Category: General Games

Dinosaur Island

| T3d-1978

In Dinosaur Island, players will have to collect DNA, research the DNA sequences of extinct dinosaur species, and then combine the ancient DNA in the correct sequence to bring these prehistoric creatures back to life. Dino cooking! All players will compete to build the most thrilling park each season, and then work to attract (and keep alive!) the most visitors each season that the park opens.

Do you go big and create a pack of Velociraptors? They’ll definitely excite potential visitors, but you’d better make a large enough enclosure for them. And maybe hire some (read: a lot of) security. Or they WILL break out and start eating your visitors, and we all know how that ends. You could play it safe and grow a bunch of herbivores, but then you aren’t going to have the most exciting park in the world (sad face). So maybe buy a roller coaster or two to attract visitors to your park the good old-fashioned way?

Game Mechanics:

  • Action Points
  • Dice Rolling
  • Economic
  • Set Collection
  • Tile Placement
  • Worker Placement

Game Specifications:

  • 1 – 4 Players
  • 90 – 120 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 3.03

Deja Vu: Fragments of Memory

| T3d-1978

As the nameless girl returned to consciousness, she found herself lying in an egg-like space pod, holding a bowl of luminous blue flowers, and her forearm was tattooed with some kind of alien symbols. “What is this place? Who am I?” She did not remember anything. In the space pod’s computer was a black box with records of all the planets it had visited. Bewildered but resolute, she set out to revisit all the planets in reverse order in the hope of retrieving all her lost memories.

Deja Vu: Fragments of Memory is about memory, but it is NOT a memory game; instead the game focuses on tableau-building and set-collecting, and to win the game, you must perform well both tactically and strategically. In the tactical part, players collect wooden tokens on the map with various combinations of color and shape, and both the color and shape are essential to success! The process of collecting is a pleasantly perplexing mind puzzle.

In the strategic part, players use the wooden tokens they gained to add cards to their tableau, building up their “card engine”, which serves to generate victory points, reinforce their resource-collecting ability, and improve the engine itself. Should you increase your selection of cards first? Or create more space to save up resources? Maybe you should plant more cosmic flowers? Balanced and efficient long-term planning is the key to victory.

The central cosmic map, aside from being a place to hold resources, is also a battlefield to contest precious memory fragments which, when paired with the right cards, can earn enormous amount of victory points for you!

Game Mechanics:

  • Deck, Bag, and Pool Building
  • Mancala
  • Modular Board
  • Set Collection

Game Specifications:

  • 2 – 4 Players
  • 45 – 90 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.67

Cyclades

| T3d-1978

In this latest collaboration between Bruno Cathala and Ludovic Maublanc, players must buy the favor of the gods in their race to be the first player to build two cities in the Ancient Greek island group known as the Cyclades.

Victory requires respect for all the gods – players cannot afford to sacrifice to only one god, but must pay homage to each of five gods in turn. Each turn, the players bid for the favors of the gods, as only one player can have the favor of each god per turn – and each player is also limited to the favor of a single god per turn.

  • Ares allows the movement of player armies and the building of Fortresses.
  • Poseidon allows players to move their navies and build Ports.
  • Zeus allows his followers to hire priests and build temples.
  • Athena provides her worshipers with philosophers and universities.
  • Apollo increases the income of his worshipers.

Game Mechanics:

  • Area Majority / Influence
  • Auction/Bidding
  • City Building
  • Civilization
  • Dice Rolling
  • Open Drafting
  • Set Collection

Game Specifications:

  • 2 – 5 Players
  • 60 – 90 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.82

Cupcake Empire

| T3d-1978

Cupcakes are at the height of fashion in the city. It’s the perfect time to expand your business. Even though at the moment you only have one small Bakery, the dedication and the level of creativity of your employees means that there are no limits to your ambition.Your task will be no piece of cake since your competitors share your same goals and they are not going to make it easy for you. Only those who work the most efficiently and effectively will manage to build their own cupcake empire.

Cupcake Empire is mainly a dice game. Your personal board represents your business and the dice your workers. In each of the columns of the board you can carry out one specific action; create new recipes for cupcakes, open new stores, serve customers, hire new workers, etc. On each turn you will have to decide which column you are going to activate, taking into account that the more dice there are and the more specialized they are, the more effective the action will be. Through these actions you will increase your level of sales and production, trying to get them to grow in equal measure since at the end of each of your turns your Income will increase by the amount indicated by the marker that is the furthest behind i.e. that has made the least progress.

