steampunk

Inventors and tinkerers abound in the Victorian era, harnessing the power of clockwork, steam, and electricks to build machines capable of anything to give glory to Queen Victoria!

In the steampunk worker placement game Steam Works, you'll put your mechanics to work collecting components and power sources, then you'll literally build devices by assembling those sources and components. What's more, those devices in turn become action spaces for other players to use!

Each player takes on an inventor persona with unique starting components or special abilities accessible only to themselves. But the heart of the game is in assembling modular component tiles into a device for other players to use. Sources may provide one or more of the three power types — clockwork, steam, or Tesla-style electrickal power — to the components connected to them, which in turn provide a wide range of effects for gaining resources, prestige points, or more component tiles. Devices start simple with just two components (one source and one component), but devices with three, four or more components will become possible — as soon as the players assemble a device to let it be possible. Because of the modular mix-and-match nature of the components, the available action spaces vary widely from one game to the next, providing great replayability: each game players will create devices never seen before!

Mad professors test their experimental racing machines on the lab roof. Each player has a favorite machine, a set of movement cards for the racers and a secret score card. The score card shows the actual result you want to achieve, each player wanting the 4 cars to finish in a different order. The movement cards have 3 functions, showing number of spaces to move, or direction to move in, or 2 vehicles out of the 4 available that you could move. Start order changes each turn, the first player chooses one card of the three available, the next chooses a different type of card, the 3rd player the last type. The final player decides which car moves of the 2 cars that have been chosen as possible cars to move. The board also has random oil patches and hazards.

As owners of a fantastic steam park, you're to build gigantic, coal-powered rides to attract as many visitors as you can – but building attractions won't be enough. You'll also need to manage your employees, invest in advertising in order to attract and please the different kinds of guests visiting your park, and, above all, keep the dirt that your park produces under strict control!

Steam Park is an easy-to-learn game with two difficulty levels: one for the less experienced gamers and a more strategic one for those who want a more exciting challenge. In this management game, you'll have to build your own amusement park and make it the largest and most profitable in the region. By constructing the three-dimensional, wonderful rides designed by Marie Cardouat, you will see your park grow right before your eyes. Choose your strategy! Build Stands to attract more Visitors, or Toilets to keep the Dirt under control. Whatever decision you take, take it quickly: The less time you spend planning, the more time you'll have to maintain your park. Thanks to a clever, original action-choosing mechanism, winning in Steam Park is as much a matter of being the best as of being the fastest!

Description from the publisher:

It's the year 1899, and strange phenomena is being observed in places like Stonehenge and the pyramids of Egypt. Time goes crazy, and newly discovered crystals have exhibited strange properties that allow for the creation of fantastic apparatuses.

In a race to exploit these discoveries, the rapidly industrializing nations have used them to construct gigantic steam-driven airships to travel through time and space. In Steam Time, the race is on for long-lost knowledge, vanished cultures, and hidden treasures. Travel to past ages, search for crystals, and use your crystals wisely to stay ahead of your competitors.

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.