Real-time

In Pendulum, each player is a powerful, unique noble vying to succeed the Timeless King as the true ruler of Dünya. Players command their workers, execute stratagems, and expand the provinces in their domain in real time to gain resources and move up the four victory tracks: power, prestige, popularity, and legendary achievement.

Players must use actual time as a resource in managing their strategy to best their opponents, using time on different action types and balancing it with time spent planning and analyzing. The winner will be the player who manages and invests their time most effectively and who builds the best engine, not the player who acts the quickest.

Pendulum is the highest-rated protoype in the history of the Stonemaier Games Design Day.

—description from the publisher

In Ready Set Bet, you and your friends head to the races for a day of cheering, jeering, and betting on your favorite horses, whose fates hang on every roll of the dice.

Ready Set Bet is played over four rounds. Each round consists of a race followed by bet resolution. During each race, players freely place their bet tokens on the board while the race is going on. After each race, players win or lose money for each of their placed bet tokens, then receive a VIP Club Card to help them win more money in the following races. After four rounds, the player with the most money wins!

—description from the publisher

The Illiterati are an evil secret organization that has taken over the world. Your job as a member of the League of Librarians is to save the world's books — one word at a time.

Illiterati is a real-time, co-operative word game in which players work together to form words and bind books. Each player starts the game with five letter tiles and a red torched book that shows a condition that player must achieve to restore that book, e.g. using 8+ tiles with at least 3 green symbols, create words that are all animals. A library of three random tiles is placed in the center of the table. The game takes place in three-minute rounds, and before the round begins each player draw seven letter tiles from the draw bag.

Once the countdown begins, players can talk and trade letters as much as they want with one another and the library to try to achieve their goal. Once time ends, if the library contains too many letters — and this threshold is based on your difficulty level — then you trigger a burn event. Flip all of these letters face down, then remove one of them from the game, then discard excess letters to the discard bag. If you burn too many letters, you lose the game. If you didn't burn any letters and you've completed your goal, flip your red book face down and draw a blue waterlogged book to give yourself a new goal.

At the end of the round, draw an illiterati villain card and resolve its effect. If you've drawn this villain previously — and the deck contains five copies of five villains — then all of the previous effects from this villain also resolve in a chain attack from newest to oldest. Villain attacks often strip letters from words, which means you'll need to create new words with what's left during the next round to avoid burning another letter.

Once all players have completed two books — or three or four depending on your difficulty level — draw one more book, the Final Chapter, with all players needing to complete this challenge in the same round, e.g., using 12+ tiles, create words in which all of your vowels are the same color. If all players meet this goal during the same round, you win; if even one person fails, another villain attacks, then you draw new tiles to start another round. You can discard and redraw up to seven tiles at the start of a round, but you must draw a second illiterati villain card that round — and if the villain deck runs out, you lose.

June 2471, and kerosene - KERO - is scarce. Two clans are struggling to survive, exploring New Territories in their tanker trucks. Running out of fuel is a risk each time they leave camp! Fortunately, a local tribe of Tuareks can lend a helping hand…

Kero is a two-player game set in a future unfriendly world, where players will be clan leaders - managing a camp, a tanker truck and 7 Explorers - competing for the same lands. Their ability to win the game will be based on how much kerosene (Jerrycans) they can find and how they use it wisely… Collect as many resources as possible while using as little as possible of the KERO in your tanker-truck to upgrade your camp and claim New Territories! Score the more points (by adding up the points on cards and territories) and become the 2471 Badassest Clan!

The game is played in 3 rounds (ending when a Claim card is revealed), each comprising several turns. Making snap decisions and mistakes under time pressure is part of the game!

5 MAIN STEPS IN A PLAYER’S TURN

1. Fuel up with KERO (if necessary).
2. Choose your dice and roll them.
3. Collect resources shown on the dice and perform actions to upgrade your camp: take cards from the raw, take Tuarek tiles, send out Explorers on New Territories.
4. Deal with Fire and discard any burnt cards accordingly to the results of your roll.
5. Claim New Territories in which you have a majority at the end of a round.

FOCUS ON THE ORIGINAL REAL-TIME PLAY

TO COLLECT RESOURCES …

On a turn, choose your dice and roll them in a self-limited time using your tanker-truck. Tip it and roll your dice however many times you want, to obtain needed resources, keeping results as desired and avoiding fire (the fire dice burns up). When happy with the results, replace your truck flat. You can’t tip it up again! Beware of Kero outage! In this case, you lost your turn!

… AND FUEL UP WITH KERO

As soon as your opponent starts rolling the 8 dice, hold your tanker-truck (cab facing downwards). You gain only as much time as it takes your opponent to roll fires on all the dice. A simultaneous and interactive way to gain time for your sandtimer!

KERO KEY FEATURES

• Light, tactical & frantic game
• Fast & furious play for casual & experienced players
• Unique balanced gameplay mixing strategy & chance
• Uncommon barren theme with beautiful colored art
• Two 6 inch/16 cm tanker-timers inside!

HAVE FUN ROLLING YOUR DICE & REFUELING YOUR TANKER-TIMER!

Retrograde is a real-time roll-and-write inspired by classic 80s arcade games.

Evil Astrodroids are invading earth. Grab the joystick and blast as many as you can. Can you get the high score?

Each round, roll your dice as fast as you can. Race to roll combos shown on the target cards, claim the best card, and spend your dice to put the ‘Droids on your sheet out of commission. Be fast, or an opponent might beat you to the card you want. If you're the last player without a card, you can only reroll 2 more times before you're stuck with what you rolled.

Depending on the card you choose, you'll collect Coins and power-ups. Blast entire columns of 'Droids to destroy bosses for bonus points. Blast rows of 'Droids to unlock the power-ups you collect.

—description from the publisher