Racing

As the first winner of the Spiel des Jahres award in 1979, Hare and Tortoise or the German Hase und Igel (for Hare and Hedgehog) will always be regarded as a classic game. It is a cunningly designed race to the finish in which your fuel (carrots) must practically run out (all but 10 carrots or fewer) at the moment you hit the finish line. You also have three lettuce cards you must spend during the course of the race. The farther you move, the more carrots you spend, and there are a variety of ways to gain or lose carrots as you go around the track. It's a very clever exercise in arithmetic which David Parlett has fashioned into an entertaining and unique perennial favorite.

There have several variations between the multiple prints of Hare & Tortoise by different publishers. Most variations come from methods of adding randomness that favor lagging player via cards, dice, or dice charts when landing on a Hare square.

Parlett Strategic Variant--The designer's preferred way of playing the Hare square is that "... you can land on them [Hare square], but must miss a turn. This would be the equivalent of the hare taking a nap, as in Aesop's fable. This is the rule I most favour and would prefer it to simply not landing on them at all..."

You've got your horse, your trusty gun and a brand new hat on your head - but above all you've got a pack of letters that need to reach Sacramento before all the other riders in the Pony Express!

Nothing will stop you on your quest for speed and victory, neither the Indians lying in wait, nor the pretty saloon girls who want to charm the gold from your pockets. You're the best, the wildest, the quickest and the luckiest rider in the land... At least you think you are - but all the other riders feel the same, so watch your back and get moving! Be the first to grab gold from the mines, duel opponents in savage gunfights or beat them at the poker table, and use your brains, bluffing skills and equipment to clear the way to Sacramento and deliver your precious letters.
Whether you ride like the wind or eat dust on the trail, this game will be wild!

As explained on B. Faidutti's website:

A racing game with poker dice in which the dice are used both to generate poker hands in order to move forward and in duels, as bullets. The poker hands rolled denote the number of spaces one could move on the track from St. Joseph to Sacramento (with, of course, some opportunities for bluffing). The game is a mix of luck, bluffing, and dexterity.

More than 2,000 years ago Plato told the myth of the splendid city of Atlantis, which was sunk in the sea.

In this family game the players, by skillful placing of cards and the building of bridges, try to leave the city of Atlantis in order to reach the solid ground with as much treasures as possible.

The city of Atlantis and the solid ground are interconnected by land tiles. The players receive cards with several drawings, land tiles with those drawings, all pawns of a color as well as a bridge. In your turn you can discard a card with any drawing and go with one of your pawns to the next tile with the same card drawing. At the end of your turn, you can take the tile left behind and put it in your hand as victory points. The player puts a water tile into the gap created and draws a card from the deck the pile. So every turn there are more water tiles and it's harder to overcome the gaps, players can go forward using their bridges or paying victory points with your collected tiles. When all players have saved his three pawns safe ground there are a recount. Who reaches safe ground with most victory points wins.

Expanded by:

Atlantis - Variante Schiffe
Atlantis - Ikarus Expansion

A racing game with a twist.

Players secretly get a horse (of a particular color) assigned before the game starts. The player with the horse in last place at the end of the game wins.

On your turn - sequence of play is decided by auction - you play a card that controls two different colored horese. When every player has put down cards, the horses move; but only horses with an odd number of cards on the table! If the number of open cards is even, the horse does not move.

But, true to the spirit of horse racing, each player has a chance to play a "dirty trick", including Change Horses. This can affect the game dramatically.

The best detailed description of the game is here.
{This is one of the few multiplayer games that plays equally well with only two}

A plastic tiki idol is placed in the raised middle of a molded, 3d board, where it can rotate freely. Players move their explorer pawns up the sides of the mountain along paths and through caves, trying to reach the top of the mountain, retrieve the idol's giant ruby, and take it down the other side to the waiting boat. However, both the idol and volcanic vents throughout the board periodically spit out "fireball" marbles, which physically roll down the mountain, either plowing through explorer pawns in their path, or toppling triggered bridges as they pass under them.

Note: This is a rare and protected game; its only available to play with special permission from the Game Librarian.
See game associate for details.