Author: OTSG Staff

Photograph

| OTSG Staff
Photograph

Photograph

Time to walk about town and take some pictures! It’s the 1960s in Japan, and you have a half-size camera that lets you take half-size vertical pictures. Let’s see whether you can put together good shots…

In Photograph!, you’re trying to organize pictures on your roll so that they appear in the right order. Each player has a hand of cards, and on a turn, you’ll add 1-3 cards to the front of your hand (without changing their order), move one card in your hand closer to the front, then discard as many cards from the back of your hand as the number of cards that you added. When the sunset card comes out, you can take no more pictures, and everyone scores for what’s on their camera.

The cards all have numbers and colors on them, and you try to line them up in hand to score the most points possible.

Game Mechanics:

  • Hand Management
  • Open Drafting
  • Set Collection

Game Specifications:

  • 2 – 4 Players
  • ~20 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.07

Plague Inc.

| OTSG Staff
Plague Inc.

Plague Inc.

Each player is a deadly disease and they must battle against each other to spread their plagues, develop new symptoms and ultimately wipe out humanity.

Starting with Patient Zero, you spread your infection across the world by placing tokens in cities – earning DNA points and preventing other players from becoming dominant. Players choose which countries are placed on the board but you must be both climate resistant and connected to a country before you can infect it. Eventually, as countries become fully infected – you try to kill them using the Death Dice.

Each player’s unique pathogen can be upgraded by evolving trait cards onto an evolution slide (with DNA points). At the start, your disease is weak and unspecialised, so you will need to add new symptoms to make it stronger. Choose carefully and plan ahead in order to react to the changing world and exploit opportunities created by other player’s actions.

A simple nosebleed could accelerate things early on, whilst diarrhea will help you thrive in hot countries. Sneezing can infect new continents by air but Total Organ Failure would allow you wipe out multiple countries each turn.

As countries start to fall, use powerful event cards to alter the balance of power. You might try to eradicate a dominant player by bombing their diseased cities, or hold the Olympics to cause huge numbers of infected people to travel to a healthy continent.

When the world collapses, who will be the ultimate plague?

Game Mechanics:

  • Area Control
  • Hand Management
  • Network Building
  • Take That
  • Tile Placement
  • Worker Placement

Game Specifications:

  • 1 – 4 Players
  • ~60 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.15

Pie Town

| OTSG Staff
Pie Town

Pie Town

Welcome to Pie Town, a community built on apples and butter. Business here is no cake walk, so manage your operation well and keep your secret recipe secret.

Pie Town is a worker-dice placement game with hidden information. You need to manage your constantly changing workforce to harvest, bake, and sell pies while deducing other players’ secret recipes! Now is your chance to become the best pie shop in town!

Game Mechanics:

  • Deduction
  • Dice Rolling
  • Worker Placement

Game Specifications:

  • 2 – 4 Players
  • 60 – 90 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.33

Picture Perfect

| OTSG Staff
Picture Perfect

Picture Perfect

How do you take the perfect picture of a group of people if you only have one try? Each character has different wishes. Some want to be at the front of the picture; some want to stand next to another; and some really don’t want to be next to that one particular person by any means. Do your best to make everyone happy – even if you don’t actually know all the characters’ preferences…

In Picture Perfect, first released as Der Perfekte Moment, you need to arrange fourteen characters to take the perfect photograph. Each of them has three specific desires that you want to fulfill. Unfortunately, these desires are hidden in envelopes.

During the game, the players try to take a look inside these envelopes to figure out how to place the characters correctly. To do so, they trade their information with others — or maybe try to hide it…

Whoever earns the most points at the end of the game has fulfilled the most desires and becomes the master photographer.

Game Mechanics:

  • Auction/Bidding
  • Deduction
  • Memory
  • Negotiation
  • Puzzle
  • Tile Placement

Game Specifications:

  • 2 – 6 Players
  • 50 – 90 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 1.86

Photosynthesis

| OTSG Staff
Photosynthesis

Photosynthesis

The sun shines brightly on the canopy of the forest, and the trees use this wonderful energy to grow and develop their beautiful foliage. Sow your crops wisely and the shadows of your growing trees could slow your opponents down, but don’t forget that the sun revolves around the forest. Welcome to the world of Photosynthesis, the green strategy board game!

