Author: OTSG Staff

CATAN: Junior

| OTSG Staff

Explore the seas! Catan: Junior introduces a modified playing style of the classic Settlers of Catan, giving players as young as five a perfect introduction to the Catan series of games.

Catan: Junior takes place on a ring of islands where 2 to 4 players build hideouts and encounter the mysterious Spooky Island, where the Ghost Captain lives. Each island generates a specific resource: wood, goats, molasses or swords, and players can acquire gold. Each player starts with two pirate hideouts on different islands, and they can use the resources they acquire to build ships, hideouts or get help from Coco the Parrot. By building ships, they can expand their network; the more hideouts they build, the more resources they may receive. Just watch out for the dreaded Ghost Captain!

Be the first player to control seven pirate hideouts, and you win!

What sets this apart from the previous Die Siedler von Catan: Junior from 2007:

  1. This game is playable with two as it comes with a two-player map.
  2. The three- and four-player map is larger and is more symmetrical, so that two of the colors don’t operate at a disadvantage.
  3. The map now shows die faces rather than numbers for resource production.
  4. Many of the event cards have been removed to make the game simpler.
  5. There are no cards in the game only tiles for more durability.
  6. There are no longer harbors in the game. In the original game you had to set up the board with random secret harbor tiles that allow for better trades with the bank. Now the trading to the bank is simpler and can be done from the beginning and doesn’t require people to build to the harbors.
  7. The resources are different.
  8. There is a race for the Coco the Parrot tiles (rather than ‘CoCo Helps’ cards) and those that have the most get to put an extra piece on the board (one step closer to winning), tied players take their piece off the island and leave it vacated.
  9. The market is now a part of the board, and can be traded into only once on your turn
  10. By default, Trading with other players is excluded and only part of the “advanced game”. In Die Siedler von Catan: Junior trading with other players could be excluded to simplify the game.

Game Mechanics:

Game Specifications:

  • 2 – 4 Players
  • ~30 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 1.50

1347: De Nigrae Pestis Ludum

| OTSG Staff

The year of our Lord 1347: The Black Death has arrived via Eastern trade routes, bringing suffering and misery to the towns and countryside. The sole hope for relief from a slow and painful death lies in the hands of the plague doctors. Dressed in black cloaks, and masks stuffed with vinegar-rags and spice, the surgeons roam the Burgus streets searching for the infected. To these they offer salvation, saving their flesh from death, while gaining prestige with the princely court and — why not? — one or two shiny coins!

Will you prove yourselves as valorous surgeons, up to the tasks you’re called to resolve? Will you expand your influence with good works, draining infected swamps and building plague hospitals? Or will you give in to the facts of life, and death, raking in whatever coins you happen to find?

1347 is a strategic game in which players are plague doctors with the aim of gaining as much fame and prestige as possible to become the most important of the town. Each player has resource cards, money, grave diggers, and five influence tokens at their disposal to invest in order to defeat the plague and enrich themselves. There are three stages that will repeat for three periods (that will vary from 6 to 9 game rounds):

  1. Investments -> Each player, turn by turn, will invest one influence token (from 0-4 influence points) in one of the six areas of the board, each one with different actions allowed. All the investments are hidden. Investments go on until all players remain with no tokens.
  2. Actions -> Starting from Area 1, all invested tokens are revealed. The player who invested the most is the only one who can exploit the actions allowed from that area. The other players who invested can convert their “unused points” in money or grave diggers. So losing is also a strategy. In case of tie, the first player, or the nearest one in clockwise has priority, in any case the first player will change at the end of each round.
  3. Upkeep -> In this stage players collect money from the Agrus (the country), can heal their recruited plagued commoners, or can maintain their healed commoners. Healed commoners give players new influence tokens to invest and an ability to exploit as long as they remain healed.

There are many kind of actions players can do: recruit commoners, transform grave diggers in peasants to collect money, build expansions to enforce their influence to specific areas, etc.

At the end of the game, the players obtain 1 wealth point (victory points) for:

  • Each influence point (the value shown on each influence token held);
  • Every five coins;
  • Each subject card;
  • Each development held;
  • Every three gravediggers held (including the player’s reserve and those assigned to the Agrus).

Game Mechanics:

Game Specifications:

  • 2 – 6 Players
  • 50 – 180 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.82

Heat: Rocky Roads

| OTSG Staff

The desert heat is relentless but so are you…

Gravel sprays out from under your tires and your car gives a sickening lurch as it begins to spin out. Clutch. Shift. Gas! Your engine roars and your car leaps into the next turn on a perfect line; you’re still in the race but you’ll have to watch for loose gravel on the track.

Heat: Rocky Roads introduces two new racing tracks. In the South Africa Grand Prix you will face treacherous gravel on the track, requiring careful management of your car and nerves of steel. Victory on the Germany track will hinge on how you deal with the fast pace of the newly build chicanes along the long straight away.

Take part in the 1966 Championship season and take advantage of a new innovation, the sliding Skirt, to surprise your opponents and slipstream to victory!

