Square Grid

Prehistories

You are the leader of a prehistoric tribe, deciding which members of your tribe go hunting and what prey they want to catch. To guide you, the Elders have created challenges that you can complete by painting on the wall of your cave.

Each round in Prehistories, you and your fellow tribe leaders bid simultaneously (and secretly) to decide who hunts where. The more hunters you have, the bigger the game you can catch, but the slower you are. The fastest player — that is, the one with the smallest sum of hunters — goes first, but they have few hunters with which to hunt. To hunt, you assign your hunters to one or more locations to catch the prey waiting there. Prey is represented by polyomino tiles, and the larger the tile, the higher the sum required. If you have just enough hunters to catch your prey, they might be wounded in the process, which means you'll draw fewer hunter cards at the end of the round to refill your hand. (They distrust your leadership when you get them injured!)

In the second phase of a round, you paint your cave with the animal tiles collected during the hunting phase. Your cave is represented by a 7x7 grid that starts with a few tiles already in place. The first tile you place goes in the left-hand column, and all subsequent tiles must touch tiles already placed, with all tiles being oriented so that the animals are viewed with their legs (or fins) down. (Cavemen have simple tastes and want everything to be representational.)

When you fulfill the wishes of the Elders by painting your cave in certain ways — such as completing a horizontal line or connecting opposing corners or surrounding a legendary animal on all sides — you place one or more totem tokens on that challenge. Whoever first discards their eight totem tokens wins.

Stack'n Stuff: A Patchwork Game

In Stack'n Stuff, a more streamlined version of Patchwork, players are on the move. However, packing all of your stuff into a moving truck is quite tricky, costly, and time consuming — and the day runs out fast!

During the game, the last player on the time track chooses one of the next three furniture items. After paying the transportation cost and spending the loading time, the player places the patch on their truck game board. Whoever manages to pack their truck best, as well as earns the most money during the game, is a moving master and wins!

—description from the designer

Samarkand Bazaar

Sid Sackson's classics Samarkand & Bazaar are now combined as two games in one box with this new edition of both games.

Samarkand is a fast-paced trading and selling game set in exotic Asia Minor. Cunning Merchants buy, exchange, and sell goods to build wealth. When visiting Nomad Camps and after offering gifts for their hosts’ hospitality, Merchants trade for the goods they desire. When visiting Oases, they may purchase random goods. Ultimately, these Merchants travel to the bazaars in Cities such as Samarkand or Isfahan to sell the goods they have acquired. Merchants must plan which desert paths to use to travel efficiently between the Nomad Camps, Oases, and Cities so they can earn the quickest (and greatest) profit!

In Bazaar, players attempt to gain the right combination of colored cubes through skillful trading to purchase the wares displayed in the Bazaar. Values of the various wares are determined by the number of cubes the purchaser has left over following the transaction. Trading is governed by the current rates posted at the Exchange. When the wares from two stalls have been completely sold, the Bazaar is closed, and the game ends. The player with the highest score wins!

-description from publisher

boop.

A deceptively cute, deceivingly challenging abstract strategy game for two players.

Every time you place a kitten on the bed, it goes “boop.” Which is to say that it pushes every other kitten on the board one space away. Line up three kittens in a row to graduate them into cats… and then, get three cats in a row to win.

But that isn’t easy with both you AND your opponent constantly “booping” kittens around. It’s like… herding cats!
Can you “boop” your cats into position to win?
Or will you just get “booped” right off the bed?

Approachable but challenging abstract game and a worthy follow-up to SHOBU. Plays in 20 to 30 minutes.
Features a quilted, fabric board that lays over the back of the box, completing the miniature bed playing surface. 8 wood kittens and cats per player - 32 adorable cat pieces in all!

CoraQuest

CoraQuest is an exciting and accessible co-operative dungeon crawling game for one to four people, aged six and up.

In CoraQuest the players work together to guide four adventurers exploring a dungeon, avoiding traps, finding treasure, fighting monsters, and sometimes rescuing a gnome called Kevin.

CoraQuest is a game that kids and grown-ups can play together and get equal amounts of fun from. It's also a game that sparks creativity - providing encouragement and guidance on how to create heroes, monsters and adventures to make CoraQuest your own.

All the artwork in CoraQuest is based on kids' drawings, much of it sent in to us from all over the world by the wonderful CoraQuest community. The art has been brought together by our "chief-colourer-in", Gary King, to make a unique and charming-looking game.

—description from the designer