Have a view at which games were bought by the Club during this first trimester : it feels a bit like Christmas.

Our buyers decided to go for the following games :

– Letters from Whitechapel : Get ready to enter the poor and dreary Whitechapel district in London 1888 – the scene of the mysterious Jack the Ripper murders – with its crowded and smelly alleys, hawkers, shouting merchants, dirty children covered in rags who run through the crowd and beg for money, and prostitutes – called “the wretched” – on every street corner. The board game Letters from Whitechapel, which plays in 90-150 minutes, takes the players right there. One player plays Jack the Ripper, and his goal is to take five victims before being caught. The other players are police detectives who must cooperate to catch Jack the Ripper before the end of the game. The game board represents the Whitechapel area at the time of Jack the Ripper and is marked with 199 numbered circles linked together by dotted lines. During play, Jack the Ripper, the Policemen, and the Wretched are moved along the dotted lines that represent Whitechapel’s streets. Jack the Ripper moves stealthily between numbered circles, while policemen move on their patrols between crossings, and the Wretched wander alone between the numbered circles.

– Space Cadets : Dice Duel : Space Cadets: Dice Duel – the “Team vs. Team, Real-time, Dice-Rolling Game of Starship Combat!” – pits two spaceships against one another in quick-paced combat. The players are divided into two teams, each team playing the crew of a ship and winning or losing together based on how well they perform. The game ends when one side destroys their opponent by causing four points of damage through torpedoes or mines. Each ship has six Bridge Stations: Engineering generates power for the other stations, Helm maneuvers the ship on the map, Weapons loads the torpedo tubes to attack the enemy, Sensors locks onto the enemy so torpedoes can hit, and uses jammers to stop the enemy from locking on, Shields helps protect the ship from enemy torpedoes, Tractor Beams can grab the powerful crystals, move the enemy ship on the map, and launch Mines. Each player is in charge of one or more of these stations, or has the overall role of Captain to coordinate everything. There are no game turns in Space Cadets: Dice Duel; instead the game continues with players acting as quickly as possible until one side wins.

– Nexus Ops : Nexus Ops is a light-medium science fiction war game. The game boasts a hexagonal board that is set up differently every time, as well as (in the Avalon Hill edition) cool “glow” miniatures and lots of combat. Players control competing futuristic corporations that battle each other for control of the moon’s Rubium Ore. By winning battles and fulfilling Secret Missions, you can obtain victory points. Units are composed of various alien races and have stats similar to those used in the Axis & Allies series. Combat is also similar. Players who lose battles are compensated with Energize cards which grant them special powers later. Players can also obtain Energize cards by controlling the Monolith, a raised structure in the center of the grid. The first person to reach the required number of victory points wins the game.

– Dead Panic : The zombie apocalypse has begun, and you and your friends take on the roles of various characters who are all working to survive. In Dead Panic, each player takes on the role of one of eight unique characters, which have special abilities. Players work together to survive in a remote cabin, at the center of the board, against waves of the undead that close in from the edges of the board. If the players can hold out, survivors bring pieces of the radio needed to call for rescue. Once rescue arrives, it’s up to each player to leave the safety of the cabin and make it out alive! To fight the zombies, players use cabin cards, some of which are weapons that help players attack zombies at a distance or in hand-to-hand combat. If characters take too many injuries during combat, they die and return to the game as a zombie with customized rules as a member of the undead! Other cabin cards are items, which give the players various benefits and a better chance at survival. The supply of items and weapons is limited, however. Once the cabin deck is exhausted, it is not reshuffled. A separate deck of cards, called event cards, allow the zombies to have their turn. This deck not only brings a variety of zombies into play but each card also has a special effect when drawn.