Game Mechanics:

  • Abstract Strategy
  • Action Points
  • Area Control
  • Economic

Game Specifications:

  • 2 – 4 Players
  • 30 – 60 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.07

Paws and Padlocks

| OTSG Staff
Paws and Padlocks

Paws and Padlocks

The evil Slime Queen has stashed her most valuable treasures within her fortress known as Slime Castle. This has attracted many adventurers from far and wide, including yourself, to try and nab her majesty’s treasures! Will you be quick enough to get your treasure and escape before everyone else, or will you be trapped inside Slime Castle forever?

Game Mechanics:

  • Area Movement
  • Dice Rolling
  • Push Your Luck
  • Tile Placement

Game Specifications:

  • 2 – 4 Players
  • 30 – 60 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.00

Parks

| OTSG Staff
Parks

Parks

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!

Game Mechanics:

  • Economic
  • Worker Placement

Game Specifications:

  • 1 – 5 Players
  • 30 – 60 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.16

Papillon

| OTSG Staff
Papillon

Papillon

A butterfly garden requires vision and a caring hand. Spring has arrived, and the world is in bloom. As your garden grows, caterpillars will congregate and morph into beautiful butterflies eager for nectar.

Papillon is a tile-drafting, tableau-building, and area majority game for 2-4 players. Over 8 rounds, you will bid for flower tiles to build your garden, attract butterflies to flowers with valuable nectar, and of course, every garden looks better with a gnome. Collect the most nectar at the end of the game and you’ll win!

Game Mechanics:

  • Abstract Strategy
  • Area Control
  • Auction/Bidding
  • Open Drafting
  • Tile Placement

Game Specifications:

  • 2 – 4 Players
  • 30 – 45 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.06

Paper Dungeons

| OTSG Staff
Paper Dungeons

Paper Dungeons

Prepare your adventurers for a challenging dungeon exploration in Paper Dungeons, a roll-and-write game that seeks to reproduce the feel of a dungeon-crawler.

In the game, you control a classic group of medieval adventurers: warrior, wizard, cleric, and rogue. In each of the nine rounds, you select three of the six rolled dice and use these results to raise the level of your characters, produce magic items, obtain healing potions, and explore the dungeon to face challenges and collect treasure. You’ll also find three large monsters waiting in the dungeon, and you can fight them for glory.

In the end, whoever collects the most glory wins.

Game Mechanics:

  • Dice Rolling
  • Grid Movement
  • Paper and Pencil
  • Set Collection

Game Specifications:

  • 1 – 8 Players
  • ~30 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.13

Pandemic: 10th Anniversary Edition

| OTSG Staff
Pandemic: 10th Anniversary Edition

Pandemic: 10th Anniversary Edition

In Pandemic, several virulent diseases have broken out simultaneously all over the world! The players are disease-fighting specialists whose mission is to treat disease hotspots while researching cures for each of four plagues before they get out of hand.

The game board depicts several major population centers on Earth. On each turn, a player can use up to four actions to travel between cities, treat infected populaces, discover a cure, or build a research station. A deck of cards provides the players with these abilities, but sprinkled throughout this deck are Epidemic! cards that accelerate and intensify the diseases’ activity. A second, separate deck of cards controls the “normal” spread of the infections.

Taking a unique role within the team, players must plan their strategy to mesh with their specialists’ strengths in order to conquer the diseases. For example, the Operations Expert can build research stations which are needed to find cures for the diseases and which allow for greater mobility between cities; the Scientist needs only four cards of a particular disease to cure it instead of the normal five—but the diseases are spreading quickly and time is running out. If one or more diseases spreads beyond recovery or if too much time elapses, the players all lose. If they cure the four diseases, they all win!

The 2013 edition of Pandemic includes two new characters—the Contingency Planner and the Quarantine Specialist—not available in earlier editions of the game.

Game Mechanics:

  • Action Points
  • Cooperative
  • Hand Management
  • Set Collection

Game Specifications:

  • 2 – 4 Players
  • ~45 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.41