Tile Placement

You're the leader of a great nation which is currently expanding. Over the course of the seven decades covered by the game, you will have to invest in infrastructures and industries, provide your country with energy and finance the mercurial forces of research in order to remain competitive.

But prosperity has a price. You owe it to future generations to leave them a healthy world. Pollution lurks, but will you be able to limit it?

Prosperity has players building up their countries on a grand but abstract scale, with them needing to balance concerns over energy and ecology with the constant need for capital and the long-term goal of prosperity points.

The game starts with 24 tiles available, half on the energy side of the shared game board and half on the ecology side. Two tiles on each side are placed on levels 1-6, with the players each having two research markers – energy and ecology – that start at level 1. Each player has an individual game board with color-coded spaces for tiles, a pollution track, and tracks for energy and ecology. A stack of 36 tiles – with tiles arranged by decades: the six from 2030 on the bottom, then the five from 2020, and so on to the five from 1970 – is set up during the playing area.

On a turn, a player draws the top tile from the stack, then everyone resolves the symbol highlighted on the tile:

Energy – for a positive value, earn money; for a negative value, lose money or increase your pollution
Ecology – remove or add discs to your pollution track
Capital – earn money for each capital symbol on the tiles you own
Research – advance one research marker one space for each research symbol on tiles you own
Prosperity – score points for each prosperity symbol on tiles you own, but only if your pollution isn't maxed out

Once everyone has done this, the active player takes two actions, repeating an action if desired. The possible actions are:

Take money.
Remove one pollution marker.
Move forward one space on one research track.
Buy a tile, with the amount owed being based on whether the tile is energy or ecology and the level of your corresponding research marker. If you buy a tile of the same level, the cost is €100; if the tile is of a higher level, you pay €100, plus €100 for each level; and if the tile is lower, you pay a flat €50.

Players have limited space for tiles on their individual boards, especially since the tiles and spaces are color-coded, but players can cover existing tiles, if desired, losing any benefits (or penalties) in the process. Some parts of the individual board are off-limits to new infrastructure until you first provide transport; toll roads, highways and even train systems have drawbacks of their own, but ideally you'll be able to build your way past those trouble spots without causing too much pollution.

When the final tile is drawn, that player finishes his turn, then everyone scores: twice for their energy and ecology levels, one for capital (with money being converted into prosperity points), once for research on both tracks (with points for those researching the most), and once for prosperity. Whoever tallies the most prosperity points wins!

Indigo is a tile-laying game along the lines of Metro, Tsuro and Linie 1 in which players build paths bit by bit, with no player owning the individual paths and everyone trying to exploit the paths already present. Unlike those earlier games, however, your goal is to move gemstones from their starting locations on the board to your designated goals, with the player who scores the most points winning the game.

To set up the game board, place the central hex tile, then add five green and one indigo gems to it. Place six "u-turn" tiles at their designated locations on the outer edge of the game board, then place a yellow gem on each such tile. Each player places goal markers on goals between these u-turn tiles on the edge of the game board: in a two-player game, the players alternate goals; in a three-player game, each player has one goal to herself, while sharing two others; and in a four-player game, each player shares a goal with every other player.

On a turn, a player places a tile on any space on the game board, with the only restriction being that a player cannot create a route directly from one goal to another. Each tile has three route segments on it, connecting one pair of edges. If a player places a tile next to a gemstone, that gemstone "moves" as far as possible along the route so that all players can see where to place tiles to next move that gemstone. (Thus players avoid the mental gymnastics required in Metro and Linie 1 in which nothing moves until a route is complete.) When connecting to the central tile, the green gems move off first, with the indigo gem moving only with the sixth connection.

If a player places a tile so that one gem would run into another, both gems are removed from the game!

When a gem is moved to a goal owned by only one player, that player keeps the gem. If two players own the goal, then both players collect a gem of that color, taking the extra gem needed from the reserve. Once all the gems have been claimed, the game ends, with players earning 3 points for an indigo gem, 2 for green and 1 for yellow. The player with the most points wins.

The aMAZEing Labyrinth has spawned a whole line of Labyrinth games. The game board has a set of tiles fixed solidly onto it; the remaining tiles that make up the labyrinth slide in and out of the rows created by the tiles that are locked in place. One tile always remains outside the labyrinth, and players take turns taking this extra tile and sliding it into a row of the labyrinth, moving all those tiles and pushing one out the other side of the board; this newly removed tile becomes the piece for the next player to add to the maze.

Players move around the shifting paths of the labyrinth in a race to collect various treasures. Whoever collects all of his treasures first and returns to his home space wins!

The aMAZEing Labyrinth is simple at first glance and an excellent puzzle-solving game for children; it can also be played by adults using more strategy and more of a cutthroat approach.

This Sid Sackson classic has taken many different forms over the years depending on the publisher. Each player strategically invests in businesses, trying to retain a majority of stock. As the businesses grow with tile placements, they also start merging, giving the majority stockholders of the acquired business sizable bonuses, which can then be used to reinvest into other chains. All of the investors in the acquired company can then cash in their stocks for current value or trade them 2-for-1 for shares of the newer, larger business. The game is a race to acquire the greatest wealth.

Some versions of the 3M bookshelf edition included rules for a 2-player variant.

The original version is part of the 3M Bookshelf Series.

Carcassonne: Hunters and Gatherers is a standalone game in the Carcassonne series set in the stone age.

As in other Carcassonne games, players take turns placing tiles to create the landscape and placing meeples to score points from the map they're creating. The player with the most points at the end of the game wins.

Instead of cities, roads, and farms, Carcassonne: Hunters and Gatherers has forests, rivers, lakes, and meadows. Players' meeples can represent hunters (when placed in the meadows), gatherers (in a forest), or fishermen (on a river segment). They also have huts, which can be placed on rivers or lakes to get fish from the entire river system.

It includes many of the familiar mechanics from Carcassonne with a few new rules, including:
- A player who completes a forest with a gold nugget in it gets to immediately draw and place a tile.
- A meadow is worth 2 points for every animal in it, except tigers, which negate certain other animals.
- A river segment is worth the number of tiles in the segment plus the number of fish in the lakes at each end.
- A fishing hut scores at the end of the game and is worth the number of fish in all the lakes connected by rivers.

The Devir edition includes (the relevant part of) the Carcassonne: King & Scout expansion.