experience a hunt for the most beautiful emeralds in the Cambodian primeval forest. You start from your base camp to reach a temple where you collect precious jewelry.
Players carry a rucksack with items for their survival and later on use it to return the jewelry. But the pathway through the jungle is insidious because routes are changing all the time and traps are laid out for you. The goal is to collect as many emeralds as possible and return them to your base camp.
Arimaa, pronounced "a-ree-muh" is a game where stronger animals like elephants and camels freeze, push and pull the weaker ones from the opposing team around and into traps while one of the rabbits tries to sneak across the board and harmlessly reach the other side. The first player to get one of their rabbits to the other side wins.
This may sound like a simple kids game; and while it is easy enough for your kids to learn and enjoy, you will find that it is also a very deep game that can take a lifetime to master. Arimaa is one of the deepest strategy games ever invented in the history of mankind, but designed to look intuitively simple. No two games of Arimaa are ever the same. There is much to learn and discover about this intuitively simple, yet intellectually challenging game.
Played on a 8x8 grid with four trap squares and 32 animal pieces(16 gold and 16 silver). Each player has an elephant, camel, 2 horses, 2 dogs, 2 cats and 8 rabbits.
Strength hierarchy: Elephant>Camel>Horse>Dog>Cat>Rabbit.
The game begins with an empty board. Gold places the sixteen gold pieces first in any configuration on the first and second ranks. Silver then places the sixteen silver pieces in any configuration on seventh and eighth ranks. Then gold moves its pieces first. A player can move up to four "steps" each turn. All pieces move orthogonally.
History:
Arimaa was invented by Omar Syed, an Indian American computer engineer trained in artificial intelligence. Syed was inspired by Garry Kasparov's defeat at the hands of the chess computer Deep Blue to design a new game which could be played with a standard chess set, would be difficult for computers to play well, but would have rules simple enough for his then four-year-old son Aamir to understand. ("Arimaa" is "Aamir" spelled backwards plus an initial "a").
In 2002 Syed published the rules to Arimaa and announced a $10,000 prize, available annually until 2020, for the first computer program (running on standard, off-the-shelf hardware) able to defeat each of three top-ranked human players in a three-game series.
From the Publisher:
Wicked Witches Way is a board game which will put you in command of a flying witches broom that you will have to control with daring and mastery.
Your goal? Win the race by passing the finish line first! Spot the dice, recreate the proper formula and advance... But don't forget that two kinds of combinations are possible, depending on the color: orange and its turbo mode, or black, with its special cards filled with spells and sneaky tricks! The choice is yours! Memory, audacity, and cunning will be your best assets to take the victory.
Slide Pursuit Game
Race your four game pieces from Start around the board to your Home in this Pachisi type game. By turning over a card from the draw deck and following its instructions, players move their pieces around the game board, switch places with players, and knock opponents' pieces off the track and back to their Start position.
Slides are located at various places around the game board. When a player's piece lands at the beginning of one of these slides not of its own color, it automatically advances to the end, removing any opponent's piece on the slide and sending it back to Start.
Game moves are directed exclusively by cards from the play-action deck. If one plays the normal version in which one card is drawn from the deck each turn, the outcome has a huge element of luck. Sorry can be made more of a strategic game (and more appealing to adults) by dealing five cards to each player at the start of the game and allowing the player to choose which card he/she will play each turn. In this version, at the end of each turn, a new card is drawn from the deck to replace the card that was played, so that each player is always working from five cards.
A player's fortunes can change dramatically in one or two rounds of play through the use of Sorry cards, the "11" cards (which give the player the option of trading places with an opponent's piece on the track), and the fact that it is possible to move from Start to Home without circumnavigating the full board by making judicious use of the "backward 4" cards.
From the Publisher:
Climb aboard your trusty steed and lift off for the race of your life! The players race their dragons on a course in a deep and winding canyon. You have some magic to use to aid your cause, or hinder your opponents, but the real test is your skill at maneuvering your dragon through the course to reach the finish line ahead of the others. Players choose their speeds on each round secretly, but then must move at that speed, even if other dragons or canyon walls are in the way.
The movement system gives players more maneuverability at lower speeds than at higher, so you cannot turn your dragon on a dime unless you are going very slowly - an important consideration in those hairpin turns!
The track is made of two-sided tiles, so players can design their own races and change them every race to keep things fun and exciting!