Tableau Building

City of Gears is a unique steampunk game of exploration, area control, worker placement, and engine building. From your incredible Factory, you must race to claim ownership over the magnificent ruins of an abandoned clockwork metropolis. Each game plays in under an hour, and because only nine of the city tiles (from dozens available) are randomly chosen and placed each game, no two games ever play the same.

Each turn, you roll a number of production dice and activate City Tiles, then you move your automaton workers and perform a variety of actions (such as drawing and placing gears to reactivate areas of the city, sabotaging opponents, and activating unique steam powers) as determined by your resources. Along the way, you will develop your Factory with special powers which set it apart and provide you with powerful bonuses.

As the city is revealed and its abilities are discovered, players must concoct plans to accrue prestige and hinder opponents so that once Opening Day arrives, they will emerge victorious! Do you have what it takes to set the City of Gears in motion?

In Space Base, players assume the roles of Commodores of a small fleet of ships. Ships begin docked at their stations and are then deployed to sectors as new ships are commissioned under your command. Use cargo vessels to engage in trade and commerce; mining vessels to build reoccurring base income; and carriers to spread your influence. Establish new colonies for a new Commodore in a sector to gain even more influence. Gain enough influence and you can be promoted to Admiral!

Space Base is a quick-to-learn, quick-to-play dice game using the core "I roll, everyone gets stuff" mechanism seen in other games. It's also a strategic engine builder using a player board (your space base) and tableaus of ship cards you can buy and add to your board. The cards you buy and the order you buy them in have interesting implications on your engine beyond just the ability on the card you buy, making for a different type of engine construction than seen in similar games. Players can take their engine in a number of directions: long odds and explosive gains, low luck and steady income, big end-game combos to launch from last to first, or a mix-and-match approach. Ultimately, Space Base is a game you can just start playing and teach everyone how to play in the first round or two and has a satisfying blend of dice-chucking luck and challenging strategic choices.

Patchistory is a strategy board game with cards that symbolize historical heroes and wonders, with the whole game being divided into three eras. During the game, you acquire these cards through auctions and expand your territory by placing cards so that they overlap one another in a 5×5 space in the first era, a 6×6 space in the second era, and a 7×7 space in the third era. When your land—that is, the layout of your cards—is well built, the card functions are activated. You can earn victory points with diplomatic actions, domestic politics, war movement, the actions of production, etc., and at the end of the game, the person with the highest score after the third era wins.

Because you can make combos with lots of features on historical cards and you can score in various ways, Patchistory will give you another new exciting play every time it hits the table.