Game Mechanics:

Game Specifications:

  • 1 – 7 Players
  • 60 – 120 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.38

DC Breakout: Arkham Asylum

| OTSG Staff

Make a mad dash out of Arkham Asylum – again! You’ve broken out before, though, so to make things more interesting, you’ve challenged your fellow rogues of Gotham City to a race to freedom. Can you make your daring getaway before your opponents?

In DC Breakout: Arkham Asylum, each player gets five villains from Batman’s history, then chooses two teams of two villains, with each team competing in one of two races. Hundreds of possible duos exist, with each villain having a unique power that can be supplemented with gadgets to gain the upper hand over your rivals. Whoever wins the second race wins the entire game.

Game Mechanics:

Game Specifications:

  • 2 – 6 Players
  • 30 – 45 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 1.00

Antiques Ghost Show

| OTSG Staff

“Ah yes, this is a very interesting piece! Notice the fine craftsmanship, and that you can barely hear the otherworldly wailing emanating from it.”

You and up to 3 opponents are rival antiques dealers, each of whom received an invitation to a manor home filled to the brim with very old and valuable collectibles. But when you arrive, you quickly realize that each and every item in the house has one thing in common: they are hopelessly haunted!

Bringing these terrifying treasures back to your warehouse seems like a ghastly idea, but having just a few might raise your profile. Perhaps you can even convince some wealthy collectors to take some of the macabre museum pieces off your hands…
Your goal is to escape the manor with the least haunted set of loot… that is, if you escape at all!

Game Mechanics:

Game Specifications:

  • 2 – 4 Players
  • 15 – 20 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 1.00

Catan: On the Road

| OTSG Staff

CATAN: On the Road builds on well-known CATAN mechanics with a fresh variation. Gameplay is driven by a deck of 120 cards. Players gather resources by drawing cards, construct developments from a common set of available choices, and negotiate trades either with the bank or with fellow players. Trading plays an even larger role in this version: any player who trades while it is not their turn is rewarded with an extra resource card.

How to Play:

– Collect and trade for the resource cards you need to build.
– Expand your region, recruit knights, and upgrade your settlements for victory points.
– Be the first player to reach 7 victory points to win the game.

Game Mechanics:

Game Specifications:

  • 3 – 4 Players
  • 15 – 30 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 1.75

For Sale Autorama

| OTSG Staff

For Sale Autorama is a quick, fun game about buying and selling vehicles: cars, motorcycles, RVs, semi-trucks, etc. During the game’s three distinct phases, players first bid to hire advisors, with those advisors then assisting them in the other two phases of the game, when the players purchase several vehicles, then attempt to sell them for the greatest profit possible.

Game Mechanics:

Game Specifications:

  • 3 – 6 Players
  • 30 – 45 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 1.79

Dark Pact

| OTSG Staff

To win the deck-building game Dark Pact, you need to complete one of the game’s thirteen Dark Pacts, each of which has a unique winning condition.

To set up, each player has a deck of ten cards, with cards being either actions, treasures, or multipliers. Players take turns clockwise until someone achieves a Dark Pact: “Keeper” Dark Pacts can stay in play, and if you ever meet their condition based on the cards you have in play, you win; “Instant” Dark Pacts are played as an action, and if you meet their condition based on the cards you have in hand, you win. (Alternatively, if the deck runs out, the player with the highest sum of Insight minus Curses wins.)

On a turn, you play one action from your hand, and an action might let you play additional actions; draw cards; gain cards from the supply; exile cards; and so on. Some cards attack opponents, and they can reveal a react card in response. Played cards stay in your play area.

Next, you can buy cards, first playing treasures from your hand to gain coins. (Action cards played earlier might also have coins on them.) You can purchase cards from the ten-card supply, as well as one card from your grimoire, which starts with three specific cards and to which you can add other cards during play.

You can modify an action or a treasure by playing x2 and x3 multipliers at the same time. Multipliers affect all numerals on the action or treasure, whether for coins, curses, draws, actions, etc.

To end your turn, clean up, first carrying out “clean up” effects on played cards, then discarding all played cards (except those that can remain in play, such as some Dark Pacts) and cards from your hand that you don’t want. If necessary, draw to fill your hand to five cards.

Dark Pact includes solitaire rules in which you compete against a bot that tries to win in one of three ways.

Game Mechanics:

Game Specifications:

  • 1 – 4 Players
  • ~50 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.63

Isle of Cats, The

| OTSG Staff

The Isle of Cats is a competitive, medium-weight, card-drafting, polyomino cat-placement board game.

In the game, you are citizens of Squalls End on a rescue mission to The Isle of Cats and must rescue as many cats as possible before the evil Lord Vesh arrives. Each cat is represented by a unique tile and belongs to a family, you must find a way to make them all fit on your boat while keeping families together. You will also need to manage resources as you:

  • Explore the island (by drafting cards)
  • Rescue cats
  • Find treasures
  • Befriend Oshax
  • Study ancient lessons

Each lesson you collect gives you another personal way of scoring points, and 38 unique lessons are available. Complete lessons, fill your boat, and keep cat families together to score points, and the player with the most points after five rounds wins.

Game Mechanics:

Game Specifications:

  • 1 – 4 Players
  • 60 – 90 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.36