variable player powers

The journeys of Marco Polo continue in Marco Polo II: In the Service of the Khan, an epic follow-up to The Voyages of Marco Polo. After traveling to Beijing, your travels now take you back to the West in the service of the Khan, sending you to the farthest reaches of his empire in search of wealth and fame.

Marco Polo II is a standalone game based on The Voyages of Marco Polo, and you don't need the original game to play this one. This new journey will present unique challenges, with new and different actions, new scoring rules, and a new good: rare and valuable Chinese jade.

Retread old paths with renewed purpose, or find new ones as you explore farther west, continuing to build the immortal legacy of Marco Polo!

—description from the publisher

Santa Maria is a streamlined, medium complexity Eurogame in which each player establishes and develops a colony. The game features elements of dice drafting and strategic engine building. The game is low on luck and has no direct destructive player conflict; all components are language independent.

In the game, you expand your colony by placing polyominoes with buildings on your colony board. Dice (representing migrant workers) are used to activate buildings; each die activates a complete row or column of buildings in your colony. The buildings are activated in order (left to right / top to bottom), then the die is placed on the last activated building to block this space. It is therefore crucial where you put new buildings in your colony, and in which order you use the dice.

As the game progresses, you produce resources, form shipping routes, send out conquistadors, and improve your religious power to recruit monks. When you recruit a monk, you must decide if it becomes a scholar (providing a permanent special ability), a missionary (for an immediate bonus) or a bishop (for possible end game points). The player who has accumulated the most happiness after three rounds wins. The available specialists, end game bonuses and buildings vary from game to game, which makes for near endless replayability.

The Tang dynasty was considered the first golden age of the classical and now iconic Chinese gardens. Emperor Xuanzong built the magnificent imperial Garden of the Majestic Clear Lake as an homage of life itself and from where he ruled. Players will act as Imperial Garden Designers and they will be called to build the most incredible garden while balancing the elements of Nature.

Tang Garden is a Zen-like game that will take you to the first golden age of China, where players will progressively build a garden by creating the landscape, placing the scenery and projecting their vision through vertical panoramas. During the construction, noblemen will visit the garden to admire the surroundings and the way the natural elements coexist in the most breathtaking scenery humankind has ever laid their eyes upon.

Players will take turns by playing one of the two actions available in the game:

1) Placing tiles and matching the elements to increase their personal nature balance and unlock more character miniatures.

By balancing the nature elements on the player boards, players will attract new characters into the garden. On each player turn, if the elements are balanced, the player will have to choose one miniature from the ones available and finally decide which one of the characters will be placed in the garden, orienting them towards their favorite background, while keeping the other with you to keep exploiting its ability.

2) Draw decoration cards and place one on the board to get prestige by completing collections.

Players will draw a quantity of cards based on the board situation and choose one to keep. Players will then have to place the chosen decoration in one of the available spots in the garden, creating a unique and seamless scenario that will never be the same.

During the game, by placing tiles on special parts of the board, you will be able to place a panorama tile, a new element that adds a never ending perspective for the visitors. Both small and big panoramas will be placed perpendicularly to the board by attaching it to the board insert by creating a seamless look on the four sides of the board. The Panoramas will interact with the characters at the end of the game by giving prestige points based on what your visitor sees and likes.

At the end of the game, the player with the most prestige will be the winner.

—description from the publisher

The Cosmic Citizenship Council has announced it will allow two new alien species to join its ranks, but they forgot to make two copies of the filing form — which means that only one species can join! Now, the two candidates must battle for control of the planets to determine who deserves the right to become a Certified Civilization.

Cosmic Encounter Duel is a competitive standalone two-player game in the Cosmic Encounter universe in which you and your closest frenemy race to be the first to control five planets. Each of twenty-seven alien species comes equipped with its own unique abilities that play with the game mechanisms in some way, offering you an edge in the fight, e.g., the Cheater, who can reserve an additional tactic that they can put toward any fight in the game — as long as their opponent doesn't call out how they're trying to "cheat". How your game of Cosmic Encounter Duel plays out will inevitably be affected by which powers each dueling species has and how they play off of one another.

In addition to your unique species and its ability, you have twenty spaceships to traverse the cosmos and maintain control over the five planets you need to become a Certified Civilization. As long as you have a ship on a planet, you have control of it, even if your opponent also has ships there and you must share control. You can deploy these ships to fight in duels, use them to act as reinforcements, or draw them back for a tactful retreat. Just don't lose them to the Warp or let them be claimed by the black void between the stars and end up lost in space forever!

To play, players draw and resolve Destiny cards, which come in three types: Discovery cards, Event cards, and Refresh cards. Discovery cards have you and your opponent discover a planet and duel for control, while Event cards ask you both to test your mettle against a variety of challenges and cosmic calamities, and Refresh cards offer a respite in which you can recover ships, gather allies, and ultimately prepare for another clash.

At the start of a duel, you and your opponent secretly decide how many ships to send to the planet, and once they have been deployed, you can call upon any befriended envoys. To plan your attack, you secretly choose a card from your hand and a standing tactic from your collection to either guard your ships or blast your opponent's ships, then you fight, sending ships to face-off for control of the planet until the winner claims their prize while the loser retreats. After you and your opponent resolve a Destiny card, you check the icon on the bottom of the card to determine which deck to draw from next, then the race continues.

—description from the publisher

An alert pops up on your smartphone: A crime has just been committed! Grab your investigator's license and your keen powers of deduction and hunt down the suspect. But watch out because you're not the only private eye on the hunt, and only one of you can slap the cuffs on the suspect and claim the reward. Get enough reward money, and you can finally leave this rat race behind and retire to a sunny tropical beach in the Caribbean.

Stop Thief is a family game of logical deduction for 2-4 players. An invisible suspect commits a crime. Only the sounds they make give them away. Listen to the clues and figure out where they are hiding. Play cards from your unique deck to move around the board, sneak through a window, or even get a private tip. Once you have the suspect pinned down, swoop in and make the arrest.

The obvious first step in this restoration was taking the electronic device and turning it into an app. Doing that allows for better sound quality and a more dynamic platform for different modes of play. Next step was ditching the roll-and-move mechanism and, in general, stripping out some of the luck and adding in a healthy dose of strategy. By replacing the dice with decks of movement cards, it also allows asymmetrical decks, which increases the fun and replayability. Game effects were also added to the suspect cards to further spice things up.