Tile Placement

Strike it rich with this exciting mining-themed board game!

Gold Mine is a unique tile-laying game in which players build a maze of mine tunnels and control miners that traverse the mine collecting gold nuggets. Players race to be the first to collect enough gold to exit the mine and stake a claim. It may sound easy, but the greedy miners have several tricks up their sleeves in order to gain an advantage—including sneaking through secret passages, fighting for gold, and scaring away other miners with bats.

With a different game board every time, a great balance of luck and strategy, and the addition of optional rules, this game is bound to be a family favorite for years to come!

A boardgame based on a computer game (instead of the other way around) and designed by Klaus Teuber, Anno 1503 views the era of colonization strictly from the home country perspective. Two to four players send ships to explore islands scattered about a 5 x 12 square ocean (the more players, the more islands). The settlement of the new lands is, however, strictly abstract.

Each player's turn begins with the roll of one 6-sided die. A "6" is a random event (pirates, fire or good fortune - bad twice as often as lucky, and most likely to damage players who are doing well). On other results, each player gains a commodity from one of his five workshops. The player who rolled may then buy commodities from the bank, sell them to his colonists for gold (no trading among players), or use them in various combinations to recruit new colonists, promote existing ones, or build ships. After that, ships can sail for the unknown lands.

Each island bears on its hidden side an outpost, a treasure or a trade agreement. After being discovered, these items are brought back to the home country (and the ship is removed from play, requiring the player to build a new one in order to keep searching). Outposts increase the productivity of workshops. Treasure yields either gold or free colonist promotions. Trade agreements reduce the gold needed to buy commodities from the bank.

Besides being useful in these ways, outposts, gold and agreements are among the game's victory conditions. A player wins by being to first to attain three out of five objectives, namely, four outposts, 30 gold, three trade agreements, three colonists promoted to the top rank of "merchant" and the construction of four public buildings. The buildings (8 types, each bringing some advantage) cost nothing but don't become available until a player has recruited at least four colonists. After that, each new colonist adds a building (unless they've been preempted by other players; there aren't enough for everyone).

Overall, the game falls squarely into the "simultaneous solitaire" category. Except in the race for islands, the players scarcely interact at all. They do, however, have a great many choices to make in the course of play.

New York has the same game play as Dirk Henn's Spiel des Jahres-winning Alhambra, but with the Spanish architecture being replaced by the skyscrapers of Manhattan. As in the original game, players collect four types of currencies and use those funds to purchase tiles that they assemble into their own mini-metropolis, connecting the paved street edges on the tiles to create a coherent network of roads. The building tiles come in six colors, and players score for their holdings three times during the game, earning points for having the most of a color as well as for their longest road.

Aside from the theme change and the associated new artwork, the gameboard is now larger with spots for both face-down and face-up tiles and a scoretrack that circles the edge of the board instead of zigzagging back and forth.

Re-implements:

Alhambra

In the 20th Century, every country strives to develop and improve, each in its own way. Some become financial leaders. Others become centers of learning. Both science and commerce serve to propel nations toward the future – but toward what kind of future? Growth produces waste, and the greatest advances may come with the greatest cost to the environment. How will these countries mitigate the inevitable ecological catastrophes?

Your goal is to build a land free of garbage and pollution – a land where the environment is as healthy as the economy. Only then can you consider your country to be truly developed.
The game consists of six rounds, during which you oversee the urbanization of your country. Some lands produce income. Some produce scientific research. Others improve the quality of life. Your research allows you to discover new technologies that will shape the way your nation develops. Science can even help you avert ecological catastrophes. At the end of each round, your lands provide you the money and research that you will need to deal with the challenges of the next round.

You accumulate points each round, based on your nation’s quality of life. At the end of rounds two and four, you also score bonus points for certain aspects of your country’s development. At the end of round six, you will score bonus points based on your country’s income, research, and environmental quality. The player with the most points wins, having built the country with the highest standard of living.

(from Czech Games Edition website)

A fast-paced word game for two players. The game consists of wooden letter tiles, each with four letters (the Discovery Edition contains 28 tiles and the Wooden Box edition has 32 tiles). The board starts with 16 tiles and more are added during the game. On a turn, players find words (at least three letters long) on the board. Words can be situated vertically, horizontally, or diagonally. When a player finds a word, they use transparent tokens to highlight the letters in the word.

Over the course of the game, the board expands beyond the inital 4 x 4 layout, as players earn new letter tiles and add them to the wordsearch field. The first player to use up all of their tokens wins.