Game Mechanics:

  • Dice Rolling
  • Economic
  • Worker Placement

Game Specifications:

  • 2 – 4 Players
  • 45 – 60 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.78

Cult of the Deep

| T3d-1978

You are a cultist, trying to establish your faction’s rise to power. Fight over rituals and mythical monsters as you seek victory and control of the cult.

Roles

Each player is given a role that will remain hidden throughout the game, except the High Priest. This role will determine your win condition:

  • High Priest – Root out corruption in the cult. Kill all Cabalists, the Heretic, and survive.
  • Cabalists – Seek to take control of the cult. Kill the High Priest.
  • Faithful – Protect the High Priest from threats to their power. Kill all Cabalists, the Heretic, and the High Priest must survive.
  • Heretic – Burn the whole cult to the ground. Kill the entire cult, yourself included if necessary.

Extra abilities

Each player will also be given a:

  • Character card that determines their starting health, special ability, and a power symbol that provides an additional way to gain life from the dice.
  • Secret sigil card, which gives each cultist a once per game power, will also be given to each player.

Mechanics

A player will take a turn by first rolling their dice up to 3 times. They then decide where to commit their dice: to rituals to gain altar effects to temporarily empower themselves, finish a ritual in order to gain its powerful effects permanently, stab other cultists, gain life, or give life to other cultists.

If a player is killed, they are not eliminated. Instead, they become a wraith. They will roll dice on their turn still, just less. They cannot commit dice like normal but instead haunt the dice of enemies and allies by giving, replacing, or discarding dice.

Game Mechanics:

  • Bribery
  • Deduction
  • Hidden Roles
  • Push Your Luck
  • Re-rolling and Locking
  • Team-Based Game
  • Variable Player Powers

Game Specifications:

  • 4 – 8 Players
  • 45 – 75 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.71

Court of the Dead: Mourner’s Call

| T3d-1978

Everyone is already dead in the Underworld. It’s time to join the factions of Bone, Flesh and Spirit as they work to achieve the goal of the Underworld: to gather enough forces to take on the celestials of Heaven and Hell to end their ceaseless war. If the players work diplomatically in Court of the Dead: Mourners Call to maintain a balance, they can ensure the Underworld survives long enough for them to also complete their collective and hidden individual objectives. The player who best contributes to these goals will earn Death’s favor and a place among the elite of the Underworld.

You are a Mourner — an allegiant of Death — dedicated to realizing his noble ambition to end the celestial war and restore balance to the universe. However, Death’s purpose includes your own ulterior motives. You and your fellow Mourners must unite and rise, or fall together. But only one Mourner will achieve their particular vision of the Underworld united. Your task will not be easy. While the Underworld is united in its purpose, it is divided in its strategy to achieve that aim. There are three factions in the Land of the Dead: Bone, Flesh, Spirit. Each is a unique path to rise up against Heaven and Hell.

You will need to strategically manipulate your influence within these factions, their strongholds and guilds, and within the Court of the Dead if you wish to achieve your ends. But beware: The power within mortal souls — known as Etherea — is a perilous substance. Use it carelessly, and you risk invoking the Dreadsgrip – a destructive force within every Mourner that consumes all it touches, including its former master. Failing to satiate the celestials’ war need, or triggering the Dreadsgrip, has dire consequences for all Mourners. Are you strong enough to achieve your own ambitions and be the champion for the uniting force for which all Mourners Call?

Game Mechanics:

  • Area Majority / Influence
  • Auction / Bidding
  • Closed Drafting
  • Contracts
  • Hand Management
  • Open Drafting
  • Take That
  • Worker Placement

Game Specifications:

  • 2 – 5 Players
  • ~90 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.95

Council of Shadows

| T3d-1978

It’s the year 2200. We’re on the edge of the known universe, and a race for a seat on the mighty Council of Shadows is in full swing, with four civilizations vying for admission. Only those who provide more energy to the council each turn and outdo themselves will be successful.

