Author: OTSG Staff

Spy Club

| OTSG Staff
Spy Club

Spy Club

“We could start a Spy Club,” suggested Beatrice. “You know — search for clues and try to find mysteries to solve!”

In Spy Club, players work together as young detectives to solve neighborhood mysteries. It includes a replayable campaign format, with variable unlocking content, for playing a series of 5 games connected together to tell a larger story. Throughout the campaign, you’ll unlock new modules with additional rules and story elements. With 40 new modules and 174 cards in the campaign deck, you can reset everything and play multiple campaigns — with a different story and gameplay experience emerging each time.

In the standard game, each player has double-sided clue cards in front of them. On your turn, you use actions to flip, draw, and trade clue cards, gain ideas, and confirm clue cards as evidence. Confirm 5 clues of the same type to solve part of the case. As you discover more and more of the solution, a story starts to emerge: your Neighbor stole something from the ice cream shop, but what? And why? To crack the case, you must find the solution to all 5 parts before the suspect escapes or you run out of clues.

You can always play a single, standalone game of Spy Club, but the campaign mode is the recommended way to play:

  • Each game plays in 45 minutes, and each campaign consists of 5 games.
  • Some elements from each game carry forward and affect future games, with new rules and story elements are unlocked each play.
  • The sequence of content isn’t scripted, so each campaign will unfold differently.
  • Everything can be fully reset and replayed.
  • You only unlock a small portion of the total content in one campaign (just 4 of the 40 modules), so you can play multiple campaigns and continue unlocking new content each time!

Game Mechanics:

  • Action Points
  • Deduction
  • Memory
  • Set Collection

Game Specifications:

  • 2 – 4 Players
  • ~45 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.16

Splendor: Marvel

| OTSG Staff
Splendor: Marvel

Splendor: Marvel

Bring together a team of super heroes and prevent Thanos from ending the world!
The Infinity Stones are scattered throughout the Multiverse. Use their essence to recruit heroes and villains and gain Infinity Points.

Assemble the Avengers, acquire locations and when ready, claim the Infinity Gauntlet!

Pick your tokens carefully, recruit characters to gain Infinity Points and bonuses. These bonuses help you recruit more powerful heroes and acquire locations… until you gather enough characters, power, and Infinity Points to trigger the endgame!

Even though Splendor Marvel uses Splendor’s core rules and high-quality materials, it has a different color structure, a new endgame trigger, and new victory conditions. You can also gain Infinity Points with the Avengers Assemble tile that can be passed from one player to another several times during the game!

If you are keen on Splendor, learning the rules will be easy, but mastering the game may take you a while.

And if you don’t know Splendor, soon you will enjoy its quick and simple rules and become addicted to this game without even realizing it!

Game Mechanics:

  • Economic
  • Open Drafting
  • Racing
  • Set Collection

Game Specifications:

  • 2 – 4 Players
  • ~30 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 1.91

The Spill

| OTSG Staff
The Spill

The Spill

Offshore rig, DeepWell•4, has blown out and the rupture is spilling crude oil into the ocean at an alarming rate! Your response team must work together, using your individual talents to avert an ecological disaster, one which threatens to contaminate marine life and devastate the ecosystem. The situation is dire and escalating by the minute, so there is no time to waste.

  1. Contain the oil flowing from the rig
  2. Remove what oil you can from the waters
  3. Rescue the marine animals

The world is watching. The fate of the coast is in your hands!

This fully cooperative game, for 1-4 players, features a 4-way dice tower as the oil rig, which randomly drops oil dice onto the four quadrants of the game board. In this respect, the game is a reverse tower defense game, as players sail the perimeter trying to push back and contain the oil, remove dice from the water and save the sea life.

Communal resource cards are chosen by the team before the game begins and are then powered for use by either removing 3 oil dice from the game or saving a full set of 6 marine creatures.

Weather dice complicate matters adding new challenges for the round that restrict movement, drop more dice or increase the cost of operations.

It takes coordination and teamwork to win, as new oil dice are dropped at the beginning of every turn and the number of oil dice dropped increases over the course of the game.

If the team can accomplish all three objectives on their WIN Condition card and remedy any potential losing conditions on the board by the end of a given turn – they win. Otherwise, the game will end when the 60 dice from the bag are exhausted, or they are unable to correct one of the three losing conditions.

Contain the Oil. Save the Sea Life.

Game Mechanics:

  • Action Points
  • Cooperative

Game Specifications:

  • 1 – 4 Players
  • 50 – 60 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.00

Spies & Lies

| OTSG Staff
Spies & Lies

Spies & Lies

The head-to-head game of deployment, deduction and deception

Break the deadlock in the final days of war. Victory will hinge on the actions of a handful of men – and we women spies… Go head-to-head as you secretly select soldiers with different abilities to engage the enemy.

Each of you will have the opportunity to sabotage your opponent’s missions – using careful deployment, clever deduction and surprising deception. With every enemy soldier you identify, with every advance you rebuff, you’ll tighten the noose, infiltrating further into the enemy camp and taking the Double Agent a step closer to capturing the enemy flag!

Spies & Lies is played in 3 rounds. Each round consists of 3 phases (Deploy, Intel and Mission) which will determine which player can move the Double Agent into enemy territory on the game board. The first player to land on the enemy’s flag with the Double Agent wins (or the player who is closest to doing so when the third round ends).

