Set collection

Alien Artifacts

Game description from the publisher:

Alien Artifacts is a 4X-style card game in which you play as an interplanetary faction, sending your research vessels into uncharted space to expand your knowledge and power. Build powerful ships, develop new technologies, and explore distant planets for anything — or anyone — you can exploit.

Alien Artifacts is built on a Resource engine - each turn you will have 3 Resource cards in your hand and you will decide how best to spend them. Each resource card has two different resource types for you to use. You can only use one side and only two cards per turn! Using these resources, you will build Ships, develop Technology, discover Planets, or Trade for currency!

New Ships allow you to attack the aliens and gain their valuable artifacts which provide huge bonuses.
With each new Technology card in your Empire, you will have access to more actions, bonuses, and scoring opportunities.
Each Planet you explore provides valuable resources for future actions.

There are two sides to each of these cards, and as you build them you will decide:
Logistics - play cards on this side to gain ongoing bonuses that will make your Empire stronger and help you build faster.
Operational - play this side to gain a new way to score victory points (and yes, you will be able to activate your operations more than once, if you play well).

Manage your Resources, build the right cards, make wise choices. Win!

Alien Artifacts provides a true 4X experience in under an hour. With over two hundred cards, Alien Artifacts offers players many scoring strategies and great replay-ability.

Merlin

King Arthur is searching for a worthy heir. Together with Merlin, he tries to find the best candidate among the Knights of the Round Table.

In Merlin, players move their knights or Merlin with the help of dice around the action ring to get the most desired actions. While the knights are only moved by the corresponding player, Merlin can be moved by all players, which makes integrating Merlin in one's plan a tricky endeavor.

There are multiple ways to score victory points such as defeating barbarians, building manors in the surrounding area and increasing one's influence in the six counties. Additionally, players can fulfill task cards during their turn to get more victory points. The player who plans his actions most efficiently will ultimately have the most points and thus will be the royal successor of King Arthur.

Mare Nostrum

In the Ancient World, civilizations are built upon 3 foundations: Commerce, Construction, and Expansion. As a leader of an ancient Mediterranean Power, each player will need to master all 3 roads to power in order to lead their civilization to dominance and victory.

Mare Nostrum is all about the expansion of one's lands, the construction of new cities, and the dispatching of caravans to take advantage of rare commodities that can either be traded or exploited to build constructions and eventually wonders of the world.

But diplomacy and trade are but one path to greatness. The expansion of your navy and armies can take what should be rightfully yours. Hiring great leaders will further expand your boundaries in quick time.

Controlling a combined total of 4 Wonders and/or Leaders or being the first to build the Pyramids will assure victory. But there are many hurdles to overcome to achieve such heights.

Mare Nostrum allows for up to 5 players and offers a basic and advanced game in which players can customize their starting civilization. For a game of such scope, it is quite amazing to think that the game only requires 2 pages of rules.

Spy Club

"We could start a Spy Club," suggested Beatrice. "You know — search for clues and try to find mysteries to solve!"

In Spy Club, players work together as young detectives to solve neighborhood mysteries. It includes a replayable campaign format, with variable unlocking content, for playing a series of 5 games connected together to tell a larger story. Throughout the campaign, you'll unlock new modules with additional rules and story elements. With 40 new modules and 174 cards in the campaign deck, you can reset everything and play multiple campaigns — with a different story and gameplay experience emerging each time.

In the standard game, each player has double-sided clue cards in front of them. On your turn, you use actions to flip, draw, and trade clue cards, gain ideas, and confirm clue cards as evidence. Confirm 5 clues of the same type to solve part of the case. As you discover more and more of the solution, a story starts to emerge: your Neighbor stole something from the ice cream shop, but what? And why? To crack the case, you must find the solution to all 5 parts before the suspect escapes or you run out of clues.

You can always play a single, standalone game of Spy Club, but the campaign mode is the recommended way to play:

Each game plays in 45 minutes, and each campaign consists of 5 games.
Some elements from each game carry forward and affect future games, with new rules and story elements are unlocked each play.
The sequence of content isn’t scripted, so each campaign will unfold differently.
Everything can be fully reset and replayed.
You only unlock a small portion of the total content in one campaign (just 4 of the 40 modules), so you can play multiple campaigns and continue unlocking new content each time!

Pandemic: Fall of Rome

At the height of its power, the Roman Empire held more than two million square miles of territory containing over a hundred million people. Throughout the centuries of its existence, the Empire brought major advancements in engineering, architecture, science, art, and literature. By the beginning of the 5th Century, decades of political corruption, economic crisis, and an overburdened military had exacted a severe toll on the stability of the Empire. This paved the way for severe incursions from aggressive barbarian tribes, leading to a decline from which Rome would not recover. Now citizens, soldiers, and allies of Rome must unite to protect the Empire.

Combining the cooperative gameplay of Pandemic with innovative new mechanisms, Pandemic: Fall of Rome takes players back in history to the time of the world's greatest empire: Rome. A weakened military has left the borders open to invasion from countless tribes such as the Anglo-Saxons, Goths, Vandals, and Huns. As you march through the Roman Empire, you must recruit armies, fortify cities, forge alliances, and face off against the invading hordes in battle.

Simply defending Rome is not enough; players must find a way to stop the incursions and find peace with their neighboring peoples. Players collect sets of matching-colored cards to forge an alliance with the different tribes. In doing so, they gain the ability to use cards matching the tribe to convert other members of that tribe into Roman soldiers, furthering their ability to hold the line against other invaders.

Take on unique roles with special abilities to improve your team's chances to protect against the invaders. Work together, use your skills wisely, and stop the fall of Rome!

Pandemic: Fall of Rome includes a solitaire mode in which the player takes on the burden of being the Emperor and commands three different roles to try to protect the city from the invading hordes. Players who want a more difficult game can try the "Roma Caput Mundi" challenge by adding more Revolt cards to the deck; they must also respect the law in Rome that Roman legions are not allowed in the city.

—description from the publisher