Worker Placement

Game description from the publisher:

In the Martian mining colony of ARES-6, crime pays. Three factions vie for control of this corrupt new world and everything within it. You are a mercenary known as a "freelancer", here to profit off the conflict, to make a name for yourself – but ambition alone isn't enough. A network of seedy contacts will assist you in undertaking the dangerous missions necessary to bolster your rep. Whether it's hiring henchmen to carry out your dirty work or plotting with secret schemes, you'll let nothing stand between you and your squalid goals.

In Infamy, players find that nearly anything can be bought for the right price. Players attempt to win the game by being the first to reach 15 Infamy points or by reaching the highest reputation level in any one of three factions: the Harada Cartel, the Trust Megacorp, or the PKD Militia. The core of this auction and influence game is the "Pay to Play" mechanism in which players must sacrifice bidding power in order to place any bids at all. Spend too much time bidding against an opponent, and your currency will dwindle – but if you refuse to bid, you'll be forced to watch your opponent acquire all those things that only the criminal underworld can deliver.

Here at the end of the world, where everyone and everything has its price, there is but a single ambition that endures: Infamy.

Monolith is a fast-paced, confrontational, and exciting worker placement game that will reward players who make use of thoughtful and creative gameplay strategies. No two games will play the same as changing Fate and Rune cards are introduced to create a variable game board offering phenomenal replayability. Players will be executing exciting combinations and managing valuable resources, all while cautiously engaging other players.

To begin the game, the game board is seeded with five Starting Rune cards, six Rune cards at random, and one randomly-drawn Fate card. Once the first player is determined, they gain the powerful Primus Token and randomly determine the placement of the starting "Round 1" card, while all other players receive one Skill card or one gem.

Players then take turns placing or socketing one die at a time onto a Rune card of their choice, yielding Skill and Power cards, gems or victory points, and they can even attack other players. After all dice have been placed, the cards on the board are resolved in sequential order. As each die is removed, the effect of that placement is resolved. This sequence makes for exciting combinations and rewards strategic play.

All resources of the game are finite, so players need to play carefully in order to avoid wasting placements. The game ends after five rounds or immediately if any player reaches Victory on the Score Track.

"Kanban" — the Japanese word for billboard — is a term for the visual cues that might be used in a lean, efficient assembly line in order to expedite and smooth workflow. These signals get the workers what they need, where they need it, when they need it to create a just-in-time (JIT) production system.

The setting for the game Kanban: Automotive Revolution is an assembly line. The players are ambitious managers who are trying to impress the board of directors in order to achieve as high a position as possible in the company and secure their careers. With promotions come advantages at the factory, such as more space to store precious materials and greater prestige to accelerate your ascent. Through solid management, you must strive to shine next to your peers. You need to manage suppliers and supplies, improve automobile parts, innovate — anything to stay on the cutting edge, or getting your hands greasy on the assembly line in order to boost production. You must exercise wisdom in choosing which projects you should start, selecting only those that will give you the upper hand and shunning those that will bog you down or cause the unthinkable — failure — which would diminish you in the eyes of the board.

Over the course of the game, you persuade the board and the factory tender to help you develop and improve automobile parts. You make shrewd use of the outside suppliers and the limited factory supplies in order to appropriate needed part when the suppliers come up short. Because the factory must run at optimum efficiency, production doesn't wait for you or for mistakes.

Like the process itself, Kanban: Automotive Revolution proves to be both innovative and rewarding. Game mechanisms tightly tied to the automobile manufacturing theme include:

The factory manager is a game-driven non-player character with two modes of play ("nice" or "mean") to offer a friendly or more competitive gameplay environment.
Two independent player-influenced game timers — the factory production cycle and work week clock — provide timing tension to the game, trigger intermediate scoring phases, and factor into the game end conditions.
A simulation of the factory assembly line with spatial point-to-point movement adds an element to the game that requires optimal timing.
A design and innovation department, leveraged to manipulate the value of the various car models and component upgrades produced within the factory, drives the economy of the game.
Departmental training and certification tracks provide players a means to operate more efficiently.

If you want a seat on the board someday, you need to show that you can keep a complex machine running smoothly, efficiently, with everything happening just at the right time. Kanban: Automotive Revolution is a pure Eurogame focused on economics and resource management that puts you in the driver's seat of an entire production facility, racing for the highest level of promotion.

In Fresco, players are master painters, working to restore a fresco in a Renaissance church.

Each round begins with players deciding what time they would like to wake up for the day. The earlier you wake up, the earlier you will be in turn order, and the better options you will be guaranteed to have. Wake up early too often, however, and your apprentices will become unhappy and stop working as efficiently. They would much rather sleep in!

Then, players decide their actions for the turn, deploying their apprentice work force to various tasks. You'll need to buy paint, mix paint, work on painting the fresco, raise money by painting portraits (which you'll need to buy the aforementioned paint!), and perhaps even send your apprentices to the opera in order to increase their happiness. Points are scored mostly by painting the fresco, which requires specific combinations of paints, so you'll need to buy and mix your paints wisely, in addition to beating other players to the paints and frescos you would like to paint.

Fresco: Big Box contains all of the material from the original Fresco game, plus all expansions released through the end of 2012 and the all new 2nd expansion (with modules 8, 9, and 10)! You can play without expansions for a lighter family game, or add in expansions – whether one, two, or all – to vary play and to increase the decision-making and difficulty, resulting in a very flexible game with a high replay value.

Early Italy, 600 BCE – Five city states are vying each other for superiority in the region: Roma with their Roman inhabitants, Velletri with the Volscian inhabitants, Reate with their Sabin inhabitants, Veii with their Etruscian inhabitants, and Alba Longa with their Latin inhabitans. Each player controls a city state and tries to be the first to have 16+ population and 10 monuments. This city state is destined to be a glorious power of the Ancient World!

A game of Alba Longa offers a fine combination of dice selection, city management, and worker assignment (inside your own city), and is spiced up with the ingredient of city combat (soldiers and heroes)! Inside the box are three big variants – Assisi, A Job Well Done, and Spoils of War – which can be added and combined at your will and which add even more longevity to this game!

In prototype form, under the name The Great Pyramid, this design was one of four winners of the 2009 Concours International de Créateurs de Jeux de Société, a design competition run by Centre National du Jeu in France. Here's what the jury said about the game: The Great Pyramid is rich with an astonishing number of possible strategies but manages to convey the clarity of the whole mechanism. The choices offered to the players are numerous and present a contentious interaction too rare in this kind of game.