UK)

Penny Dreadfuls of Victorian London

Penny Dreadfuls were short illustrated periodicals, very popular in the United Kingdom in the second half of the nineteenth century.
They were very cheap booklets, costing just one copper penny and offering short stories with vivid and popular themes narrated with an emphatic and sensationalist style.
Despite the low cultural value, Penny Dreadfuls gave birth to a genre that has constantly evolved to this day.

In Penny Dreadfuls of Victorian London: Sensational Tales of Terror, 1 to 5 players will share bizarre and frightening tales masterfully narrated by our authors, set in gloomy Victorian London in the late 19th century, infamous for the mysterious serial murders in the neighborhoods of Whitechapel and Whitehall.

In each Sensational Tale, specific Characters living in an ordinary Victorian world are suddenly embroiled in shocking events that catapult them out of reality and natural conventions. By joining them, players face a bizarre scenario, investigating, making deductions and choices,
facing trials leading to unpleasant consequences or handsome rewards.

Each game has a variable number of turns with different possible outcomes, ranging from miserable failure to utter and satisfying success, all depending on how the players interpret the story, sharing the fate of their Stars.

—description from the publisher

On the Underground: London/Berlin

The London Underground is the world's first underground passenger railway, having opened in 1863. Its 11 lines move about 5 million passengers a day to 270 stations, along 400 km (250 mi) of track.

The massive network of London Underground stations makes up one of the most complex transportation systems in the world, and On the Underground challenges you to develop it. Build the most successful lines, connect them to landmarks, and attract passenger traffic!

Gameplay Overview

In On the Underground, the players build the Underground lines in London or the U-Bahn lines in Berlin. Each player controls 2-4 different lines, depending on the number of players.

On each turn, four destination cards are available, corresponding to stations on the map. You can take up to four actions; an action is either building track by placing one of your track tokens on the board or taking a branch token. A player may use two branch tokens to branch out of an existing line (whereas normally lines can be extended only at the endpoints).

After each player's turn, a passenger token is moved along players' lines, avoiding walking as much as possible, to reach one or two destinations determined at the beginning of the turn. The destination cards corresponding to the visited stations are then replaced by new ones, then the next player takes their turn.

Players score points in two ways:

By building track and connecting their lines to various types of stations, by building a circular line (in London), or at the end of the game if they have collected tiles from specific landmark stations (in Berlin).
By having the passenger use their lines when moving.

After all destination cards have been drawn and all players have taken the same number of turns, the game ends.

Differences from the First Edition of On the Underground

For their first turns only, the player first in turn order takes three actions, and the player last in turn order takes five actions. (Previously, everyone other than the start player had a few points added to their score as a balancing mechanism.)
The passenger is no longer removed from the board immediately when the draw deck is empty.
There is a new Berlin map, along with its corresponding cards and tiles.
On the London map, these single connections have been made double connections: Paddington-Shepherd's Bush, Shepherd's Bush-Goldhawk Road, Goldhawk Road-Hammersmith, Waterloo-Borough, London Bridge-Bank, Stratford-West Ham, and West Ham-Canning Town.
On the London map, this double connection has been made a triple connection: Borough-London Bridge
On the London map, the New Cross station has been removed, as has the connection between Aldgate and Canada Water.