Tile Placement

In Shangri-La, the mysterious and isolated utopia nestled high in the mountains, a strange struggle for dominance has begun. Once peaceful and neighborly, the Masters of the competing mountain-folk train their students and send them out across bridges to control neighboring villages. To take control of a village, the students must come together in uncomfortable alliances, regardless of their tribal origin. Eventually students become Masters themselves, train new students and expand to other villages.

There is one thing each student must keep in mind as they travel from village to village -- the mystical powers of Shangri-La mysteriously cause the bridges to collapse, separating villages forever. One crucial question will decide the winner: who will control the most Masters of Shangri-La?

Players take on the roles of leaders of a specific tribe. There is a battle raging over the empty villages of the land and players must quickly fill those villages with their tribal leaders. As players migrate tribal leaders from one village to the next, they must not become too weak or they risk losing leaders to opposing tribes. The ultimate object of the game is to have the most leaders on the board at the end of the game.
It is an abstract game with many options and tense until the end.

2004 Mensa Select

Thematically, players are adding masters and students, and trying to have the students migrate to nearby villages to become masters. Functionally, this is essentially a military game. Players either spend their turn reinforcing a village (adding more tokens there) or invading a neighboring village (expanding influence if you have more total tokens than the victim). The unique twist is that, after each invasion, the connecting bridge is removed. So over the course of the game, attack options become more and more limited, until the game naturally comes to a conclusion.

You have 10 Days in the USA. Travel the country by jet, car, and on foot. Plan your trip from start to finish using destination and transportation tiles. With a little luck and clever planning, you just might outwit your fellow travelers.

This is the first installment in the 10 Days in series.

There are 50 state tiles, 10 colored airplane tiles, and 6 car tiles. Players all flip tiles one at a time, examine them, and put them in the 10 "days" of their tile tray, in any order. Then in turn, they draw a tile from one of three face-up piles or a face-down pile. The new tile may replace one tile in their tray, with that tile (or the unused drawn tile) discarded onto any of the face-up piles. Tiles may not be rearranged. When a player has all their days connected correctly, they win the game.

Travel Connections:
By Foot - bordering state tiles may be placed side-by-side
By Automobile - states may be connected by driving through a third state which borders them both (the car tile is put between them)
By Air - Two states of the same color may be connected by a same-color airplane placed between them"

Battle rages on between orcs and knights. Purple and Orange form a chaotic melee and no-one knows which side will win this battle. Mage towers scattered on the battlefield are strategic objectives, and it soon appears that whomever controls the most towers will reap the seeds of victory.

Players place tiles to form majorities of their army on the corners of towers: when all 4 corners are resolved, the player with the majority of corners seizes control of the tower.

Special power tokens can increase your presence or decrease your opponent's presence as well as doing a few other things.

There are 5 special tiles included in the game for added strategies.

Debuted here in Fangs and Swords - 2 players tile game of orcs vs knight combat (V.2-updated).

Steam-belching iron horses roar across the wild plains! Age of Steam relives the era when pioneering U.S. railroads built the tracks that transformed America's economy. The cut-throat action is centered on the industrial powerhouses of the growing nation: Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Chicago, and beyond.

Challenges that await you:

Can you finance both the most extensive track network and the most powerful locomotives?
Which routes will give the best returns on their costs?
Can you beat the opposition to the most lucrative shipments?
Will you make enough money to pay your aggressive creditors?

Competition is brutal, with the game usually going to the player who plans most carefully.

Each self-contained phase in the game keeps players constantly involved in making vital decisions and interacting with other players. Age of Steam also allows towns to be developed into cities, ensuring that no two games are exactly the same.

The Discovery is a new stand-alone Carcassonne game.

The inhabitants of Carcassonne have discovered a new region far away from their homeland - one that consists of meadows, mountains and seas. The followers, of which each player only has four (with a fifth for the scoring track) get placed as robbers (in the mountains), seafarers (on the seas) or explorers (on the meadows). On a player's turn, he must place a tile and may then place a follower on it.

As in the original game, tiles may only be placed so that identical landscape types match up. A follower may only be placed when no other follower has been placed there yet. When the follower is removed, however, then the size of the region in which the follower is located brings points - regardless of whether the region has been closed off or not, although closed off regions score considerably more points. There's also an additional rule that lets mountainous regions increase in value, even if they've already been completed.

This is a distinctly simpler version of Carcassonne than the original. This was the goal during the development of the game. It should have simpler rules, but offer greater strategic depth. What is interesting about the game is that regions aren't scored automatically any more (when they are closed off), this is a decision left to the player (the removing of the follower). Since the regions can only get more valuable, this ensures many agonizing decisions.

(From Gamewire and Spielbox)

This game is part of the Carcassonne series.