Family Games

PARKS is a celebration of the US National Parks featuring illustrious art from Fifty-Nine Parks.

In PARKS, players will take on the role of two hikers as they trek through different trails across four seasons of the year. While on the trail, these hikers will take actions and collect memories of the places your hikers visit. These memories are represented by various resource tokens like mountains and forests. Collecting these memories in sets will allow players to trade them in to visit a National Park at the end of each hike.

Each trail represents one season of the year, and each season, the trails will change and grow steadily longer. The trails, represented by tiles, get shuffled in between each season and laid out anew for the next round. Resources can be tough to come by especially when someone is at the place you’re trying to reach! Campfires allow you to share a space and time with other hikers. Canteens and Gear can also be used to improve your access to resources through the game. It’ll be tough to manage building up your engine versus spending resources on parks, but we bet you’re up to the challenge. Welcome to PARKS!

—description from the publisher

Which Egyptian dynasty will be the most glorious? Pray to the Gods to construct edifices in their honor and ensure your dynasty has a millennia-long posterity.

Pyramids is a game for 2 to 5 players that sends you back in time to Ancient Egypt. Your necropolis — a place of eternal sleep, luxury, and glory — will be made up of pyramids, obelisks, and tombs. Select the best combination of stones in the quarry, optimize their layout, and make your necropolis the most famous in all of Egypt!

In New Haven, set in colonial New England, players must develop the riches of the land and build a thriving settlement. Players place tiles strategically to a shared game board to cut timber, quarry stone, plant fields of wheat, and fill pastures with fat sheep. Players then use these resources to erect buildings on their own village boards, attempting to complete rows and columns for population points. Whoever can build the biggest and most prosperous town will end up with the biggest population and win the game!

New Haven is a tile-laying game with a drafting component. The center board is the land between the player villages from which resources will be gathered. Players select from their two hidden tiles and play on this board to generate available value in some of the four resources. Once per game, each player can get a shipment which delivers a large value of one specific resource type.

This value is then used by the player to play building tokens on his personal village board. However, he can play only building tokens already owned behind his player screen, with restrictions on how buildings must be arranged. He can elect to play a token face down for more flexibility, but this means a lower score if he successfully completes that row or column of buildings.

Once a player is done building, any value he hasn't used is available for his opponents to use to build! Thus, the goal when placing resource tiles is to generate just enough for what is needed, not the most that can possibly be created. Finally, the player drafts new building tokens for use on future turns; plan your creation and consumption of resources to perfectly match your needs, and you'll be rewarded with additional tokens.

The base game lasts ten turns, and the player who attracts the most colonists to his village by completing roads and avenues of buildings wins the game.

New Haven plays well with 2, 3, or 4 players, lasting about 15 minutes per player, with a bit more time needed for learning games. The game includes a side B game board with some twists, as well as rule variants that can make the gameplay either more forgiving or more strategic.

Cube Quest is a dexterity game in which lightweight hollow cubic dice are flicked across custom rubber mats. Cubes that leave the mats are defeated. Play alternates until someone wins by defeating the enemy king. Cubes also risk defeat in enemy territory; if they land "shadow" side up, they have been captured and must be rolled, like dice, to determine whether they escape.

The cubes have different strengths and special abilities, such as taking extra flicks, immobilizing enemy cubes, reviving lost cubes, and hiding before strategic re-positioning.

The game allows for custom army building using a simple point system. Pre-battle setup involves a tactical selection of cubes worth a total of 40 points maximum to fight alongside their king. Each player also chooses how to position their cubes, creating individual attack and defense formations and structures!

The time has come for the tribe to leave its shelter and head for new lands. As the chief of your clan, it's up to you to guide your prehistoric people through the valley: Take advantage of the environment, pick and hunt for food, discover big and safe caverns for the upcoming winter, gather your tribe and discover the valley!

Sapiens is a short and easy-to-learn tile-placement game that can prove much deeper than it seems for gamers. Each player has a personal game board that represents the valley on which they will play tiles to determine the journey of their tribe through several prehistoric life scenes. Their aim is to gather food points on the plains and in the forests of the valley and to get shelter points for reaching caves in the mountains. A player's turn consists of two steps:

Connect one new tile from the four in his personal pool to the tiles already in play on his board, with connected scenes needing to match. These placements earn food points when a connection is made, earns shelter points when a cave is reached, and sometimes provides a special ability based on the connected scenes.
Choose a new tile from the five available in a common pool to re-fill his personal pool to four tiles.

Sapiens relies on instinctive domino-like mechanisms that are improved by interesting twists:

Laying tiles on personal (modular) game boards brings a bit of a puzzle feel to the game.
Having two separate scores — food and shelter — and knowing that only their lower one matters when determining who wins confronts players with interesting needs and dilemmas.
Including special powers linked to the eight different scenes represented on the tiles brings a lot of interaction and choices.