Tile Placement

In Steam you build railroads and deliver goods along an ever changing network of tracks and stations. You build the tracks, upgrade towns, improve your train, and grab the right goods to make the longest, most profitable deliveries. Score your deliveries and add to your income or victory points, balancing your need to invest against your quest to win the game.

Steam contains a beautiful, double-sided game board. The map on each side depicts terrain, towns, and cities at the start of the railway age. The map of the northeastern USA and neighboring Canada is ideal for 3 or 4 players. Use the map of Europe's lower Rhine and Ruhr region when playing a 4 or 5 player game. You can play Steam on any number of current and future variant and expansion maps, so we include pieces for 6 players.

The game plays very similarly to Age of Steam but with modifications to some of its mechanics and artwork. Tracks for income, train level, etc. are all printed on the board around the map such that alternate maps can be overlaid on the board and the necessary tracks will still be able to be used.

Similar to:

Railways of the World

A Scrabble-like game without the board -- much like Pick Two!, but without the letter values.

Using a selection of 144 plastic letter tiles in the English edition, each player works independently to create their own 'crossword'. When a player uses up all their letters, all players take a new tile from the pool. When all the tiles are gone, the first player to use up all the tiles in their hand wins.

There are also variants included in the rules, and the game is suitable for solo play.

The Club is a slightly satirical game about life in the fast lane - a board game about love and about people's need to meet one another.

The whole game takes place in a nightclub and the game board is the dance floor. On their turn players push three new dancers to the dance floor from their own bar counter (edge of the game board) and as they come into play they push others towards the center of the dance floor. Once two dancers meet in the heat of the night they can be made into couples and the better the match the more players score. If only two of the four visible qualities match then the dancers have a one-night-stand which is not a very long term fun and is thus worth only one point. With three matching qualities the dancers actually like one another, start dating and that is worth four points. If all the four visible qualities match then the dancers get the "happily ever after" the one true love we all search for and thus it is worth full 5 points.

Each dancer also has a secret quality that can and will alter the basic score. For example if a guy has a large... "personality" then the player gets two extra points unless the other dancer is drunk, because if she is she wouldn't notice the difference. Girl's beautiful roommate on the other hand only has a function in the one-night-stands and the fun the couple would have means now triple fun and thus the player gets triple points. There are 12 different secret qualities in the game ranging from heart-broken to those who still live with their mom.

Occasionally the game gets spiced up by one of the three special charachters in the game. Bouncer can remove any of the dancer from the game board where as a Rock Star walks into the game normally, but once (s)he has gathered a fan crowd and he's completely surrounded player can take the Rock Star and four adjacent dancers back to his hotel room and form two couples out of them. The bully is the guy who harasses women and picks a fight with men and once he enters the game his mere presence prevents any dancer next to him to be part of a couple.

In the end the player who has been the best cupido wins the game. In other words the best scorer wins.

From the publisher:

A beautiful and beautifully simple game of laying a tile before your own token to continue its path on each turn. The goal is to keep your token on the board longer than anyone else's, but as the board fills up this becomes harder because there are fewer empty spaces left... and another player's tile may also extend your own path in a direction you'd rather not go. Easy to introduce to new players, Tsuro lasts a mere 15 minutes and actually does work for any number from 2 to 8.

Theme:

Tsuro has an Asian spiritual theme - the lines representing the "many roads that lead to divine wisdom", and the game as a whole representing "the classic quest for enlightenment".

This theme is very light and the game essentially plays as an abstract.

Gameplay:

The game consists of tiles with twisting lines on them, a 6x6 grid on which to lay these tiles and a token for each player. Each player has a hand of tiles. On your turn you do two things: place a tile from your hand onto the board next to your token and move your token as far as it can go along the line it is currently on, until it is stopped by an empty space with no tile in (yet), the edge of the board or colliding with another player's token. If your token reaches the edge of the board or collides with another player's token, you are out of the game. The aim of the game is to be the last player left with a token on the board. Strategy therefore consists of trying to drive your opponents either into each other or off the board whilst extending your own route in directions that will make it difficult for your opponents to do the same.

Other notes:

Tsuro was originally patented by McMurchie in 1979 under the name Squiggle Game, but was apparently not published at that time. Somewhat similar to Metro and Spaghetti Junction.

Walnut Grove is a cross between jigsaw puzzles and worker placement, with the players as farmers who find their plots merging into a single landscape as time passes and their holdings grow. Come fall they must head to the city with their goods as winter will soon return.

Walnut Grove could be described as a light mashup between Carcassonne and Agricola. The goal of the game is to develop your own ranch. The better the ranch, the more points you will score at the end of the game. Players can improve their ranch during the game by adding new land tiles to it, hiring more workers, building improvements, etc

The game play is divided into eight years, and each year is divided into Spring, Summer, Fall and Winter phases. During Spring, players add land tiles to their ranch. During Summer, players place their workers to gather resources from the fields. When Autumn comes, all players get to visit the city. Finally, during the Winter phase, players need to feed their workers and heat their homes.

In the city you can hire workers, trade goods to coins, build improvements, and so on. Each player may do only one action in the city though. The city is a kind of rondel that is divided into halves; each time you cross the midline you have to pay a coin. Therefore it is wise to move as slowly as possible on the rondel, but then again, you have consider what actions you want to take!

The land areas will produce resources when you place the workers there. Also, the tiles do not need to match, but you want them to, as larger areas of the same type will give you greater production.

Spring, Summer and Winter phases can be done simultaneously, providing fast game play. The game also works as a solo game.