Tile Placement

They came to this planet, and they chose you. They uplifted your people and promised great prosperity. They provided the wisdom and the resources to build your cities sky high. They taught you the ways of culture, science, and warfare. They promised knowledge for any willing to learn. Come, Archon, guide your citizens to victory, under the watchful eyes of the Builders, our benefactors from beyond the skies above.

In Origins: First Builders, you are an archon, guiding a population of freemen, influencing the construction of buildings and monuments, climbing the three mighty zodiac temples, and taking part in an arms race — all in an effort to leave the greatest mark on mankind's ancient history.

You start the game with a city consisting of just two building tiles: the Agora tile and the Palace tile. As the game develops, your city will grow in both size and strength as you add new building tiles, each of which has a special ability that triggers when it is first added to a city and when closing a district. Your placement on the military track indicates the rewards you receive when you attack and your chances of becoming first player.

Origins: First Builders is played over a number of rounds, with a round ending only after each player has passed. If a game end condition has not yet been triggered, the game continues with a new round. On your turn, you perform one of the following actions:

• Visit an encounter site with your workers to gain resources and additional citizen or speaker dice, advance on the zodiac temple tracks (and potentially gain zodiac cards), and advance and attack on the military track.

• Close a district, gaining victory points (VPs) and possibly gold for matching a district card's building pattern, additional bonuses based on the buildings you activate, and additional VPs at the end of the game based on the value of the citizen die you use to close the district.

• Build a tower level to increase your endgame scoring based on the tower heights and the matching color dice you use to close your districts.

• Grow your population.

• Pass.

The game finishes at the end of the round when one or more of the following conditions has been met:

At most three colors of tower disks are still in stock.
No gold remains above any district card.
No citizen die of the proper color can be added to the citizen offer.
A player has moved all three of their zodiac disks to the top space of each temple track.

The temple area is divided into three tracks: the sea temple, the forest temple, and the mountain temple. You score points only for your two least-valued temples, and once all the points have been summed, whoever has the most VPs wins.

From the award-winning, best-selling creators of Exploding Kittens and Throw Throw Burrito, A Little Wordy is a fresh and ridiculously clever take on the genre of tile-based word-unscrambling games.

Here’s how it works: You’re each given a pile of letters. Rearrange your letters until you come up with a word. Be sneaky and choose a word that your opponent won’t easily guess.

Write it down, keep it a secret. Rescramble your tiles, pass them to your opponent. The goal is to examine your opponent’s tiles and try to figure out their word. You do this with Clue Cards. These tell you things such as: what’s the first letter, how long’s the word, or what does it rhyme with? You win by using as FEW of these clue cards as possible to figure out what word your opponent wrote down.

It’s thoughtful, strategic, highly-replayable, and built specifically for two players. It’s not a game about having the mightiest vocabulary - it’s a game about making clever choices.

The longest, most complicated word isn’t always the best choice. Sometimes, picking a smaller, common word is better because your brainiac opponent will overthink things and blaze right past it. Trying to figure out your opponent’s secret word can be both hilarious and (delightfully) maddening. A Little Wordy levels the playing field against veteran word wizards.

-description from publisher

Set in ancient Mesopotamia, a cradle of civilization, at a time when the location of Ur was a coastal region, players work to build the Great City of Ur, expand its districts, and establish themselves as powerful builders.

Tabannusi: Builders of Ur features a stunning board showing the city of Ur divided into 5 regions, each tied to a specific color die. There are 3 building districts, 1 temple district, and 1 port district.

Each turn, your worker will activate one of these districts. When activating a district, you must first take a die from the district. This die matches the color of the district and serves two functions:

1) The die itself becomes a resource of its color.
2) The value of the die determines which district your worker will activate on the following turn.

Through various actions you will be able to expand your influence in the various districts, expanding construction sites and turning them into buildings to score valuable victory points. But you will also exert your influence in the temple district in order to earn the king's favor. In the port district you can obtain ships with important abilities and for scoring victory points.

You must spend your actions wisely and always make sure that you keep an eye on the general timing of the game. The moment a district is emptied of dice, a scoring will occur.

—description from publisher

Travel Blokus is the smaller, 2-player verson of Blokus. It is an abstract strategy game with transparent, tetris-shaped, colored pieces that players are trying to play onto the board. The only caveat to placing a piece is that it may not lie adjacent to your other pieces, but instead must be placed touching at least one corner of your pieces already on the board.

The tiles in the Blokus To Go version are made with square holes cut into them that allow them to be snapped onto square-shaped "nubs" on the playing field. There are also two storage trays that hold the tiles for travel. These trays cover the board when the game is not being played and fold open in order for players to access the tiles.

The tower built by architect Gustave Eiffel rises high above Paris, announcing the inauguration of the Universal Exposition. There are those who define it as a monstrous iron cyclops and others as the first step into modern architecture. There is no doubt it will leave very few indifferent.

Paris Eiffel is an expansion of Paris: La cité de la lumière. There are eight new action postcards that provide far more variability in the game. The postcards are accompanied by a series of die-cut figures that will add a spectacular third dimension to your Paris.

In this expansion you will visit Parisian marvels such as the Arc de Triomphe, the obelisk of Luxor, Louvre Museum, and naturally, the Eiffel Tower.

—description from the publisher