– Elder Sign : It is 1926, and the museum’s extensive collection of exotic curios and occult artifacts poses a threat to the barriers between our world and the elder evils lurking between dimensions. Gates to the beyond begin to leak open, and terrifying creatures of increasing strength steal through them. Animals, the mad, and those of more susceptible minds are driven to desperation by the supernatural forces the portals unleash. Only a handful of investigators race against time to locate the eldritch symbols necessary to seal the portals forever. Only they can stop the Ancient One beyond from finding its way to Earth and reducing humanity to cinders. Elder Sign is a fast-paced, cooperative dice game of supernatural intrigue for one to eight players by Richard Launius and Kevin Wilson, the designers of Arkham Horror. Players take the roles of investigators racing against time to stave off the imminent return of the Ancient One. Armed with tools, allies, and occult knowledge, investigators must put their sanity and stamina to the test as they adventure to locate Elder Signs, the eldritch symbols used to seal away the Ancient Ones and win the game. To locate Elder Signs, investigators must successfully endure Adventures within the museum and its environs. A countdown mechanism makes an Ancient One appear if the investigators are not quick enough. The investigators must then battle the Ancient One. A clever and thematic dice mechanism pits their exploration against monsters and the sheer difficulty of staying sane and healthy, all within the standard game duration of one to two hours.

– Robinson Crusoé : Robinson Crusoe: Adventure on the Cursed Island is another epic game created by Ignacy Trzewiczek, the author of Stronghold. This time Trzewiczek takes the players to a deserted island, where they’ll play the parts of shipwreck survivors confronted by an extraordinary adventure. They’ll be faced with the challenges of building a shelter, finding food, fighting wild beasts, and protecting themselves from weather changes. Building walls around their homes, animal domestication, constructing weapons and tools from what they find and much more awaits them on the island. The players decide in which direction the game will unfold and – after several in-game weeks of hard work – how their settlement will look. Will they manage to discover the secret of the island in the meantime? Will they find a pirate treasure, or an abandoned village? Will they discover an underground city or a cursed temple at the bottom of a volcano? Answers to these questions lie in hundreds of event cards and hundreds of object and structure cards that can be used during the game…

– Indigo : Indigo is a tile-laying game along the lines of Metro, Tsuro, and Linie 1 in which players build paths bit by bit, with no player owning the individual paths and everyone trying to exploit the paths already present. Unlike those earlier games, however, your goal is to move gemstones from their starting locations on the board to your designated goals, with the player who scores the most points winning the game. To set up the game board, place the central hex tile, then add five green gems and one indigo gem to it. Place six “U-turn” tiles at their designated locations on the outer edge of the game board, then place a yellow gem on each such tile. Each player places goal markers on goals between these U-turn tiles on the edge of the game board: in a two-player game, the players alternate goals; in a three-player game, each player has one goal to herself, while sharing two others; and in a four-player game, each player shares a goal with every other player. On a turn, a player places a tile on any space on the game board, with the only restriction being that a player cannot create a route directly from one goal to another. Each tile has three route segments on it, connecting one pair of edges. If a player places a tile next to a gemstone, that gemstone “moves” as far as possible along the route so that all players can see where to place tiles to next move that gemstone. (Thus players avoid the mental gymnastics required in Metro and Linie 1 in which nothing moves until a route is complete.) When connecting to the central tile, the green gems move off first, with the indigo gem moving only with the sixth connection. If a player places a tile so that one gem would run into another, both gems are removed from the game! When a gem is moved to a goal owned by only one player, that player keeps the gem. If two players own the goal, then both players collect a gem of that color, taking the extra gem needed from the reserve. Once all the gems have been claimed, the game ends, with players earning 3 points for an indigo gem, 2 for green, and 1 for yellow. The player with the most points wins.

