The goal of the game is to build the most successful Underground lines and in doing so gain the most points. You can gain points by connecting your lines to various destinations on the board, and by having the passenger use your lines to travel from station to station.
The player who has best balanced the demands by the time that the deck of destinations is exhausted will be declared the winner.
Toward the end of the 6th century A.D., King Ethelbert of Kent established the old Roman city of Canterbury as his new capital. In Canterbury, 2 to 4 players represent Saxon Lords who are charged with building the city into a prosperous capital. The Saxon Lords must use the city's meager starting resources to build up the 25 districts of Canterbury and provide key services to its citizens.
The key services are (in order from most basic to most prestigious) water, food, religion, defense, commerce, and culture. As new structures are built in the city, the city grows more prosperous. While each Saxon Lord jealously guards his or her own prosperity and achievements, they all benefit as a whole from the growing prosperity of the city itself. When the city reaches the peak of its prosperity, the game ends and the player with the most individual prosperity wins.
You are the head of a Mongolian family, intent on becoming the most powerful in the land. Use your resources wisely to take control of fertile steppe lands to raise horses, build sacred temples, develop caravans of camels, and control the beautiful oases. The player with the most points at the end of the game will be anointed the Noble of the Oasis.
Another Reiner Knizia standby, this game plays very well with varying numbers of people. The object is to accrue the most points during three rounds, which you do by spending your points to bid on sets of cards. Each turn the current player turns up one to three cards for all the players to bid on, with the highest bid taking all cards. The cards denote a commodity type and quantity/value. The round ends when each player's ships are full, or the commodity card deck is exhausted. After each round, points are awarded to each player having the most of a given commodity, and to the one with the most valuable total "cargo load".
Part of the Knizia auction trilogy.
One of the Knizia Florentine auction games.
Related Games:
Medici vs Strozzi (two-player version)
Strozzi
Nieuw Amsterdam was founded by the Dutch West Indies Company in order to encourage the lucrative beaver pelt trade with the local Native American hunters along the Hudson River. To establish a trading post there, they needed a town and a fort, which was built on the tip of Manhattan Island. To encourage European patrons – that is, settlers of means or noble birth – to populate the colony, they granted them both land and indentured servants. The patrons became the lords of a new feudal system not unlike that seen in Europe.
In Nieuw Amsterdam, players are those patrons, and they bid on action lots in order to build businesses, work land for both food and building materials, compete in elections, ship furs to the Old World, and trade with the Lenape Indians – a process that gets more complicated as players claim more land and push the Lenape camps farther up the Hudson River.