Author: T3d-1978

Dungeon Academy

Dungeon Academy

Dungeon Academy

In Dungeon Academy, each player has a piece of paper that shows four dungeons, with each dungeon being a 4×4 grid. The game lasts four rounds, and in each round you will go through one of these dungeons. Each player also has a character card that shows some amount of life (red) and mana (blue) along with a special power.

What’s actually in a dungeon is determined by dice that you roll at the start of the round. You roll sixteen dice, then let them settle in a 4×4 grid. The dice show red and blue monsters in both small and large sizes, as well as blue potions and red strength. You decide where to enter the dice dungeon and which dice to pass through in a continuous line that can change directions only orthogonally, and you draw this corresponding line on your personal grid until you exit at some other point of the dungeon without crossing over your line. You then claim the lowest available number card, with the number of cards matching the number of players.

Game Mechanics:

  • Dice Rolling
  • Line Drawing
  • Paper and Pencil

Game Specifications:

  • 1 – 6 Players
  • ~20 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 1.25

Dream Home

Dream Home

Dream Home

What would your house look like? Would you rather have a huge bedroom with an elegant canopy bed or a spacious living room with a grand piano? You are going to play a part of designers who will plan a house and add more and more rooms to it.

Dream Home is a family game about building and furnishing your new house. Over twelve rounds, players collect pairs of cards consisting of a room card and an accessory card (roof, helper, furnishing or tool) and place them on their personal boards, creating their dream homes.

At the end of the game, all players’ houses are finished and fully furnished. Players compare their houses, counting points for functionality, good design, quality of roof and furnishing. The player with the nicest and most comfortable house wins.

Game Mechanics:

  • Memory
  • Open Drafting
  • Pattern Building
  • Set Collection

Game Specifications:

  • 2 – 4 Players
  • ~30 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 1.67

Dream Crush

Dream Crush

Dream Crush

Prepare to GUSH about your CRUSH!

Look into your heart and choose your favorite Crush, then guess who your friends are crushing on in this totally timeless fantasy dating game! Uncover sweet and strange secrets about prospective Crushes while navigating hilarious relationship milestones that will leave your feelings reeling as you play. Only by correctly predicting who makes your friends swoon will you live happily ever after with your own Dream Crush!

Inspired by the classic dating games of the past half-century or so, Dream Crush was brought to life by Found Footage Fest cofounder Nick Prueher, with graphic design by Chris Bilheimer and the Mondo team, original artwork by We Buy Your Kids, and incredible photography by Carli Davidson featuring a gorgeous cast of Crushes.

The game is played over five rounds: in each round, a Milestone Card with steadily increasing impact is revealed (ex: “They ask you to be on their bar trivia team” or “You must co-sign a lease with one Crush”. Next, a Secret about each Crush is revealed, lending insight into their unique personalities and lifestyles.

Each player secretly chooses a Crush to embark upon the Milestone with, writing it on their scorecard, while also predicting who their friends will pick. Once everyone has recorded their answers, players take turns revealing their choices, often engaging in passionate table-talk defending their decision-making process (which becomes more agonizing as the rounds pass).

All correct guesses count as points toward a total that will determine the winner at the end of the game.

Game Mechanics:

  • Paper and Pencil
  • Party Game
  • Role Playing

Game Specifications:

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

Drachenturm

Drachenturm

Drachenturm

A fearsome dragon has trapped the princess in his tower. The prince and his companions rush to her aid. They must skillfully work together using their strong memory skills in order to rescue the princess before the dragon makes everything come crashing down.

Game Mechanics:

  • Cooperative
  • Dexterity
  • Memory

Game Specifications:

  • 2 – 4 Players
  • ~15 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 1.30

Downforce

Downforce

Downforce

High-stakes bidding on million-dollar race cars. Frantic bets placed in secret even as the cars race around the track. And to the victor, the biggest purse of all. But in the world of motor racing, the margin between victory and defeat can be a single moment: a steep banked turn, tires screaming and spitting out smoke, and the downforce, pressing you down in your seat and keeping you on the track as you make your move inside to pull ahead.

Downforce is a card-driven bidding, racing, and betting game for 2-6 players based on Top Race, the award-winning design by the legendary Wolfgang Kramer. Players first bid to own the six cars in the race, then they play cards from their hand to speed them around the track. However, most cards will also move their opponents’ cars. So figuring out just the right time to play a card is the key to victory. Along the way, players make secret bets on who they think will win the race. Whoever has the most money from their prize money, winning bets, and remaining bank wins.