– Rampage : In Rampage, you arrive in Meeple City as a gigantic, famished, scaly-skinned monster! Your goal: Dig your claws and dirty paws into the asphalt, destroy buildings, and devour innocent meeples – in short: sow terror while having fun. The monster who has caused the most damage after the carnage finally ends wins the game. The buildings in Meeple City are comprised of floor tiles and meeples, with the meeples serving as pillars that support the floors. Four wooden vehicles are on the ground in the eight neighborhoods in the city. Each monster, which consists of a wooden paws disc and a wooden body, starts in one corner of the game board. On a turn you take two actions from four possibilities, repeating an action if desired: Move: Pick up your monster body, flick the paws disc, then place the body back on the disc, Demolish: If your paws are on the sidewalk surrounding a building, you can pick up your monster body, drop it onto a building, then collect any floors that have no meeples on them, Toss a vehicle: If you’re in a neighborhood with a vehicle, you can pick up the vehicle, place it on your body, then flick the vehicle at a building or another monster, Breathe: Even while away from sidewalks with no vehicles, you can cause destruction by placing your chin on your monster’s body and blowing across the board. Monsters tend to be messy when obtaining meals, but if you knock meeples off the city board, you might be punished for letting food go to waste, costing you a tooth or letting other players take an additional action. After your two actions, you can eat unprotected meeples on the ground in your neighborhood, but you can eat only as many as the number of teeth you have. If you knock another monster to the ground, you break off one of its teeth, thereby keeping it from stealing your food! Meeples come in six colors, with the colors representing different types of inhabitants: blue (journalists), green (military), yellow (blondes), grey (old people), red (heroes), and black (businessmen). For each set of six you collect in your stomach, you score 10 points at game’s end. You score points for collecting floors and teeth, too, and you can also score for achieving the goal on your character card. Rampage includes rules for monsters that evolve over the course of the game, that lose points for meeples not in sets, and that want to combine two game boards to allow for play with up to eight players.

– Eminent Domain : Escalation : Welcome back, Emperor. The time for unchecked expansion is over. Warmongers raise their flags over weaker empires, while civilized planets take shelter behind peace treaties. Brace yourself for rising tensions in this next chapter of Eminent Domain: Escalation! This expansion for Eminent Domain, which cannot be played without the base game, puts the following new tools at the Emperor’s disposal: New meaning to the larger-sized ships in Eminent Domain. Additional Role cards to support a fifth player. Additional technologies, each with an alternate cost in addition to their normal Research cost. A new category of technology (“Diverse”), requiring one planet of each type to research. Optional scenarios for asymmetric starting positions and technologies for each player. In addition to the character card, each player has a power card and a superpower card unique to his monster, with the former lasting the entire game and the latter being a one-shot effect that’s revealed only upon use.

– Wildcatters : Wildcatters is a tactical and strategic board game set during the booming business of the 19th century oil industry! The players are oil barons who develop oil fields; bid for oil rights; and build rigs, oil tankers, trains, and refineries. Your goal is to deliver more oil barrels to the continents than the other players while also collecting more shares and money then them. The game lasts seven rounds with four players, and the game set-up is the same for each player, with three rigs, two trains, one tanker and one refinery being placed on the board. The game board features a world map divided into eight areas where you can find oil. Players choose an open area card and get money to build rigs, tankers, trains and refineries, after which they can buy oil actions. The players work together in an oilfield to find oil at a lower cost. The players transport oil together to the refineries, using trains and tankers from other players to deliver oil to the refineries – and all with one purpose: deliver more oil then the other players by the end of the game. (added in the list after the comment of Jean)

Then our kids games specialists have choosen the following games :

– Riff Raff : Imagine a cardanic hinge – the axis is upright and after going through a wooden floor that turns out to be the body of a ship, that axis ends up being the mast of said ship. Three spreaders rotate around it to provide balancing space for sailors, mice, bottles, crates. The spreaders are numbered (left or right to the mast, from five to ten), and the upper deck is divided into four quarters numbered 1-4. That’s the set-up for Riff Raff. Each player has the same set of “stuff” and a hand of cards numbered 1-10. Choose one card, then reveal it simultaneously with the other players. Then place anything you want onto the numbered space you chose. If the players all go to one side, the whole ship will tumble in rather unforeseeable ways to and fro, with one or more items falling off the ship with players trying to catch them quickly. Whatever you catch, goes out of the game. What falls down counts to the things you try to put on the ship. The player getting rid first of all his things, is winning the game.  For children 8+