Game Mechanics:

  • Bluffing
  • Deduction
  • Take That

Game Specifications:

  • 2 Players
  • ~30 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.00

Space Invaders

| OTSG Staff
Space Invaders

Space Invaders

Join the fight and stop the invasion!

Based on the classic arcade game that started it all, play Space Invaders like never before! Can you team-up and defeat the alien invaders to claim victory, or will it be GAME OVER with the invaders winning? It’s all hands-on deck as all players either win together or lose together in this collaborative strategy game.

Take turns moving your 3D shooter and lining up the best shot. Launch blast tokens at the waves of descending invaders. You have limited shots, so all players need to co-ordinate their attack and hit their targets. Destroy all the invaders and take down the UFO mother ship before it’s too late!

Game Mechanics:

  • Cooperative
  • Dexterity

Game Specifications:

  • 1 – 4 Players
  • 30 – 45 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.00

Space Base: Command Station

| OTSG Staff
Space Base: Command Station

Space Base: Command Station

Following the events surrounding “Shy Pluto,” two new zones within known space have opened up. The Admiral has promoted two new Captains to the rank of Commodore to command these new space bases and work their sectors!

The Space Base: Command Station expansion allows players to expand their games of Space Base to include two more players and adds “pre-deployed” ship cards to adjust for balance and gameplay with more than five players. Now six or seven Commodores can compete for the promotion to become the Admiral of the U.E.S. Fleet!

The Space Base: Command Station box is designed to be large enough to hold the Space Base base game, the Shy Pluto expansion, and additional future expansions in one convenient storage box!

Game Mechanics:

  • Dice Rolling
  • Open Drafting
  • Tableau Building

Game Specifications:

  • 2 – 5 Players
  • ~60 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.11

Sorcerer City

| OTSG Staff
Sorcerer City

Sorcerer City

Every year, Sorcerer City gets built and rebuilt in magically new ways, with blocks moving and rotating in crazy directions. You and your fellow players are rival wizard architects in charge of building the same city district over five years, expanding it and rebuilding it to gain the most money, influence, magic, and victory. Unfortunately, Sorcerer City has a bit of a monster problem, so you must work hard to mitigate the effects of marauding creatures who attack your city district. The wizard architect with the most victory points at the end of five years will be crowned the new head wizard of all of Sorcerer City.

Every player starts Sorcerer City with a set of tiles, and in each round you have two minutes to build your city as optimally as you can. In between rounds you buy new tiles to add to your pool and gain other rewards. Beware though, monsters are lurking and will also be added to your deck, no doubt adding some chaos to your plans in the following rounds. After five rounds, add up all the victory points to see who is the master sorcerer builder!

Game Mechanics:

  • Deck Building
  • Hand Management
  • Tile Placement

Game Specifications:

  • 1 – 6 Players
  • 45 – 60 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.24

Sons of Anarchy: Men of Mayhem

| OTSG Staff
Sons of Anarchy: Men of Mayhem

Sons of Anarchy: Men of Mayhem

Based on the hit TV series, in Sons of Anarchy: Men of Mayhem players take the role of rival gangs out to control territory, accumulate contraband and reap the monetary rewards of illegal enterprise.

With each turn gangs must attempt to control a range of sites by assigning gang members and resources to claiming, defending and fighting for money, contraband and guns. However, other players can challenge the right for territory, which will lead to conflict! Negotiate, threaten and ally with rival gangs when it serves your needs, but be wary of the inevitable knife in the back. This game is about making and breaking alliances, and only the gang with the most money at the end of six rounds wins.

Game Mechanics:

  • Action Points
  • Area Control
  • Dice Rolling
  • Negotiation
  • Take That
  • Trading
  • Worker Placement

Game Specifications:

  • 3 – 4 Players
  • ~90 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.56

Sonora

| OTSG Staff
Sonora

Sonora

You have entered the Sonoran Desert, a place of vast beauty. Technicolor sunsets pop out over vistas revealing deep canyons, trickling tributaries, and ancient pueblo cliff dwellings. Immerse yourself in the secrets of the desert in a flick-and-write game in which cunning and dexterity meet.

In Sonora, players flick wooden discs onto a game board representative of different vibrant landscapes across the Sonoran sands. Each area encompasses a different unique game, so skillful aim is required to play in the region of a player’s choosing and score points on your dry-erase sheet! But watch out for other players eager to bump discs to score points for themselves.

Game Mechanics:

  • Action Points
  • Area Control
  • Dexterity
  • Networker Building
  • Paper and Pencil
  • Set Collection

Game Specifications:

  • 1 – 4 Players
  • 30 – 45 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.32

Snow Tails

| OTSG Staff
Snow Tails

Snow Tails

Snow Tails is set in the snowy world of the Arctic Circle, where brave sledders compete in a test of skill and endurance. Action is fast and furious and not all sleds may make it to the finish. Huskies only have one setting and that is full speed! Hang on to your furs, the reins, your sled and anything else you can get hold of.

The game contains modular track pieces which can be fitted together to form different courses. Players have their own Dog Decks which they draw from and play onto their sled mat. Movement is rarely in a straight line as the sled may drift left or right. Losing control or speeding into a corner results in Dent cards being acquired which will limit a player’s hand size.

Game Mechanics:

  • Hand Management
  • Player Elimination
  • Racing

Game Specifications:

  • 2 – 5 Players
  • 45 – 60 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.04