In Council of Shadows, you take on the role of one of these four civilizations, secure the strongest actions, take control of important areas, and be the first to make three quantum leaps. This is how you win the race for planets and raw materials and become part of the Council of Shadows!

Game Mechanics:

  • Area Majority / Influence

Game Specifications:

  • 1 – 4 Players
  • 60 – 90 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 3.14

Cosmogenesis

| T3d-1978

In a game of Cosmogenesis, each player creates their own planet system, starting from a star and an asteroid belt. To do this, they use the elements available on the different sections of the central board. In each round, players obtain one element from each of the four sections over four turns and with these elements players form planets and moons. These then collide with each other, causing them to increase in size, develop rings, form atmospheres, and of course create life. Players do all of this in order to fulfill their own objectives, which like the rest of the elements of the game, are obtained from the central board; at the end of the game, these provide the victory points that determine the overall winner.

Game Mechanics:

  • Worker Placement

Game Specifications:

  • 2 – 4 Players
  • ~60 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.59

Cosmic Frog

| T3d-1978

Cosmic Frog is a game of collection, combat, and theft on a planetary scale. Each player controls a two-mile-tall, immortal, invulnerable frog-like creature that exists solely to gather terrain from the Shards of Aeth, the fragments of a long-ago shattered world. The First Ones seek to use the lands from the Shards to reconstruct the world of Aeth, and your frogs are their terrain harvesters.

At the start of the game, your frogs descend from the Aether, the cosmic sea between the worlds, onto a terrain-rich Shard of Aeth. Once on the Shard, you harvest land and store it in your massive gullet. When your gullet is sufficiently full, you leap into the Aether and disgorge your gullet contents into your inter-dimensional vault for permanent storage, then return to the Shard to collect more land. Although your frogs’ collective mission is to gather as much land as possible for the First Ones, your private goal is to prove yourself to be the greatest of their harvesters by delivering to them the most valuable vault. To do this, you have to fill your vault strategically in a manner that both maximizes linear sets of identical lands and maximizes the diversity of lands in your vault at the end of the game.

Throughout the game, you’re free to keep to yourself and focus on harvesting at your own pace…or you may attack other frogs and try to take lands directly from their gullets. You may even raid another frog’s vault and steal the lands they have gathered if they have been knocked into the dreaded Outer Dimensions. As you are all immortal and invulnerable, no frog is ever wounded or killed — just irritated and inconvenienced.

But don’t ever get too comfortable with your carefully crafted plans as the Aether is a chaotic and unstable place. Waves of Aether Flux will prompt you to mutate, and you may have to change your strategy in accordance with your new powers. And Splinters of Aeth, tiny slivers of the old world that swirl madly about in the Aether, will periodically fall from their orbit and crash into the Shard, destroying large areas of terrain and blasting apart the very Shard itself!

The game ends when the Shard is stripped of all harvestable land or when a Splinter shatters it. When the game ends, the player with the highest valued vault wins, and the frogs move to the next Shard to gather more land for the First Ones…

Game Mechanics:

  • Map Reduction
  • Pattern Building
  • Pick-up and Deliver
  • Set Collection
  • Take That
  • Tile Placement
  • Variable Player Powers
  • Variable Set-up

Game Specifications:

  • 2 – 6 Players
  • 45 – 90 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 3.01

Coimbra

| T3d-1978

In the 15th and 16th century, Portugal is thriving under its leading role during the Age of Discovery. Nestled in the heart of Portugal, the city of Coimbra serves as a cultural center of the country. As the head of one of Coimbra’s oldest houses, you seek to earn prestige by deepening relationships with nearby monasteries or funding expeditions of the era. To reach this goal, you must vie for the favors of the city’s most influential citizens, even if you must offer a bit of coin or some protective detail.

Coimbra introduces an innovative new dice mechanism in which the dice players draft each round are used in multiple different ways and have an impact on many aspects of their decision making. While there are many paths to victory, players should always seek to optimize their opportunities with every roll of the dice. Combined with ever-changing synergies of the citizens, expeditions, and monasteries, no two games of Coimbra will ever be the same!

Game Mechanics:

  • Auction / Bidding
  • Open Drafting
  • Set Collection
  • Tech Trees / Tech Tracks
  • Variable Set-up
  • Worker Placement

Game Specifications:

  • 2 – 4 Players
  • 60 – 90 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 3.25