– La Boca : Creating skylines of similar beauty and eccentricity is the goal of the construction teams that play La Boca. In shifting teams of two that sit across from one another, players try to create skylines on challenge cards – but the players can see the completed image only from their point of view, so they must consult with one another constantly to make sure each colored block ends up in the right location while racing against the timer. The faster the players complete their building, the more points they score. Then the next team takes a seat, breaks down the blocks, then begins building anew. Whoever has the most points after a certain number of rounds will stand atop La Boca and glory in the cheers of the Argentinian public! For children 8+

– Geheimcode 13+4 : Tonight is the night the secret mission “Amun Re” begins. The team, made up of four cunning secret agents, breaks into the museum and thanks to their precise calculations cracks the tricky codes of the security installation. Be it through addition or subtraction, multiplication or division, the numbers on the dice have to be combined so that the results coincide with the code numbers. Who in Secret Code 13+4 will be the first to overcome all the light barriers to get hold of the precious Amun Re mask?  For children 8+

– Katzofant : Katzofant is a speed action card game for children. The cards show 5 different animals in different sizes. Players compare the sizes of the animals on the table and in their hand and imitate the voice of the langest animal. The fastest player may discard one of his cards. The first player who gets rid of all his cards is the winner. For children 6+

– Kakerlakenpoker Royal : As in its parent game Kakerlakenpoker, Kakerlakenpoker Royal has nothing to do with poker – except that the game is all about bluffing, but with cards showing cockroaches, rats and stink bugs instead of queens, 10s and aces. To set up the game, shuffle the deck and deal the cards out to players. On a turn, a player takes one card from his hand, lays it face down on the table, slides it to a player of his choice, and declares a type of critter, e.g., “Stink bug”. The player receiving the card either accepts the card, says either “true” or “false”, then reveals the card. If this player is wrong in her claim, she keeps the card on the table in front of her face up; if she is right, the player who gave her the card places it face up before him or passes the card to another player, peeking at it first, then keeping it face-down and either saying the original type of critter or saying a new type. This new player again has the choice of accepting the card or passing it, unless the card has already been seen by all other players in which case the player must accept it and make a true/false claim. The game ends when a player has no cards to pass on his turn or when a player has four cards of the same critter on the table in front of him. In either case, this player loses and everyone else wins.  For children 8+

– Noah : In Noé the flood is at hand, and to save as many species as possible, Noah will need your help – with only the most deserving of players being saved from the waters! Each round, players start with eight animal cards in hand; five ferries are laid out in a circle, with one animal placed on board from the top of the deck. Noah himself stands on one ferry. On a turn, a player plays one card from hand onto the ferry where Noah is located, following two rules: (1) the total weight of all animals on board cannot exceed 21 and (2) animals on a ferry must be placed either in alternating gender order or must be all of the same gender. After placing an animal, the player moves Noah to a different ferry; if he played a female animal, Noah goes to either adjacent ferry, while if he played a male, Noah goes to either ferry on the other side of the circle. If a player can’t legally play an animal, he must first take in hand all the animals on the ferry where Noah is located, then play an animal. In addition to moving Noah to a nearly full ferry, players have two other ways to benefit themselves or mess with other players. If a player plays an animal identical to the one last played on that ferry, he moves Noah, then takes another turn. If a player brings the weight of a ferry to exactly 21, that ferry launches from shore to meet the ark located in distant waters, a new ferry becomes available for loading, and the player distributes 1-4 cards from the deck among his opponents. finally, some cards have special animals, such as the giraffe that lets you peek at an opponent’s hand and the woodpecker, which stupidly pokes holes in the ferry and reduces its maximum weight to 13. Bad woodpecker, bad! The round ends when a player runs out of cards in hand or a fourth ferry launches. Players receive penalty points for cards still in hand, scored according to the number of tears on each card, those tears representing Noah’s sadness at the animal being left behind. Then players shuffle all the animal cards and begin a new round. The player with the fewest points after three rounds wins! For children 8+

Would you need more information about those games or the other games of our collection, do not hesitate to contact us.