Strategy Games

Game description from the publisher:

Don't expect to lie around the sun, lazily sipping cocktails and passively watching hula dancers, because the tactical game Hawaii is not a paradise for idlers, but rather for bold, active strategists. Restlessly, they'll move their pieces on the game board, facing constant challenges in terms of making their beautiful villages on this beautiful island as profitable as possible. Only those who will be able to use their dwindling resources to meet the increasing demands over five rounds will find a spot for themselves on the beach.

In Hawaii, players must make use of their limited resources to score points by growing their villages and exploring the surrounding islands. Your chieftains move around the board to purchase new tiles for their villages, hopefully grabbing the best deals before their opponents. Three different currencies are used to pay for these trips, so make sure you don't run out of any of them too quickly. Players are also rewarded for providing for their people (measured essentially by how much they bought on a given turn), but your meager income shrinks as the game goes on. Players will have to balance a number of ways to score points to secure their victory.

"Kanban" — the Japanese word for billboard — is a term for the visual cues that might be used in a lean, efficient assembly line in order to expedite and smooth workflow. These signals get the workers what they need, where they need it, when they need it to create a just-in-time (JIT) production system.

The setting for the game Kanban: Automotive Revolution is an assembly line. The players are ambitious managers who are trying to impress the board of directors in order to achieve as high a position as possible in the company and secure their careers. With promotions come advantages at the factory, such as more space to store precious materials and greater prestige to accelerate your ascent. Through solid management, you must strive to shine next to your peers. You need to manage suppliers and supplies, improve automobile parts, innovate — anything to stay on the cutting edge, or getting your hands greasy on the assembly line in order to boost production. You must exercise wisdom in choosing which projects you should start, selecting only those that will give you the upper hand and shunning those that will bog you down or cause the unthinkable — failure — which would diminish you in the eyes of the board.

Over the course of the game, you persuade the board and the factory tender to help you develop and improve automobile parts. You make shrewd use of the outside suppliers and the limited factory supplies in order to appropriate needed part when the suppliers come up short. Because the factory must run at optimum efficiency, production doesn't wait for you or for mistakes.

Like the process itself, Kanban: Automotive Revolution proves to be both innovative and rewarding. Game mechanisms tightly tied to the automobile manufacturing theme include:

The factory manager is a game-driven non-player character with two modes of play ("nice" or "mean") to offer a friendly or more competitive gameplay environment.
Two independent player-influenced game timers — the factory production cycle and work week clock — provide timing tension to the game, trigger intermediate scoring phases, and factor into the game end conditions.
A simulation of the factory assembly line with spatial point-to-point movement adds an element to the game that requires optimal timing.
A design and innovation department, leveraged to manipulate the value of the various car models and component upgrades produced within the factory, drives the economy of the game.
Departmental training and certification tracks provide players a means to operate more efficiently.

If you want a seat on the board someday, you need to show that you can keep a complex machine running smoothly, efficiently, with everything happening just at the right time. Kanban: Automotive Revolution is a pure Eurogame focused on economics and resource management that puts you in the driver's seat of an entire production facility, racing for the highest level of promotion.

The "Stone Age" times were hard indeed. In their roles as hunters, collectors, farmers, and tool makers, our ancestors worked with their legs and backs straining against wooden plows in the stony earth. Of course, progress did not stop with the wooden plow. People always searched for better tools and more productive plants to make their work more effective.

In Stone Age, the players live in this time, just as our ancestors did. They collect wood, break stone and wash their gold from the river. They trade freely, expand their village and so achieve new levels of civilization. With a balance of luck and planning, the players compete for food in this pre-historic time.

Players use up to ten tribe members each in three phases. In the first phase, players place their men in regions of the board that they think will benefit them, including the hunt, the trading center, or the quarry. In the second phase, the starting player activates each of his staffed areas in whatever sequence he chooses, followed in turn by the other players. In the third phase, players must have enough food available to feed their populations, or they face losing resources or points.

In Small World, players vie for conquest and control of a world that is simply too small to accommodate them all.

Designed by Philippe Keyaerts as a fantasy follow-up to his award-winning Vinci, Small World is inhabited by a zany cast of characters such as dwarves, wizards, amazons, giants, orcs, and even humans, who use their troops to occupy territory and conquer adjacent lands in order to push the other races off the face of the earth.

Picking the right combination from the 14 different fantasy races and 20 unique special powers, players rush to expand their empires - often at the expense of weaker neighbors. Yet they must also know when to push their own over-extended civilization into decline and ride a new one to victory!

On each turn, you either use the multiple tiles of your chosen race (type of creatures) to occupy adjacent (normally) territories - possibly defeating weaker enemy races along the way, or you give up on your race letting it go "into decline". A race in decline is designated by flipping the tiles over to their black-and-white side.

At the end of your turn, you score one point (coin) for each territory your races occupy. You may have one active race and one race in decline on the board at the same time. Your occupation total can vary depend on the special abilities of your race and the territories they occupy. After the final round, the player with the most coins wins.

Clarifications: available in a pinned forum post.

In City Council each player takes the role of a council member of a newly founded city. The government will select the members of the city council for the first few years until the city rises and flourishes, by which time the most popular member will receive the position of Mayor.

In order to build the city, you and the other councilmen must maintain a low level of pollution, fight crime, create jobs, and sustain an adequate city budget. If you and the others don't keep up the good work, the city project might not succeed, the government will take over, and all players will lose.

As a member of the council, you must also strive to gain the favor of the different political groups who rule the streets of your city. As the game progresses and the city grows larger, more and more political interest groups will try to impose their will on the city by knocking on your office door and asking you for small "favors" in which you will have to act on their behalf. In return, they'll offer you their support and you'll receive victory points for your personal cause, possibly allowing you to become the city's first Mayor.