Turn Order: Stat-Based

When all you can identify in the horizon for many long days is the line that detaches the sea from the sky, the glimpse of a distant shore appearing before you will make you shiver at the understanding that the adventure is about to begin.

You find yourself astonished, landing on the shore that will be the origin of an extensive exploration through the Galapagos, a magic place of inconceivable beauty and endless biodiversity. There, you will gather repertoires and expand your knowledge of the natural sciences. Your eyes will learn how to detect the hidden species in the tropical forest, gazing at the countless colors and textures of nature. After inspiring hours spent studying and getting to enlightening conclusions, you will rest under a sparkling sky, admiring the stunning complexity of the animal realm.

Darwin's Journey is a worker-placement Eurogame in which players recall Charles Darwin's memories of his adventure through the Galapagos islands, which contributed to the development of his theory of evolution.

With the game's innovative worker progression system, each worker will have to study the disciplines that are a prerequisite to perform several actions in the game, such as exploration, correspondence, gathering, and dispatch of repertoires found on the island to museums in order to contribute to the human knowledge of biology. The game lasts five rounds, and thanks to several short- and long-term objectives, every action you take will grant victory points in different ways.

The Hunger is a race in which each vampiric player must optimize their card deck, hunt humans to gain victory points, fulfill secret missions, and eventually acquire a rose and return to the castle before sunrise. The more you hunt, the slower both you and your deck become, which will make it harder and harder to get back before daybreak. Can you become the most notorious vampire without burning to ashes at sunrise?

During the game, players spend "speed" to move their vampires around the map, hunt humans worth victory points, and add new cards to their deck.

The game ends at dawn, after which the surviving player with the most victory points on their cards wins!

—description from publisher

In Factions: Battlegrounds, you take on the role of a general who's leading an army of troops, spellcasters, beasts, and mythological monsters into battle. You and the opposing generals determine the battleground, gather resources, and score points by eliminating enemy units. Whoever first captures 25 points of units wins.

In more detail, to set up choose one of the six factions in the game; each faction has twelve unique units and five "home terrain" cards that work well with your units. Players then take turns building the battleground by placing one terrain card at a time into the 3x3 grid, each terrain card is divided into a 2x2 grid, so the entire grid of play is 6x6. Whoever places terrain first has an advantage since they have more home terrain than other players, while players who go later during set up determine the location of resource centers on the battleground or recruit their starting units last so that they can respond to the choices of opponents. Units cost 1-5 gold, and each player can spend up to 10 gold on starting units, keeping anything unspent.

During a round, all units have the chance to move, with the highest-ranked units moving first and with ties being broken in favor of whoever has the most captains, followed by whoever has the most units. Each unit has a movement, attack, and health value, along with an indication of whether it generates gold or mana and (possibly) a spell that it can cast. After moving a unit, you can attack with it, whether melee or ranged as indicated on the card. If you defeat an enemy unit, you can points equal to its cost in gold, so while expensive units tend to be the most powerful, they also provide an opponent with their biggest target for points.

Prior to activating a unit on your turn, you can pay gold to recruit new units, and those units will slip into rank order for the turn, possibly allowing you to put a high-ranking unit into play directly and giving an opponent someone on the battleground that they didn't expect.

Once all the units have moved, players collect resources for units that gain them automatically and for units located on resource centers. Rounds continue until someone has collected 25 points of captured units, at which point they win immediately.

Factions: Battlegrounds is centered on inclusion and diversity, incorporating mythology from all over the world and representing traditionally European-based fantasy elements with underrepresented cultural elements.

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.

The Zapotec were a pre-Columbian civilization that flourished in the Valley of Oaxaca in Mesoamerica. Archaeological evidence reveal their culture going back at least 2,500 years. Remnants of the ancient city of Monte Albán in the form of buildings, ball courts, magnificent tombs, and finely worked gold jewelry testify of this once great civilization. Monte Albán was one of the first major cities in Mesoamerica and the center of the Zapotec state that dominated much of the territory that today belongs to the Mexican state of Oaxaca.

In a game of Zapotec, you build temples, cornfields and villages in the three valleys surrounding the capital to generate resources needed for building pyramids, making sacrifices to the gods, and performing rituals.

Each round, players simultaneously pick a card from their hand to determine their turn order and the resources they collect. Players then perform individual turns and spend resources to build new houses, gain access to special abilities, make sacrifices to the gods and build pyramids. The played action card determines three important aspects of each player's turn:

The resource printed at the top of the card determines the row or column to activate on the resource grid to collect income.

The icon in the middle of the card matches one of the nine properties of the building spaces on the map (one of three building types, one of three regions, or one of three terrain types). On their turn, players may build only on spaces that match that icon.

The number at the bottom of the card dictates the turn order for the round when the card is played.

At the end of the round, players draft new cards from the central offer, with the final undrafted card becoming the scoring bonus card for the following round.

After five rounds, players score points for pyramids, for their position on the sacrifice track, and for their ritual cards. The player with the most victory points wins.

—description from publisher