Strategy

In Kodama 3D, players will grow trees in three-dimensional space. Players move their kodama pieces around a 4x4 grid of branch tiles in order to pick the branches they want to add to their tree. When a player adds a branch to their tree that doesn’t match what it is touching, they choose a goal card from the ones available. After all players have placed 12 branches on their tree, players score all of their goal cards. The player with the most points wins.

—description from the publisher

Keyper is a game with high player interaction for two to four players played over four rounds. Each round represents a season: spring, summer, autumn, and finally winter.

Each player starts the game with their own village board, a mini keyp board, 12 village tiles, a keyper (waving meeple) in their player color, and a team of eight multi-colored keyples, including two white keyples. Each differently colored keyple is a specialist in one activity: the brown keyper is a woodsman, the black keyple is a miner, the orange keyple a clay worker, etc. The white keyples are generalists who can represent any other color.

Keyper is a worker placement game. (Keyper is the eighth new title in the medieval Key series of games, with Keydom, the second in the series being widely recognized as the first of the worker placement genre of games.) What makes Keyper special is that when one player places a keyple on a country board, another player can join them with a matching colored keyple on the first player's turn to the benefit of both players. In this way, some players are likely to have played all their keyples before others. All keyples have the potential to work twice. If a player has played all of their keyples, but another player still has some, then on their turn, the player with no remaining keyples can lay down one or more keyples on the country board they have claimed or in their village board to secure additional resources or actions. It can therefore be doubly beneficial to co-operate with your fellow players, although Keyper is not a co-operative game in the usual sense of the term.

The country boards are also noteworthy, in that they can be manipulated and folded at the beginning of summer, autumn, and winter to show one of four different permutations of fields for that season. A player will chose the one to suit their strategy, often hoping that another player will complement their choice. Certain fields on the country boards are available only in certain seasons, e.g., raw materials can be upgraded to finished goods only in spring and summer, after which you can only convert using tiles in your own village. Gem mining occurs only in autumn and winter.

A player's strategy is likely to be influenced by which (seeded) spring country tiles they acquire and by the particular colored keyples they have available in the later seasons. Different combinations will encourage a player to develop their farm or village, help with their shipping or mining activities, and prepare for the seasonal fairs. Players constantly need to evaluate whether or not to join other players, when to claim a country board, whether to play on their own or another player's country board, when to use their own village, and whether to create a large or small team of keyples for the following season. The winner is the player to gain the most points, usually through pursuing at least a couple of the different strategies.

In addition to the theme and mechanisms, Keyper has similar traits to the earlier Key games: Game actions are positive and constructive, not destructive; player interaction is through the game mechanisms not direct, and like Keyflower, the previous game in the series, there is a lot of player interaction.

A special English-language Kickstarter edition of Keyper with "character" keyples and keypers will also be released.

In the dystopic 1930s, the industrial revolution pushed the exploitation of fossil-based resources to the limit, and now the only thing powerful enough to quench the thirst for power of the massive machines and of the unstoppable engineering progress is the unlimited hydroelectric energy provided by the rivers.

Barrage is a resource management strategic game in which players compete to build their majestic dams, raise them to increase their storing capacity, and deliver all the potential power through pressure tunnels connected to the energy turbines of their powerhouses.

Each player represents one of the four international companies who are gathering machinery, innovative patents and brilliant engineers to claim the best locations to collect and exploit the water of a contested Alpine region crossed by rivers.

Barrage includes two innovative and challenging mechanisms. First, the players must carefully plan their actions and handle their machinery, since both their action tokens and resources are stored on a Construction Wheel and will only be available after a full turn of the wheel. The better you manage your wheel, the earlier your resources and actions come back to you.

Second, the water flow on the rivers depicted on the board is a shared and contested resource. Players have to intercept and store as much of the water as they can, build dams (upstream dams are expensive but can block part of the water before it reaches the downstream dams), raise the dams to increase their capacity, and build long tunnels to channel the water to their powerhouses. Water is never consumed — its flow is just used to produce energy —, it is instead released back to the rivers, so you have to strategically place your dams to recover the water diverted by you and the other players.

Over five rounds, the players must fulfill power requirements represented by a common competitive power track and meet specific requests of personal contracts. At the same time, by placing a limited number of engineers, they attempt to enhance their machinery to acquire new and more efficient construction actions and to build and activate special unique-effect buildings to forward their own developing strategy.

Long ago, a vengeful god stole the stars from the night sky. To illuminate the night, hopeful people sent glowing paper lanterns floating toward the heavens. Out of nowhere, clever magical phoenixes appeared, soaring through the sky. As they flew from lantern to lantern, their enchanted touch changed the lanterns into new stars! The phoenix who can create a constellation of seven new stars will be the champion of a world looking for light!

Tsuro: Phoenix Rising is a new entry in the classic Tsuro series. The game shares a bond with the foundations of the venerable original: play tiles, move pawns, and stay in play, but it introduces a revolutionary board that allows for the double-sided tiles to flip and rotate throughout the game, creating diverging paths and opening up new strategies.

Featuring gorgeous phoenix miniatures, beautiful lantern tokens, and unique gameplay elements such as life tokens that allow your phoenix to be reborn from the ashes once per game, Tsuro: Phoenix Rising is a new chapter in the legacy of Tsuro!

Era: Medieval Age serves as the spiritual successor to Roll Through The Ages. While Roll Through The Ages was a pioneer for roll-and-write-style games, Era is a pioneer for roll-and-build!

In Era, your dice represent different classes of medieval society as players attempt to build the most prosperous city. The "build" comes into play as players actually build their cities on their boards. You will use beautifully modeled three-dimensional components such as walls, keeps, farms, and other structures. By the end of the game, each player will have a unique city of their very own!

Era: Medieval Age is made even more challenging as players interact with each other in ways such as extortion, scorched earth, and, of course, disease! Hey, this is the Medieval Age, right? Speaking of which, Era serves as the first of a new series of standalone roll-and-build games from Matt Leacock and eggertspiele!