Worker Placement

Game description from the publisher:

Scofflaws are brawling in the streets of Deadwood. The railroad is being built, and to you and the other gangs in the badlands of South Dakota, this means one thing: cold, hard cash. As a cowboy on the wrong side of the law you know just how to take control of this shanty-town: threaten, fight, and kill off your rivals.

Deadwood is a wild-and-wooly board game with a quick and deadly twist on classic worker placement games. Your gang consists of three different classes of cowboys with different strengths: greenhorns, gunslingers, and trail bosses. Cowboys ride into town to gain control of (annex) buildings and fight other gangs' cowboys in shootouts.

At the beginning of the game, the town of Deadwood consists of the Town Hall, the Church, the Sheriff's Office, the Saloon, and four other randomly drawn buildings. Additional buildings are constructed whenever a cowboy annexes the Town Hall. Each building has at least one unique ability that is used immediately, with some buildings offering more long-term advantages.

A cowboy accesses these advantages by controlling the building. To gain control a player simply places one of his gang on a building tile, "annexing" it. Other gang leaders can try to gain control of your buildings through shootouts. The player that instigates the shootout receives a Wanted Poster token; the more cowboys you try to kill off, the more Wanted Poster tokens you collect, and the higher the fine you must pay at the end of the game.

Deadwood can end one of three ways: the Train Station is placed on the board once the railroad is built and completed, there are no more Wanted Poster tokens in the Crime Pool, or any player has no more cowboys alive. The player with the most cash at the end of the game is the winner!

The expansion to be used by 'Cuba'. An additional game board, more and different ship cards, laws, buildings, new character cards to be used with the other characters, and a whole new phenomenon: Cuba - the Arrival of the President!
In their turn, players may take and play a character from the 'El Presidente' board: the worker, dancer, attorney, warden, revolutionary or musician. They all have different effects.
The worker puts your goods into the warehouse; all your goods are safe this turn. The revolutionary gives you one victory point, the musician two money. The player with the dancer card becomes immediately the new start player; the old rule for determining the new start player is no longer in effect.

With the attorney a player may use a building even when his supervisor is not on the row or column of this building, paying one money. The warden may change two adjacent ships in position. There are two mule cards being used when playing with less than five players; these cards cannot be chosen. When all players have chosen a card, the car of the president moves to the position of the remaining card; remember, there are six cards that each turn are shuffled and randomly placed.

Under each card on the board are symbols that come into effect when the car of the president stops there. The first makes all law proposals go into effect; the second makes it possible to move the supervisor anywhere on a player board in the next round. The next symbol also is in effect for the next round: it allows you to pay one money and overbuild a building with another; the difference in resources must be paid as well. One symbol makes the leading player to go back two points on the score track; another allows players to purchase market wares at discount prices. Players must now not only consider which role they would like to take, but also which position they likely want to be visited by the president.

There are 2 additional laws in each of the four categories, so that the game can now last up to 8 rounds instead of just 6.

Fremde Federn, which means roughly "to adorn oneself with borrowed plumes," or something like "false feathers."

Fremde Federn is about borrowing elements from well-known games (Eurogames) and constructing a new game out of them. For now, it is a deck-building, worker-placement, drafting race game. The print-and-play files – German only for now – are available on the 2F-Spiele website.

You are a politician who tries to gather enough money and influence to become the next president. Of course, you depend on the work of others to get the needed influence. You start with a set of 10 cards (7 of them are "fatherly friends," which give you 1 money each and 3 of them yield 1 influence each (VPs)). Each round you draw 5 cards from your deck and use one card for the turn order to place your workers. The workers go to the different offices in the government building to buy new cards for you, get influence or to carry out other actions. Each round there is one more space in which you can choose to place your workers. On the game board is a row of cards which you can choose to buy and each round the empty places in this row are filled from a deck of cards divided into 4 different "Ages." The last cards of the deck are Doctoral degrees which you can buy with your money; these give you 1 VP for each unit of money spent. The game ends when all of the Doctoral degrees are bought or when one player has 95 VPs or more.

In Serge Laget's Cargo Noir – his fourth standalone box game from Days of Wonder – players represent "families" that traffic in smuggled goods in a 1950s noir setting. Each turn, you'll set sail to various ports where cargo is known to get "lost" for the right price – Hong Kong, Bombay, Rotterdam, New York and more – and you'll make an offer for the goods on display. If another family then offers more in that port, you'll need to up your bid or take your money and slink away to look for goods elsewhere. Stand alone in a port, though, and you'll be able to discretely move the goods from the dock to your personal warehouse. Says Laget in a press release accompanying the game announcement, "Everything in Cargo Noir grew from a core auction mechanism that is simple and trivial to explain – you can only bid up, and the last bidder standing gets the goods."

Once you collect goods, you can trade them in to add more ships to your fleet – allowing you to scout for wares in more locations – purchase Victory Spoils, or take other actions. The more goods you collect, the more valuable they can be. The player with the most Spoils at game end wins.

The year is 632 AD. The Byzantine Empire is all that remains of what once was the mighty Roman empire. She herself has only just survived a mighty war against Persia. Both empires now lay exhausted from their long years of struggle. Meanwhile, further south in the deserts of Arabia, the prophet Mohamed has given new meaning to an old religion and sets the peoples of that land on a course of action which will echo down the ages. Under the leadership of a succession of caliphs the Islamic Arabs are about to descend on the prostrate bodies of the Persian and Byzantine empires.

The game 'Byzantium' deals with the rise of the Muslim Caliphate and its war with the Byzantine Empire. Your role as a player is to take a stake in each side and outwit your opponents to secure your own personal victory.