This is a game whose design needed no attention. Years of play and multiple versions have honed it to near perfection. On the contrary, one of the design challenges was figuring which of the many rules modules to incorporate to create the most fun version. Downforce also adds variable player powers to improve replayability. But mostly, it improves the look of the game to make it gorgeous and easy to play. Special attention was paid to the colors, the layout of the cards, the design of the cars, the details on the board, and more.

Game Mechanics:

  • Auction/Bidding
  • Hand Management
  • Racing

Game Specifications:

  • 2 – 6 Players
  • 20 – 40 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 1.74

Dodos Riding Dinos

Dodos Riding Dinos

Dodos Riding Dinos

Advance with blue or red cards and solve their whacky effects. Some will test your dexterity against your rivals by throwing bananas, flicking dodo eggs or making meteors fall.

Red cards are extra powerful but if too many players pick them during the same round, their effects will be ignored. Green cards allow the Dodo to react at any time.

Damage your rivals so they discard cards, with no cards in hand their Dodos will retrocede as a penalty and draw some cards.

At the end of each round, the Dodo in the lead advances an extra space while the rest gets to draw a card.

The fastest Dodo and Dino will be saved from extinction!

Game Mechanics:

  • Dexterity
  • Dice Rolling
  • Racing

Game Specifications:

  • 1 – 8 Players
  • ~20 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 1.60

Dixit

Dixit

Dixit

Each turn in Dixit, one player is the storyteller, chooses one of the six cards in their hand, then makes up a sentence based on that card’s image and says it out loud without showing the card to the other players. Each other player then selects the card in their hand that best matches the sentence and gives the selected card to the storyteller, without showing it to anyone else.

The storyteller shuffles their card with all of the received cards, then reveals all of these cards. Each player other than the storyteller then secretly guesses which card belongs to the storyteller. If nobody or everybody guesses the correct card, the storyteller scores 0 points, and each other player scores 2 points. Otherwise, the storyteller and whoever found the correct answer score 3 points. Additionally, the non-storyteller players score 1 point for every vote received by their card.

The game ends when the deck is empty or if a player has scored at least 30 points. In either case, the player with the most points wins.

Game Mechanics:

  • Party Game
  • Racing
  • Storytelling
  • Targeted Clues

Game Specifications:

  • 3 – 6 Players
  • ~30 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 1.26

Dive

Dive

Dive

Beyond the last continent on the remote island Windbark, diving is an ancestral tradition. During a rite of passage celebrated at the summer solstice, divers compete to retrieve the sacred stone of the village. The elder throws it from the top of the cliff, and the stone leads the contenders for the title of “hero” down to the depths of the ocean, aided in their quest by friendly sea turtles and manta rays.

However, to retrieve the stone, they will need to avoid upsetting the sharks that inhabit the ocean…

Dive plays simultaneously for all player divers, who start the game facing a shuffled stack of 36 transparent “ocean” cards. You have your own diver board and a set of five air tokens that are numbered 1-5 on both sides, with a shark on one side of each token.

Game Mechanics:

  • Action Points
  • Programmed Movement
  • Push Your Luck
  • Racing

Game Specifications:

  • 1 – 4 Players
  • 20 – 30 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 1.53

Dimension

Dimension

Dimension

In the puzzle game Dimension six task cards are laid out each round, with these cards dictating how the balls in the game should be stacked on top of one another and side to side. These challenges aren’t easy as some colors shouldn’t touch one another.

Fast puzzle-solving is important, but more than that in the end whoever solves the most of these difficult tasks wins.

Game Mechanics:

  • Pattern Building
  • Puzzle

Game Specifications:

  • 1 – 4 Players
  • ~30 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 1.37

Dice Town

Dice Town

Dice Town

Each player gets a cup with five poker dice and eight dollars. Each turn, a player will put together a poker hand and depending on the roll, take control of various key places in Dice Town that will allow him to perform the corresponding action of the location.

In a turn, all players shake their cup and take out all but one die, which is kept apart from the others. They repeat the process with the remaining dice until all five dice are on the table. Players may want to keep more than one die; they pay one dollar for each additional die.

Game Mechanics:

  • Dice Rolling
  • Set Collection

Game Specifications:

  • 2 – 5 Players
  • ~45 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 1.69