Worker Placement

From the publisher's website:

"The night is setting in slowly on the city, but not all of its inhabitants are asleep. Under cover of darkness, several scoundrels are on their way to perform their big heist tonight
You are playing the role of one of these scoundrels on the hunt for gold and art treasures. Careful planning will let you make the big haul, but be sure not to miss the right moment to cash in your swag at a fence!

Rules summary:

The players place their Scoundrel tokens at five locations on the central board, which are then resolved in the following order:

1 - City: Receive Tool cards required for the break-ins
2 - Villa: Receive Loot cards if you meet the tool requirements
3 - Ruin: Swap Tool cards from your hand with the draw pile.
4 - Museum: Receive Loot cards if you meet the tool requirements
5 - Harbor: Sell loot to the fence to gain gold (victory points)

The first player to earn 20+ gold wins.

The game is announced for release at Essen Spiel 2009.

Online Play

Yucata (turn-based)

The world is in ruin. Humankind is but a distant memory, and only now have you awoken. You are an automaton in possession of several fragments that once held the will of the human race. The other fragments lie in the hands of your fellow automatons. You must investigate and piece together these fragments so that you alone may fulfill the final will of humanity.

Code of Nine — first released as Old World And Code Of Nine or OWACON — is a card-based board game in which the goal is to puzzle together long-gone memories. Players battle for victory points (VPs), but what will generate VPs is decided by eight so-called memory cards that are dealt at the start of the game, with each player getting to look at only two of these.

Each round, players choose actions that gain certain items such as coins, books, statues or legacies, or perhaps to peek at the other players' memory cards.

After five rounds, the score is calculated, and whoever has the most points wins.

Spyrium is set in an alternate world, an England set in a steampunk-based universe. Players build factories, needing workers to manage the production of a commodity previously unknown to us called "Spyrium". Producing Spyrium in one factory, then processing it in the next results in victory points (VPs) for that particular player. Alternatively, Spyrium can be purchased, but the material is rare and expensive, and players are constantly scraping for money.

Only those who from the beginning of the game manage to increase their regular income or their base of permanently employed workers (who can be used again and again to raise money) will be flexible enough to get their hands on the important end-of-game buildings to generate many VPs.

The circular nature of the game is flexible as each player can decide for himself when to move out of the placement phase and into the activation phase. With the two tracks in the game, those involved with delivery during the worker phase can then be used to raise money, to purchase an adjacent card, or to work on their own in an idle factory. All of these things are important, but in the end only the player who has dealt best with the lack of money, workers and Spyrium will win.

Paging all interns! New patients have arrived in the ER, and you want to fight — whether fairly or not – against the other interns to prove that you're the right person for the open doctor position at the hospital.

In Hospital Rush, the player interns compete against one another to be the first with ten prestige points. Each round, players place two pawns on various fair and unfair actions, with unfair actions possibly being punished later by other players. During the game, the players collect medicine, learn new skills, take exams, and treat patients. May the best (or most devious) intern win!

In Florenza, the players are the heads of the most powerful families in Florenza during the Renaissance period. The goal of the game is to become the most famous patron of the arts by hiring the most famous artists of the period and financing their works.

Each player can commission artworks in his own district, the Cathedral, or in the civic buildings of the city. Each artwork requires money and resources to complete. To earn the money and resources the artists need, the players send their workers to labor in various workshops, possibly even in their opponents’ districts. Additional workers can be earned by offering charity to the church. During the game, players will earn prestige points, primarily by completing artworks. prestige points can be spent during the game, but at the end of the game they will be the player’s primary source of victory points.

All of the characters in the game are real historical figures that lived and worked in Italy during the Renaissance. Most of them worked in Florence. All of the buildings in the game were real Renaissance workshops. The artworks the players can complete include the masterpieces of some of the most famous artists in the world.

Note from the designers directly from the rulebook:

"We apologize if we included some characters in the game who never worked in Florence during the Renaissance, but we wanted to include all of the most important artists (in our opinion) from that golden age of Italian art and culture. Michelangelo, for example, left an important mark on the history of the city—and the Renaissance period—even if he was only in Florence for a short time. We also added some portraits of military leaders (created by Ivan Zoni) to the rulebook. They are not involved in the game, but they were influential members of public life during this era.
The names of the buildings, parts of the Cathedral, and the workshops are in the literal form they had in Italy during the 1400-1600 period. Some of them are unchanged in the modern Italian language, some have changed a little, and others have completely disappeared or remain only in some dialects. We chose to maintain those words, without translating them into a language that the real artists didn’t know. We hope you agree with our choice, and we hope you have a good time playing Florenza!"